Don't worry Julia - at least the government loves you

The political silly season has spawned the pandering to the stupid. First the president has taken to speaking trips to colleges telling them that the congress is going to double the rates on student loans. One of the things that frustrated me when I was teaching was that this generation has information at their fingertips and are too lazy to use it. Well if they decided to google the student loans, they would find that the doubling of rates would only be on new loans and not on existing ones. Thus, the college audiences should go ho-hum, what’s the big deal. Also they would know that it was the democratic congress and the democratic president who signed the law that will cause the change. So the president is assuming the students are either stupid or ignorant. Sadly most of them are both. The second salvo of pandering to the stupid is to stupid women with the Life of Julia (http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia). Here we have cradle to grave government assistance to women who obviously cannot provide for themselves. Tellingly, Obama’s Julia doesn’t ever have a man, never gets married yet opts to have a child. What message is this sending other than the government is the male substitute for women such as “Julia”. The Heritage Foundation has posted its conservative approach to Julia (http://blog.heritage.org/a-better-life-for-julia/?gclid=CJqQn4XY568CFcSa7QodrDms2g). Regardless, the women that I know are apparently not the norm. The polls show that women as a group favor a more activist federal government than do men. The women I know, even the liberal ones, fear government intrusion into every aspect of their lives. They treasure their freedoms and they are just as suspect of left wing intrusions as their NOW sisters fear right wing intrusions. Thank goodness I don't know Obama's Julia and hopefully she will only exist in the ether of the internet.