You’d better be getting free sampler baskets from Hickory Farms for linking Mickey Kaus or I’m seriously going to get your grocer to have you committed.

He hasn’t even set it up right.  If Barack Obama weren’t teaching his own kids to speak Spanish, he might have a point.  But the fact that Obama himself doesn’t speak Spanish is irrelevant.

You’d better be getting free sampler baskets from Hickory Farms for linking Mickey Kaus

Mickey sees to it that anyone linking to him gets a free block of feta cheese . . .

He has connections with the source, you know.

I really hate those hypocrites that go to jail and then go around to schools and stuff telling kids to stay out of prison and stay off drugs!

Old Grandfather: “Muhqwee, my arthritic hands can’t do it, take that wooden round thingy an poke a hole in the center for that stick a ma jig and put 2 together and let’s see what happens. And Peewee rub 2 sticks together in the pile of dry leafystuffs and it might get the same results that lightening gives.”

Chorus Muhqwee & Peewee: “Fuck you old man do it yourself. What a Progressive.”

“McCain’s lecture to parents about how “you need to make sure your child can make cancer jokes about Iranians”? Also condescending!”

Mickey Kaus calls it hypocrisy others call it learning and becoming wiser.

My parents put me in piano lessons as a child because they regretted not learning how to read music and figured if I had a grounding as a kid that if I decided to be interested in it later on it would be easier to pick up again. They were right. I hated the practice as a kid and quit by grade 5… 15 years later I picked it up again and because of that early grounding have made quick progress through the basics and have moved on to more advanced lessons/theory.

Were my parents hypocritical to revognize a skill they didn’t have themselves as potentially useful and rewarding? No? Then ya, Mickey Kaus is a dick.

I wonder if Kaus examined whether the computer-averse (click on URL) McCain thinks that children should learn technology. Actually, no I don’t so I’m not going to click through to check.

I’m sorry, but aren’t these people the same dipshits who claim that GWB’s fluence in Spanish is a sign of what a great uniter he is and how he’s not at all the coke-addled burnout that he would otherwise appear to be?

Klaus’s statement is so inane, I’m…well, I’m speechless. Is it just me, or are wingers getting dumber every day?

Note to parents: If you didn’t go to college, don’t encourage your kids to go to college.

I come at this from a slightly different angle.  Despite having followed the presidential campaigns in the US, I was unaware that Obama had said parents should make sure their kids can speak Spanish.  Is Spanish really going to be all that important in the 21st Century? 
The growing power in Latin America is Brazil, which speaks Portuguese, so if you want to focus on the Americas, it seems to me Portuguese could be at least as important as Spanish for US citizens in the 21st Century.  And looking outside the Americas, it seems Russian and Mandarin might be good choices.  I know my kids will be learning English and Portuguese at home, and they will be given the opportunity (and encouraged) to study Mandarin as well. 
I don’t want to make it look like I don’t know that the other major Latin economic power, the country second-largest population in Latin America, has Spanish as its official language and shares a border with the USA.  But Brazil’s fundamentals are much stronger than Mexico’s, and I expect Brazil to be a much bigger player in the 21st Century economy than Mexico. 
I don’t see anything wrong with people learning Spanish, especially because Mexico, while it may not be as big as Brazil in the world economy over the next 100 years, will still be important, especially to the USA.  Spanish could certainly be useful, but not to the extent that all parents should make sure their kids are speaking it. 
English will continue to be useful, even if United Statesian hegemony comes to a Bush-accelerated end in our lifetimes, at least in part because India, another growing economic power, still has English as one of its official languages (along with Hindi).  Still, it would be nice to break the stereotype and make sure all USian kids are multilingual, but there are many choices beyond Spanish.  I already mentioned Portuguese, Mandarin, and Russian.  Hindi could also be useful, as could German.  And given the world’s addiction to petroleum and the fact that much of the petroleum that can be taken out of the ground in the immediate future (as opposed to, say, the reserves recently discovered in Brazil or the petroleum available in the ANWR or off the East Coast of the USA) is in the Middle East, Arabic might be an interesting choice.

I can’t help but remember Archie Bunker: “If English was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ, it should be good enough for all these foreigners coming here to America.”

If we followed Mickey’s logic, then Republicans would have to STFU about family values.

Is the basket of cheese that Mickey Kaus sends to the people who link to him goat cheese by any chance?

Your post is unfair.  Whatever one thinks of Michael Bay’s movies, he knows ten times more about filmmaking than John McCain does about, say, economics.  Or domestic policy.  Or foreign policy.

I come at this from a slightly different angle.  Despite having followed the presidential campaigns in the US, I was unaware that Obama had said parents should make sure their kids can speak Spanish.

Actually, Obama said that parents should make sure their kids learn a foreign language and used Spanish as one example among several.  Of course, idiots on the right immediately started screaming that Obama is going to force Your Innocent Children to learn Spanish, so that’s the only part you’re hearing.

I live in California, Obama’s not saying anything we don’t hear around here ALLLLLLLL the time. I agree with him. I’m sorry that I didn’t start Spanish until high school and really just plain didn’t get it down, despite 3 years of study. (Same thing happened when I studied French in high school and ASL off and on for years.) I am all for making kids start studying Spanish in first grade (or whatever language), just however you can boost language learning ability. Starting in high school was just too damn late for me.

With regards to hypocrisy, anyone know if he’s ever tried to learn, or if his kids are? But I’m inclined to give him a pass, knowing the inconvenience of NOT knowing Spanish well enough for myself.

Would anyone care if this whole “teaching kids Spanish” wasn’t a meme for the right that Obama is going to open the borders and let all the ‘Mexicans’ move here and then English won’t be the dominant language anymore?

I can’t speak Spanish (ditto to Jennifer - started too late), and it definitely concerns me when I can’t understand or communicate with the people around me sometimes (Texas, again), but I certainly don’t think the answer is to toss them all out or force them to speak English (why would they be able to learn any better than I can)? I hope my children speak Spanish AND English fluently.

Mickey should stop writing about politics since he has never run for office

If anyone is into looking stuff up…

I don’t think Obama is fluent in Spanish, but from what I hve gathered from reading his first book and when the primary in Puerto Rico was approaching, he has a decent working knowledge of the language.

I remember reading something in his book about him speaking Spanish to his neighbors in Spanish Harlem.

Where did Kaus claim it was hypocritical?  “Condescending” is not “hypocritical?”

Even this sentence “Especially since, as Abe Greenwald points out, Obama doesn’t speak Spanish” is not about hypocrisy.  A sentence that said “Obama doesn’t make his kids learn Spanish!” might be about hypocrisy.

Kaus blows goats.  No need for you to blow goats too.  There are way too many goat blowers at Pandagon already.

But that’s not what that sentence says Jesse.  He is saying that Obama is being condescending, which is basically what Jesse Jackson was upset with.  That is what the title of his post is about, “Jesse Jackson has a point.”  And what he says, “Obama is being condescending.”

He didn’t say Obama is failing to have his kids learn Spanish, he says that Obama doesn’t speak Spanish.

He nowhere accuses Obama of hypocrisy, and neither does the original article linked to about Jackson.

He is accusing Obama of being condescending.

You know condescending, that’s like where you tell me to take my time and try to belittle me to show me how smert you are.

Look, ask Amanda or any of the feminists around here what “condescending” means—they have 256 different ways of spotting it.  It doesn’t mean hypocrisy.  (See that’s condescending of me, but not hypocritical.)

“a multilingual farmer physicist parent reverend atheist author chemist doctor lawyer astronaut firefighter acrobat chef”

what, no poli sci?

KEvron

As I understand it, someone has a set of very incriminating photographs of Mikey Kaus performing a sexual act on an animal (said to be a goat), supposedly involving oral stimulation of the animal’s genitalia.  Now, understand that I have nothing against sex of any kind between consenting adults but how can we know if the goat had consented?  Perhaps this oral molestation was entirely against the wishes of the animal…would it not be hypocritical of Mr. Kaus to attempt to assure us that it was the animal’s idea and that he was simply carrying out the wishes of this creature?

Whatever Mr. Kaus writes in the future will inevitably be colored by this goat blowing controversy.  I suggest that he concentrate on clearing the air about it by addressing it in a frank and forthright manner, rather than trying to obfuscate by criticizing Senator Obama.

He nowhere accuses Obama of hypocrisy, and neither does the original article linked to about Jackson.

Unfortunately for this argument, anon, the Abe Greenwald post Kaus links to approvingly is titled “What’s Spanish for hypocrite?”

What if Kaus decides that he wants something better for his own children, and doesn’t want them to be goat blowers? By this same logic, does that make him hypocritical because he himself is a goat blower?  I don’t believe it does.  A little condescending, maybe.  But not hypocritical.

Oh, how I wish that someone had taught me some other language (spanish would have been great) when I was a small child and it would have been essentially EFFORTLESS to just pick it up right alongside learning english.  But no, that didn’t happen, and now I’m an adult and learning even a little bit of another language is SO DAMN HARD!!! 

I am so jealous of that small minority of people who retain the ability to quickly pick up new languages through adulthood.  I am definitely not one of them.

I’m sure McCain advocates computer literacy in his education platform.  it’ s el mismo concepto

Ah! Thank you Dweeze, you’re right I didn’t catch that and that was dumb of me.  Abe Greenwald is certainly and clearly calling Obama a hypocrite, and Greenwald is clearly wrong about that.

It’s still not clear that Kaus is calling Obama a hypocrite, especially since he doesn’t call him a hypocrite, and does call him condescending, which again, is what he says is Jesse Jackson was correct about.

Kaus does in fact blow goats, but he is a clear enough writer that when he wants to say Obama is a hypocrite, he will, and when he is making the point that Obama is condescending, I think it’s safe to conclude he is saying that Obama is condescending, and that’s probably the argument you should attack him on.

But yeah, Abe Greenwald is a dipshit.

Oh, how I wish that someone had taught me some other language (spanish would have been great) when I was a small child and it would have been essentially EFFORTLESS to just pick it up right alongside learning english.  But no, that didn’t happen, and now I’m an adult and learning even a little bit of another language is SO DAMN HARD!!!

The interesting thing is that, even if you never fully learned a second language as a child, exposure to it can still be a help later on.  There was a big dispute between different sides of my family about whether I should be allowed to learn French as a child.  One side thought it would make me a “coonass”, AKA the cajun version of white trash, and the other set of grandparents were Epic Failing at learning French because my grandfather was about to be transferred to Cameroon and they’d both need a good grounding in French to get by there outside the expat community.  Ultimately my non-emigrating grandparents won, and the emigrating grandparents were prevented from laughing their asses off at the cuteness of a toddler saying things like “Ou se trouve mon parapluie?” (“Where’s my umbrella?”)  The nice thing, though, is that years later when I studied French in college, I was able to pick it up in a snap. 

Even now, if I find myself in a Francophone situation, I can make myself understood OK after a couple days. 

What’s more hypocritical?  Refusing to teach a child a language you yourself benefit from speaking, or wanting your child to be multilingual because you are limited in your ability to communicate with the world?

Give Mickey a break. Too much goat semen at once can make you say some crazy stuff.

Kaus is right.  I’m going to go tell my younger daughter to quit college immediately.  As I did not get a degree myself, it was hypocritical and condescending for me to encourage her to do so.  I’m so ashamed.

I’ll also have to fly out to California and talk my older daughter into burning her Master’s degree.

If it is, in fact, hypocrisy, then I look forward to our next President, a multilingual farmer physicist parent reverend atheist author chemist doctor lawyer astronaut firefighter acrobat chef.

How many superdelegates does Buckaroo Banzai have?