(h/t Heather at VideoCafe

With all due respect to our Texan C&Lers, I've noticed a distinct lowering of intelligence as soon as the words "Texas State Board of Education" comes up. Add the name "Tucker Carlson" and well, let's face it, "willfully ignorant" is just about the kindest possible way to describe it. In case you hadn't heard the story, the Texas State Board of Education has decided that today's textbooks are disturbingly biased against Christians, what with that completely unfair inclusion of the Inquisition and Crusades and stubborn refusal to acknowledge Creationism as a valid science. Likewise (because you know those high-falutin' elitists who write the books have to be liberals), there just aren't enough mentions of Muslims being blood-thirsty 7th Century barbarians with only jihad on the brain. I tell you, no one is persecuted in this country as much as the poor Christians.

The Texas State Board of Education will consider a resolution next week that would warn publishers not to push a "pro-Islamic, anti-Christian viewpoint" in world history textbooks, The Dallas Morning News reports. Members of the board's social conservative bloc sponsoring the resolution cautioned that "more such discriminatory treatment of religion may occur as Middle Easterners buy into the U.S. public school textbook oligopoly, as they are doing now." They offered no specific evidence of such investments, the newspaper says. The measure, The News reports, cites some books that are "implying that Christian brutality and Muslim loss of life are significant, but Islamic cruelty and Christian deaths are not."

Oh help me, Rhonda. There's no evidence that any of this is happening, but let's slap a sticker on my kid's textbook saying that the book she's supposed to be learning history--not hate, bigotry and revisionist crap--from is being too sympathetic to Muslims.

And uncanny in his ability to ALWAYS be on the wrong side of every discussion, Tucker Carlson steps in the fray to assert that the Texas Board is absolutely right and there are incontrovertible studies that prove that American textbooks are far too anti-Christian and pro-Islam. All I can say to Mr. My-Career-Is-A-Legacy-Appointment is: PUT UP OR SHUT UP, little man. Show us the studies. 'Cuz I got $1,000 that says you're pulling "facts" out of that rather pear-shaped posterior once again.

I'm sure that C&Lers are wondering why Fox News would even ask Tucker Carlson his opinion on such a manufactured issue. Turns out that when he's not pissing away his time at the execrable Daily Caller site, Tucker has been working on a "documentary" for FNC on the textbook. Actually, "documentary" is inaccurate--because it implies that it's not a piece of fiction. Let's call it a "mockumentary" instead:

I think I was in fifth grade when I began to suspect that textbooks weren't entirely on the level. The first tip-off came from the word problems in math class. They typically began with scenarios that, even to a 10-year-old, seemed a little unlikely: "Julio's mom is a welder. His father is a pediatric nurse. If his mom welds for 9 hours a day, then..." Or: "If Maria wins her first three prizefights by knockout, and her next three by TKO, how long before she can leave her job as a lumberjack and fight full time?" The characters in my textbooks didn't sound like anyone I had ever met. Years later I realized, that was exactly the point. The educators who wrote them weren't interested in describing the world as it was, or had been, but rather as they wanted it to be. They were ideologues, and my math and history books were their pamphlets, disguised as academic texts. Thirty years later, few textbooks bother with the disguise. Entire chunks of the English language have been banned from the classroom, liquidated in a P.C. purge. First to go were words containing the dreaded term "man," the three letters most offensive to professional feminists. Mailman, chairman, snowman, fisherman, manhole cover--every one now extinct, disdained relics of a bygone age.

The nerve of those educators to craft books that are identifiable to 95% of the American population instead of the pampered heir class to which Tucker graces. I'm sure that our children would all be much smarter if they had a question that read:

"Buffy and Tad had to choose between the four Mercedes in the carriage house to take them to the Hamptons 40 miles away. If they had their driver Jesus drive them in the C-Class at an average of 50 miles an hour, but with stops to pick up friends Biff and Carlton as well as dropping off Buffy at Dr. Weinstein for a touch up on her nose job, at what time will Tad, Biff and Carlton be drinking martinis at the Hamptons Racquet Club?"

Because you know, it's all about making it something that Tucker Carlson can recognize. That's the most important consideration in educating our children, at least it is for the little overcompensating man with the bowtie.

Tucker Carlson, proving once again how bad he is for America.