The President is channeling his inner Orwell and planning a speech to our nation’s schoolchildren. Because there is nothing creepy or Soviet-like about our Dear Leader addressing the kiddies. It’s not enough that their teachers indoctrinate them, they need to hear straight from the source.

To support the speech, the Department of Education has made available a list of activities, such as “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president,” to the nation’s teachers.

One would expect a creepy diktat from the Education Department to at least be grammatically correct. But no.

Jim Geraghty over at NRO has the details of the grammatical indiscretions.

ED quietly released a revised activity list later today. Perhaps is was in response to the “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your President” firestorm that it created among the right leaning blogs. Perhaps not.

Either way it reinforced to me that when we’re looking for budget savings, the Department of Education should be first on the list.

Update: I don’t know who Frederick Hess is, but he pretty much nails it, in my opinion:

I’m sure the intentions behind all of this were decent enough, and that this whole effort was intended as a pep talk dressed up with innocuous materials. The lesson plans were likely drawn up by a couple of low-level staffers and slapped up on the department website without a careful look. But this all points to some of the perils posed by the growing presidential inclination to serve as superintendent-in-chief, and it highlights the kind of hubris that has fueled concerns about the implications of the federal government’s growing reach.

Update II: Yet, Vodkapundit makes an equally good point:

The other thing I object to is a big portion (an entire portion?) of a school day being devoted to the President and His Works and Admonishments, for no reason other than he seems to think it should be. There’s no national emergency, this isn’t an inauguration or a joint address to Congress. It’s the President deciding, for reasons entirely his own, to take over the public school system for twenty minutes or an hour or a day.