. . . to all appearances it has sworn off referring to Houston and Texas as the laughingstock of the nation? Even the Chronicle apparently figured out that insulting readers is no way to win friends and influence people. But the editors simply cannot resist . . .
And it got worse. By May 2009, with the conservative wing of the 15-member [State Board of Education] firmly in the driver's seat, the Chronicle reported that a livid Leticia Van de Putte, Democratic state senator from San Antonio, told the U.S. Senate that the board, whose chair, a dentist, believed the Earth to be about 6,000 years old, had become "the laughing stock of the nation." (Editorial, "Textbooks, again: Until November, when Board of Education takes its final vote, please weigh in," Houston Chronicle, September 17, 2014)
So there, Texas rubes and hicks.
Not sure if it's worth a laugh, exactly, and certainly not a nationwide laugh, but join me in sniggering at the Chronicle's treatment of "laughing" and "stock" as two words rather than, as Mr. Merriam and Mr. Webster have it, one.
And while we're kicking sand in the face of this 98-pound weakling, take note of the approving citation in this editorial of "the Texas Freedom Foundation, a nonpartisan education and religious freedoms watchdog organization."
They know and I know and you know that TFF is a hard left advocacy group. "Nonpartisan" may be a truthful descriptor in a technical sense, but it's not the whole truth or the relevant truth. TFF is nonpartisan in form to maintain its status as a tax-exampt organization. But "nonpartisan" is misleading. It connotes that TFF has no dog in this fight, that it's just a good-hearted bystander that happens to agree with the Houston Chronicle editorial board on this one little issue.
No. Texas Freedom Foundation operates the ideological well from which Chronicle editors draw water to cool their dry lips and dampen their fevered brows. Nonpartisan, yes. But ideological to its very depths.
Calling it "nonpartisan" rather than "left-leaning" (to offer the mildest possible whole-truth alternative) is a ploy to fool said rubes and hicks -- the kind who elect education board members who make Leticia Van de Putte livid enough to call her own state a laughingstock, and the Chronicle livid enough to (mis)quote her.
And ain't it a hoot, as well, that the same editorial board that spent years, decades, telling conservatives to keep their cotton-picking fingers off the textbook bidness and leave it to the board are now whipping up fellow lefties to demand books that are more congenial to leftist ideology?
And yet another laugh that neither they nor their reporters ever quite tell you -- fairly, honestly, comprehensively -- what is wrong with the standards and textbooks to which they object?
And finally -- and God forgive me for being such a mocker, but it's so well-earned that I cannot help myself -- that the editors employ figures of speech by which a "wing" is in "the driver's seat?" Picture that, if you're looking for a laughingstock. A wing sitting (lying?) in a seat and driving.
Those would would instruct the rest of us how to educate our children and grandchildren exhibit remarkably little acquaintance with the elementary skills of reasoning, writing, and spelling demanded of useful editorial writers.
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