You can say a lot with an eye roll

From American Spectator:

The reason they call it the Web is that it catches more flies-by-night than the aluminum siding business. Some image, poignant in its charisma or its grotesquerie, captivates the public imagination and suddenly millions of otherwise productive citizens must stop whatever they are doing and see the kitty trampoline unto the roof or the pea which sprouted in a man's lung. Some of these buzz arts are followed by buzzards, as 30-year careers are crushed by 30 seconds of crassness. This week's target was Sarah Palin, the former governess of Alaska, if that's the correct way to say female governor.

What Palin did to cash in the wroth ire of retiring liberals nationwide was to roll her eyes. It wasn't what she said, it wasn't even how she said it, it was that she turned and gave a knowing look that amounted to a rolling of the eyes. Well, in the 1990s Bill Clinton promised us a revolution in optics and I guess we finally got one.

The story, in case you have been occupying yourself with more momentous matters like Wall Street and Tiger Woods going down, is as follows. A lady, if that's the word I'm looking for, was protesting the filming of Sarah's documentary series. Her idea of a political banner was a horizontal horror about 100 feet wide (serving as a new sort of picket fence) bearing the legend: WORST GOVERNOR EVER. Sarah respectfully asked for a breakdown on the forensic method used to calibrate the degrees of worseness in the gubernatorial sweepstakes. The woman responded: "You walked out on your responsibility to serve your term when cash was waved in front of your face, and you left to become a celebrity."

Quoth Sarah in an excellent comeback, both witty riposte and logical rejoinder: "Oh, you wanted me to be your governor! I'm honored! Thank you!" That is as quick-on-your-political-feet as anyone this side of Dennis Miller, although Democrats dismiss it as a dumb broadside.

Then she asked Our Lady of the Presumption what she did for a livelihood when she wasn't stirring up a lively 'hood.

"A teacher."

At this point, Sarah makes a turn-to-the-right to glance toward someone off-camera. The left wing of the blogosphere has been ululating in outrage over the perception that her turn was not dexterous but sinister. She rolled her eyes at a teacher! At the whole teaching profession! What if she becomes a roll model?! Why, the optic nerve of that woman! It's bad enough that she turns heads, now she's rolling eyes!

Sarah herself lost no time twittering back to these twits with the standard line about how my grandparents were teachers, my father was a teacher, ladidah. (Well, my grandfather was an eye-roller, so there. He used to roll those eyes up a hill one by one in 100-degree weather back during the Depression.) I would have just answered that all this cash-waving made my eyes roll as I tried to keep them on the prize. And immediately started selling T-shirts: "Eye roll my own!" "Eye roll with the punches!"

TRUTH BE TOLD, if truth is a meaningful element in such discussions, I join Sarah in rolling my eyes at teachers. The profession of teaching is an honorable one, but the leftist teachers who dominate schools today are dishonoring it by much of what they profess. Look at this woman herself. First, her conclusion that Sarah left office just to cash in her celebrity sounds like one she reached via a long jump, hardly the stuff of judicious analysis. Second, her bestowal of the Worst Governor Ever lifetime achievement award based on that critique smacks of the hyperbolic rhetoric students are supposed to unlearn in school.

My own children, despite attending Jewish parochial schools, are constantly subjected to this brand of haranguing by the teachers in the secular department. One daughter had an entire test in science period devoted to global warming. A class play about forests (in 3rd grade!) included speaking birds who advocated for killing the woodchopper for his desecration of trees.

A different daughter, as a junior in high school, had to write a report on an angry novel about Southern racism in the early 20th Century, where blacks had to wait for whites to go first over the bridge and a host of similar indignities. In her essay, she wrote that such atrocities are a thing of the past. In the margin the teacher commented: "Who says?" In each case, I considered unleashing angry missives but remembered that these activists held my children's grades hostage.

So when these teachers stop being so contentious and tendentious we will begin again to eye them with respect. In the meantime, they should not be surprised to see some rotation of pupils.

First of all let me say that I know for a fact that there are many good and decent people in the teaching profession. I know several of them personally who are conservative Christians who labor every day as a kind of "fifth column" in the public school establishment not to proselytize or indoctrinate but to counteract the left-wing indoctrination which the education establishment wishes to force upon the nation's children.

Sometimes they have to risk their jobs to do this.

I also know that there are many teachers who hold a liberal and secular worldview themselves but still realize that their place is not to force those views upon the children in there care and therefore take special care to treat dissenting opinions with respect and tolerance.

AND I know that there are many teachers in the public schools who are very intelligent people. I sat under some of their instruction in my school days and I know some of them today.

Having said all that we must also note these facts.

In any college having a teachers school a look at the distribution of student IQ's will reveal that the bottom third will be clustered in the education major.

The only major in American colleges and universities that attracts students with a lower average IQ than teaching is journalism.

Most public school teachers in the US belong to the National Education Association. This organization sometimes claims that it is a professional association dedicated to the education of America's youth and the promotion of excellence among America's teachers. Other times it claims to be a labor union representing teachers.

In reality the NEA is a pillar of the left wing of the Democrat party. The NEA provides a large amount of funding to the DNC and members of the NEA comprise a large percentage of the delegates to the DNC's nominating convention. The NEA tirelessly advocates for every possible left wing cause - however much or little they might have to do with education.

The fact is that the NEA has only three items on its agenda. One is left wing activism two is securing greater pay and job security for teachers (even bad ones) and three is shielding incompetent teachers from any kind of accountability.

Notice that nowhere on the list is educating children. That can't make the cut because it directly contradicts all of the NEA's genuine priorities.

Sarah Palin knows all of this. The fact that her father is a teacher and her mother worked in school administration mean that she has had a lifelong pipeline to the truth about exactly what is going on in the public schools of this nation.

So of course Ms. Palin rolled her eyes when she heard that the moonbat in front of her was a teacher (lately some doubt has been cast on that - BTY). For a conservative Republican to be confronted by a public school teacher is usually the equivalent of FDR being confronted by a member of the German American Bund.

Right now public school teachers enjoy a reputation which most of them do not deserve. Those teachers who follow the "party line" which they learned in teachers college which is supported by the US Dept. of Education and the NEA represent a greater threat to our children than pedophiles do because the law does not require that our children be placed in the care of known pedophiles for six or seven hours a day.

Conservatives must educate the public on these facts so that it will not be political suicide for a political candidate to utter these truths out loud.