One of the problems with government-run schools (a.k.a. “public” schools) is that the bureaucrats and politicians who run the institution are unable to resist employing it to serve themselves.

And one of the reasons so many of us are ho-hum about the president’s plan to address schoolchildren in the classroom is because most of us are products of the public school system and we have become accustomed to the government using it for purposes quite apart from education.

This is typical in totalitarian regimes and dictatorships. Portraits of the “leaders” are hung in the classroom, and the students are often addressed by party officials, including the supreme leader himself.

But in the U.S., the only portrait hung in our classrooms was Gilbert Stuart’s Washington. And the only person who addressed us was the principal (or superintendent, as after the JFK assassination).

But this has been changing. The Stuart portrait was taken down in many places, and other figures have taken its place. Some call this ”progress.”

President Obama is neither totalitarian or dictator. He is the elected leader of the world’s most powerful democracy. So the question becomes: what is achieved by imitating the self-promoting behavior of dictators? And when can we expect the schoolchildren to begin wearing red (or green) neckerchiefs?

I watched the Robert Bork hearings, when Sen. Kennedy savaged an honorable judge with a string of outlandish, inflammatory predictions (vice real accusations), that fundamentally changed the level of partisan discourse in the Senate that persists to this day.

I also watched the Clarence Thomas hearings, when the same Sen. Kennedy (alongside the embarrassment who is currently the vice president), a lothario and drunkard who was at the time galavanting with his nephew William,  insult a humble man of great accomplishment and a genuine Catholic (vice Catholic lite) raised by his grandparents in the most meager of conditions, with questions about “Long Dong Silver”, while the ACLU and NAACP sat on their hands.

If that is redemption, then all liberals must be saints.