'Sorry There Is No Quote Of The Of The Today'

In place of our semi-recurring usual Quote of the Day, allow us to quote from the Department of Education. Or as the Weekly Standard quips in its Scrapbook department, “How Now, Chairman Mao?”

The Scrapbook doesn’t spend a lot of its time surfing tired bureaucratic websites that look like relics of the 1990s, but our interest was piqued last week by a quotation on the “Kids’ Zone” page of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics: “Our attitude towards ourselves should be ‘to be satiable [sic] in learning’ and towards others ‘to be tireless in teaching.’ ”

The author was indeed a tireless teacher who tirelessly aimed his precepts at hundreds of millions of people. Too bad those who weren’t interested in his teachings were tortured, beaten, and killed.

The “Kids’ Zone,” of course, was channeling Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book (or more likely one of the thousands of “quotable quotes” websites on the Internet that mistakenly render insatiable as satiable. We’re not, by the way, suggesting that the Department of Education has been infiltrated by Maoists. Rather, one of its websites seems to be in the hands of historically illiterate hacks.

Needless to say, the prominent featuring of Mao’s quote attracted more than the usual quota of attention to the “Kids’ Zone,” and the snippet was quickly removed. Here is what it was replaced with: “Sorry there is no quote of the of the today.”

Come again?

Actually, on second thought, don’t. Considering that Mao Tse-Tung killed 65 million or so people, “NEVER QUOTE HIM AGAIN ON A DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION-RUN KID’S WEBSITE,” Moe Lane writes emphatically. “EVER.”

Exactly. And as Moe adds:

I understand that they’ve already scrambled to get the quote off of the site, but… nobody checks this stuff? – And that’s a question that should be asked Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the next time he’s speaking in front of Congress.  We would be seeing zero tolerance if they had put up quotes by the aforementioned German and Russian genocidal psychopaths: why, exactly, should we be expected not to care now?  Is it because Mao’s victims were Chinese, and thus apparently not as important to apologists for this administration?

I certainly hope that this is not the case.  I’d hate to think that the Left was still struggling with that kind of institutionalized racism…

No, the Left is institutionalized racism these days — QED.