We're doomed, I tell you

I have seen the future

And it sings what the government mandates:

Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said.

Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children's future and the state must put them right, Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said...

The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair's 'national parenting academy', a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the 'parenting workforce'...

Mrs Hughes condemned the way governments before 1997 thought they had no role in the upbringing of children, which it 'regarded as the entirely private arrangements families make.'

She praised the Government's record of pouring billions into state benefits for single parents, into providing subsidies for childcare, into pushing mothers into work, and into the 'Sure Start' children's centres...

Read the entire article. It's absolutely frightening to realize these people are not only saying all this with a straight face, but that this is the position of the government of England. And given our historical propensity for following trends set across the pond, it is only a matter of time before we are speaking in all seriousness about federally mandated nursery rhymes.

It must be so. People mock the slippery slope, but they simply lack the patience and perspective to watch it play out. Once the government begins down a path, it has no choice but to follow it to the end, because both success and failure are rewarded with more money, more power, more dependency.

GWB's federal marriage counseling is different only in degree from his friend Tony's mandatory nursery rhyme singing. They have the same underlying logic: it is the government's responsibility to direct the lives of its subjects according to the wisdom of the politicians. "Compassionate Conservatism" is simply Christian socialism.

Once President Rodham establishes "for the children" as the national motto, we shall begin singing our way - at gunpoint - down the same happy trail as the Brits. It will begin with expanding the role of the Department of Education (the same one the GOP should have killed but doubled instead) and the appointment of a Czarina. The Democrats will cloak the program differently than the GOP did, but it won't matter: the rhetoric is only incidental to the final result anyway.

The only good news is that since Europe is not even having enough children to replace itself, such programs will be necessarily short-lived - the Middle Easterners and North Africans who will rule the continent in a generation will have enough sense to get rid of them. The bad news is that America will probably still ride it out to the very end.