I was talking about the election with my daughter Beth the other day, and she said: “Well, all the Republican kids in my class are completely looney anyway.”

You cannot let a sentence like that fly by without a follow up. “Really?” I said. “How are they looney?”

This is a paraphrase, but it goes something like this: One boy, whose redeeming qualities include a love for baseball and a straight-A average, says he hates McCain almost as much as Obama and Clinton. Because McCain is too liberal.

But that's not what makes the boy crazy, according to Beth. He's crazy, she says, because he thinks the war in Iraq is a good thing — and he says that it would be OK to draft people to build up the Army.

Ha, she says, scoffing at him. “I know him. He’d be the first one across the border to Mexico if he got drafted. He’s not going to fight and risk getting himself killed.”

But that’s nothing compared to one girl in her class, a spoiled brat whose parents seem to give her every possession she wants despite her frequent detentions and skipping class enough to be at risk of failing eighth grade even though she makes 5s on her FCATs.

She says that women do not need to vote and that all a girl really needs is to marry a rich man. Women should not work, she says, and they don’t need any rights because their husbands will take care of them.

Well, how can everyone marry a rich man? Beth rightly wonders. “It’s crazy.”

That it is. I can only hope that these two kids do not represent our future.

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