Our hero Thom Tillis, the N.C. Speaker of the House and pride of Cornelius, has a way with words. Specifically, he has a real knack for wrestling words to the ground and shaping them into sentences that misdirect listeners and hide otherwise obvious facts that could make him look bad. Case in point: Tillis told a town hall meeting in Salisbury yesterday that it’s news to him if N.C. teachers and teacher assistants are being laid off as a result of the legislature slashing the public school budget. He told the Salisbury crowd that he wants to know about specific instances of such layoffs, because that’s certainly not what he intended when making those cuts.
Either Tillis is obfuscating like a mofo in this instance, or he’s as dull-witted as his political cohort, Rep. Paul “Skip” Stam, of “gay marriage leads to legal incest” fame. Tillis, though, is certainly nobody’s dope, so we’re giving him credit for his, er, diversionary language skills. Or, as Chris Fitzsimon says at the ProgressivePulse website, maybe it’s just that Tillis “remains vigilant in not letting the facts interfere with his talking points.”
If Tillis really does want to hear of “specific cases” of teacher and assistant layoffs, he’s going to have a huge pile of them to sift through, as the Department of Public Instruction reports that 1,260 teacher assistants and 534 teachers have been laid off this year due to the GOP’s budget cuts. Tillis has hinted that he doesn’t want to stay in the General Assembly a long time. If he needs a new profession after his lawmaking days are over, may I suggest leading Obfuscation Workshops around the nation for prospective politicians?
- Josh Ellis
- Speaker Thom Tillis gonna whomp sumbody over the head if they blame him for teacher layoffs
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2011.
wait, you mean politicians aren’t always truthful and that *gasp* a republican might not understand the implications of his ideology? nahhhhhhhhhhh
Ideology and party over people and country.
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
…Jimi Hendrix
Every public school district is a horrifically bloated bureaucracy which protects incompetent teachers. I graduated HS in 1981, never sat in a classroom of fewer than 32 students, and scored 1360 on my SAT.
The Meck EdShed could easily lose 1/3 of its deadwood and every school 1/4 of its teachers with no resultant change in student achievement.
You do realize that’s its the schools and school systems that choose to layoff the teachers and assistants. Sure he should have assumed that cutting their budget would result in layoffs, but maybe just maybe the intended target of the layoffs were anything but the teachers and their assistants employment.