John Kelly, you have disappointed the nation.

John Kelly, you were one of the last people in the White House that I respected. Now you're just like all the rest of them: a big fat liar.

That was the short version. Here's the medium-length version.

I listened to MSNBC's "All In" on the radio yesterday. Chris Hayes is the host.

Chris Hayes played John Kelly's entire talk to the press, where the White House chief of staff told, in detail, the story of Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson's speech at the 2015 dedication of a new FBI building in Miramar, Florida. He told a convincing story about how she had spent her time at the podium taking credit for the building, and how she had personally gotten a $20 million commitment from then-President Barack Obama to build the building. According to Kelly, her whole speech was about herself and how great she was, especially for bringing the pork home. In his words, "... we were stunned." The gall of the woman's ego and self-promotion was beyond — well, beyond almost anybody in modern history, except perhaps Donald Trump.

Well, the Florida Sun Sentinel had dug up a videotape of that dedication ceremony, and All In had obtained a copy of it. So Chris Hayes played Congresswoman Wilson's speech, in its entirety. She told a story about how, four weeks before the dedication, the FBI had approached her and asked to have the building named after two FBI agents who had been killed in the line of duty. That literally takes an act of Congress, and so Wilson talked about how she had contacted the leadership of both the House and the Senate, and gotten that act of Congress through in record time. There was nothing "stunning" about it. She spent the rest of her speech praising the FBI, law enforcement and first responders in general, everyone involved in raising the building, and her colleagues in Congress for helping to get the building named.

She didn't say anything that John Kelly had accused her of. She bragged a bit about rushing that bill through Congress, but it was a fun story, and she gave credit to all of the other players.

As for the $20 million from President Obama, Wilson pointed out to reporters this week that the $20 million was appropriated by an act of Congress in 2009, and she didn't get elected to Congress until 2011.

Everything John Kelly said about her was a lie. Everything.

The long version? If I'm able to find a transcript of Kelly's words and one of Wilson's speech, I'll add them to this post so that you can read them for yourself.

UPDATE, JUNE 24, 2021: I still haven't found the transcript. But here's a Washington Post article from October 20, 2017, corroborating what I said.

Common Core opponents are irrational - and ignorant

Forgive me getting a little overheated about this.

Right now, it's fashionable to trash the Common Core State Standards Initiative - or Common Core, as it's more generally known. However, after having read a lot of anti-CC articles (and comments on articles) on the Web, I have reached an important conclusion. Two conclusions, as a matter of fact.

1. Common Core opponents are irrational.
2. Common Core opponents are ignorant.

To illustrate their irrationality, I will point you once again to "Frustrated Parent." He couldn't figure out his son's math problem, and so he and the entire world blamed it on Common Core. I looked at the math problem in question. It simply presented another way to learn subtraction. As I explained in my posting about it, there are many different ways to teach subtraction.

Common Core does not tell you how to teach subtraction, but it allows for all those different teaching strategies.

To underscore the irrationality, I have been following the comments in another article about CC. One of the commenters was bashing CC because, to quote his words as well as I can from memory, it doesn't allow for the fact that there are many different ways to teach a concept, and it requires that the concept be taught in one way. Um, (a) nothing could be further from the truth; and (b) this directly contradicts the underlying notion behind the math problem that "Frustrated Parent" was bawling about.

As for ignorance, when I say "ignorant" I mean "stubbornly unwilling to learn (more) about a subject." I've read lots of comments by people who are spouting off authoritatively about something they know nothing about, when the truth is freely available, and easy to read, at the Common Core State Standards website. All they have to do is look it up. But they prefer to go on blabbering ignorantly about what they perceive as Common Core and all its shortcomings, unencumbered by facts or the truth.