Around this time last year, President Obama sent a message to America's schoolchildren: Stay in school. Work hard. Learn.

Because the right-wing media is full of crazy people, deeply dishonest frauds who would do anything to destroy Democrats, and those who are both crazy and dishonest, Obama's innocuous message was greeted with an avalanche of looney-tunes claims that Obama was emulating Chairman Mao.

This year, President Obama delivered another back-to-school address to students, as presidents before him have done. But this year, the crackpots and frauds in the right-wing media are busy waging an anti-Muslim scare campaign and trying to roll back the first amendment, so they didn't get around to yelling about how Hitler wanted kids to do their homework, too.

The rational response to the disparate conservative reaction to the two Obama speeches is that it's a reminder of how insincere last year's yelling was. The Washington Times, however, has a different reaction:

President Obama's second back-to-school address contained a similar message of studiousness on Tuesday, but unlike last year, the speech failed to ignite partisan flames and cries of socialist indoctrination.

...

This time around, the White House appeared to have learned its lesson and avoided a similar media frenzy by issuing Mr. Obama's straightforward and — judging by the lack of conservative backlash — uncontroversial address ahead of time.

Got that? It was the White House's fault that people compared Obama to Mao last year. But this year, Obama's staff has learned their lesson.

The punchline, of course, is that while the Washington Times blames the White House for conservative paranoia about a “cult of personality,” the Times itself is owned by a man who claims to be the Messiah. Literally.