At the fear factory

Oh, come on. Didja really think it was going to stop after the election?

Melissa Taggart says she was delighted that her son was learning a foreign language in the eighth grade -- until she learned he was expected to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish.

And that he'd receive a zero if he didn't. (Music, maestro)

Taggart, of Edmond, Okla., said the Pledge should be recited in English -- and English only. (You can see why Oklahoma was in such a hurry to ban that evil sharia law this year! That relationship between liturgical language and the ritual itself is already sneaking in.)

“English is our language … and I just feel it’s wrong that he would have to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States of America in Spanish. It’s just wrong,” a frustrated Taggart told KFOR.

She said she couldn't begin to understand why her son's teacher would choose the Pledge for her class. And she was upset that her son was told he would receive a zero if he did not complete the assignment. (Any of you teachers out there want to take a swing at finishing this one from here?)

.... But Brenda Lyons, associate superintendent and public information officer for the Edmond School District, defended the class assignment, saying the school's language curriculum calls for students to translate and recite something that they are familiar with.

“The Pledge assignment has been in place for years.” Lyons told FoxNews.com. “It is written in the curriculum for Spanish that students need to learn something they are familiar with, like short phrases in the foreign language."

Right -- long story short, somebody forgot to do the assignment, and he thought he'd found a way out of it, and one thing led to another, and next thing you know, "the Quran ate my homework" became the third most important story for most of the day at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.*

Why? Well, it's interesting to note how the "US" section of the Fox Web site breaks down: Crime, Economy, Immigration, Disasters, National Interest, Terror, Military, Religion, Education and Road to Recovery. (Don't look for the jobs report under "Road to Recovery"; it goes under "Politics.") "National Interest" is the category for stories like this one -- and kids sent home from school for wearing flag shirts, veterans told to stop flying the flag, school groups ordered to stop singing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial, and the like. It's where you go if you haven't had enough chances to complain about the ACLU in your day-to-day life and need to find your fellow outraged partisans -- or if you just need to vent about the Mexicans and the Muslims and the teachers and the unions and the liberals and the media. At Fox, that is the national interest.

* That was Thursday. Today, that evil Keith Olbermann is in its place.