Michael Moore, leftist originator of the blatant anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11," announced in a June 24th press conference that despite Republican control of the White House and Congress, America is liberal.

True, the Republican Party hardly resembles the GOP of Reagan, Goldwater, Nixon, or Eisenhower. But is America liberal?

Better ask those self-important heads of some Washington-based think tanks and policy organizations, who, while fiscally conservative, manage to shoot themselves on every issue - marriage, taxes, environmental extremism, child welfare, crime. For example, just one week after Michael Moore's rant, Massachusetts state Senator Therese Murphy revealed that some 40 percent of adopted children are going to homosexual couples - even though they make up 3 percent of the population.

For 40 years the schools have been indoctrinating each class of new high school graduates in Marxist socialism and counterculture dogma. Thoughtful conservatives are stumped by the ongoing reticence of elected Republicans to take on America's left-leaning education system - not only for the sake of the nation, but for the sake of the Party. Increasingly, conservatives are looking at Third Party options - or not voting at all.

The various conservative moguls of Policyland seem disinterested in education. Oh, they support educational "choice," yet remain oblivious to strategies that could make "choice" meaningful - that could turn Republicans into heroes instead of goats.

The leftists always understood the stakes in institutionalizing cultural Marxism and social chaos through the education system. They knew from the 1940s that schools were their ace-in-the-hole, assuring the overall success of socialism, and maybe even communism, whatever temporary setbacks might occur from one administration to another.

The interests of the Republican Party are not served when schools turn out little socialists year after year. Republican leaders somehow expect that curriculums which denigrate self-reliance and individualism, which play down national sovereignty and inalienable rights, which offer academic credit for taking part in abortion/gay rights/anti-Bush rallies, which replace Shakespeare with "rap poetry," and which advocate socialistic solutions to problems like health care and unemployment are going to produce conservative Republicans.

Public schools, populated by some 90 percent of America's youth and 99 percent of the teachers, are creating a nation that thumbs its nose at the Framers of our Constitution, their writings - and even the Declaration of Independence. Minnesota State Senator Michael Kelley went so far as to call it a "mistake" to include the Declaration among America's founding documents. Beginning in 1947, UNESCO and the National Education Association were belittling the family, calling it "poisonous," and equating self-defense to rabid nationalism. Today, the NEA has upped the ante, collaborating with the leftist organizations like MoveOn.org in "the largest mobilization � ever" to defeat a candidate in an election - yet it denies political lobbying and pays no taxes.

The questions Republican leaders should be asking are: Exactly how is teacher preparation that is geared to Marxist-socialist ideals supposed to energize the electorate to vote Republican? Or advance free markets? How can we remove the red tape so that private-school startup costs are lessened, thereby providing more supply to meet the demand? What are the "breakthrough" methodologies that would revolutionize, without stigma, the teaching of basic subjects? Can we support these techniques through the universities - instead of writing each state a blank check? How can we lessen the grip of the teachers unions so that they behave more like "professional associations" and less like "political intervention groups" (PIGs)? How can we move education in a direction that reflects the American founding documents and away from what is essentially a United Nations construct?

Failure to transmit free-market concepts has produced a large egalitarian faction that believes socialist systems fall short only when legislation fails to give everyone an equal share of the pie. That a pie requires unleashing the creative energies of enterprising people through the profit motive escapes their logic. Pie-making is viewed as government's job.

Promises to ax the U.S. Department of Education and rein in the illegalities of the teacher unions have become political dead-ends, while dozens of vested interests like the NEA persist in sustaining a quid pro quo between the Department and agents of the left - all committed to Marxist-style socialism.

Conservatives will continue to redouble their efforts and miss their aim as long as they fail to make the education behemoth Priority #1. The question is: How long before young graduates are no longer sufficiently schooled in the principles of liberty to bother defending them?