By Andrew K. Boyle

It is spring time in America. The grass is green, our economy is pretending to be green, and professional politicians are busy pollinating the stories which after germination will hope to sway the election this November -- occasionally also pollinating a staffer or two which will require high levels of concealment up until after said election. These forces of nature bring us peace, while the forces of politics drive us mad and birth a curmudgeonly terseness among conservative Americans which ensures we will continue to validate the cranky-white-male-gun-clinger narrative which is now being put to music for DNC adds set to run later this year.

It is in this Shakespearean "kingdom for a stage" turned soap opera in which America attempts to either roll back the ocean tide of progressivism drowning our culture, prosperity and posterity, or accept our King Canute future and simply try to enjoy the rip tide. Fortunately in understanding the hopelessness our politics induce, we can also understand the otherwise unexplainable letdowns that are as cyclical as the seasons for people tethered to the GOP by strategic and inescapable default.

Thus is the sad story of Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and her Achilles heal -- Common Core. In a series of events which appear to serve no other purpose than to ensure politicians unceasingly disappoint us, the popular and reliably conservative governor had much to do with developing and committing Oklahoma to become captive to a Titanic Ship of State project dooming our nations educational system known as Common Core.

A project of the National Governors Association, Common Core is a nationalized set of standards pushed by the Obama administration intended to revolutionize the nation's schools in much the same way the Stimulus bill revolutionized the national power grid. Just as the Department of Energy is now bursting with cash and most of our power plants are slated to close, Common Core makes possible a lavish educational industrial complex leeching off a student body perfectly groomed to be future clients of the State.

While avoiding the minutiae of Common Core, it may be summed up as an unmitigated disaster. From math problems which require not sums by explanations of reasoning, to teaching that democratic institutions as a necessary evil in the eventual one world socialist government, the list of instances where the standards are nothing less than the drivel and fantasies of the Far Left abound. The mob inspired coercion and intimidation by which the standards have been universalized, and the implications for local and parental control over education are diverse and widespread enough to make additional words here superfluous.

But why is it that we find Mary Fallin front and center in this leviathan of progressivism? Why is it that the Republican controlled Legislature, both houses, has been forced to take public and contentious votes to attempt to repeal something championed by Gov. Fallin, packaged right along-side a successful agenda of fiscal discipline and small government virtues?

Here is where the skull -splitting disappointment in an otherwise praiseworthy conservative provides the pollen to our flowers of general disgust in all matters concerning government; turning perfectly reasonable and well informed citizens into miserly curmudgeons clinging to their guns, talk-radio and anti-everything-fun cartoons -- ensuring both the present culture and the future belong to those who pander-most. Here is where a rising star like Mary Fallin becomes the eventually doomed presidential candidate we shall forever pejoratively term as "just the next John McCain."

Let me be clear, Governor Fallin is wildly wrong on Common Core, and the reaction of repealing the law and the challenges against any other Republican who supported it (see Janet Barresi) are full of virtue and have the power of truth on their side. I even suspect that they will, in short order, be successful and return some sense of sanity to the Sooner State. This is what democratic peoples do, they allow politicians to impose huge and unnecessary encumbrances on everyday life; when it becomes inescapable, they push back. This is self government. This is Oklahoma. This is why I love both of these proud institutions.

But the real story here is not Common Core, or a governor surprisingly supportive of a horrible spawn of bureaucracy; it is that the whole fiasco is not the fault of Mary Fallin. It is the inescapable story line of any well intentioned politician who attaches themselves to the GOP.

Gov. Fallin came into politics as a pragmatic person who tended towards small government, general freedom, and a good dose of common sense. Just as you and I tend to vote Republican out of Darwinian survival instinct, she joined the GOP because every politician needs a place to call home. While common values were easily married, what was less obvious is that the Governor was joined in political matrimony the party of deficit spending, Medicaid part D, No Child Left Behind, comprehensive immigration reform and pork-barrel spending who also happened to be in an abusive relationship with a host of puritanical pressure-groups who each insisted upon unwavering fidelity. It was this abusive partner which ensured the governor would one day be forced to betray her conservative values to maintain peace within the walls of her political marriage.

The GOP is not about anything but their own power and enduring access to offices in which the law permits them to exercise that power. For decades the official position of the GOP can be summed up as being the sober-managers who can take progressive ideas and ensure they cost us less. In the case of Common Core, the GOP had no choice but to go along with whatever replaced No Child Left Behind. National standards were their own idea in response to nationalized education -- Common Core is just the natural progression of this idea. Whereas you and I can oppose disasters like this as matters of principle and guiding concepts of freedom and enlightenment, the GOP is already philosophically in agreement with the entire program - forever resigned to opposing the specific problems which arise on page such and such. They can seek to change specific books, we are free to change the entire institution.

In a way the support of Common Core championed by Governor Fallin is a blessing to the people of Oklahoma. It exposes the limited return offered by the GOP, but more importantly it requires involvement at a very small and localized level. The legislation that would ultimately repeal Common Core standards from the Red River to Kansas requires new standards to be adopted in the State by August 2015. Over the next 16 months local school boards have the chance to set up standards which cater to the unique populations of Blanchard, Edmond, Broken Arrow and Woodward. They also have the chance to demand any new statewide standards be remarkably vague and malleable -- non-encumbering of the standards vigorously contested and adopted by small communities of people. It won't be the collective planning of the Democrat party, or the equally problematic social engineering of Republicans, but the end result will be the exercise of free persons seeking to govern themselves. This local commitment to education will be the pledging of lives, fortunes and sacred honor in the same vein of those which first forged the American people.

Personally I find great hope in Oklahoma. It is a practical place, inhabited by remarkably good people. It has always been a place where the wrongs perpetrated by government are quickly reversed by the people. This is what is happening right now with Common Core. This proud history is in no danger of coming to an end. Unfortunately, in this brave new world we are entering of outrageously tyrannical government on a scale unfathomable in the annals of history, this reactionary approach to self government is no longer enough. It will take the entrepreneurial and revolutionary actions of hundreds of school boards to ensure whatever replaces Common Core isn't worse than what is now being voted out. The same iniquitous politicians who designed the present standards will develop a new system of churning out future clients of the state. Both systems will take the sons and daughters of Sooners and turn them into synthetic Californians and New Yorkers.

Oklahomans have refused to lose their souls to tornadoes, bombings, droughts, Mac Brown and the modern culture. Whatever has flooded across the borders has proven unable to rid the state of the red-dirt goodness bequeathed each person born on her plains. I would lie if I said I fear not for the future of Oklahoma, but equally would I be dishonest if I did not declare the violent hope my time as a resident there forever etched in my mind. The stakes on this one are high, but the revolutionary future it may accidentally birth holds more promise than all the oil under that red-dirt.