Reaching new heights of unprecedented displays of disrespect for the office of the president, conservative bloggers and cable news personalities are urging parents to keep their children home from school in order to prevent their children from watching President Barack Obama's planned speech to school children Tuesday at noon (EDT). It shocks and degusts me how baldly racist, and that's what it is, racist, the political right has become and how dangerous they are making the world by openly fomenting sedition by refusing to recognize Barack Obama as the democratically elected president of the United States. Even at the height of the GOP's loathing for Bill Clinton, there was still a grudging respect for both Mr. Clinton and the office of the president. George Bush, whose presidency was inarguably a gross failure and whose policies bankrupted the nation and plunged us into war, was still respected, by liberals and even the African American community, as the president of the United States.

The conservative right's malicious and unprecedented hate campaign--a campaign of personal hatred against the man with indifference to the office--continues to heat up and go unchallenged by, well, anyone. It treads a very thin line between political protest and open sedition against the U.S. government, which can be charged as the crime of treason. The conservative right--often in lock-step with the religious right--continues to develop and deploy propaganda designed to engage this country's sad history of institutionalized racism to achieve a political goal: the removal of Barack Obama from office. These actions undermine the very principles this country was founded upon and risks unpredictable blowback as, once our political leaders make it acceptable for us to simply not recognize our duly elected chief executive (for not much other obvious reason than that he is black), it makes it that much easier for dissent to set in and harden, as we become selective in terms of which authority figures we choose to recognize in the future. By undermining the office of the president, and the entire electoral system, these people are literally undermining the future of our nation, which makes their tactics not only wrongheaded and ignorant, but an act of sedition against the United States of America.

I only wish someone had the political will to charge them with that crime.