Silly? it's embarrassing!

The Silly Season ceases to be "silly" when what passes for political debate in America turns not merely stupid or witless, but certifiably demented.

I write of the kooky reaction of many conservatives--politicians, citizens and commentators in the media--to the plan by President Obama to address the nation's schoolchildren tomorrow. (And I write, please note, as a nonlefty libertarian who did not support Barack Obama in the presidential election.)

Obama will, as we all know, address our kids--plenty of whom need a lesson or two on the subject, since they clearly don't get it from their parents--on the virtues of study, education and hard work. According to a White House spokesman, the aim of the speech is "to challenge students to work hard in school, to not drop out and to meet short-term goals like behaving in class, [and] doing their homework ..." If anyone thinks that's unpalatable, subversive, Commie and un-American, I'd like to meet for a duel at dawn by the skating rink at New York's Central Park. (Pick your weapon, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck ...)

Obama's original "lesson plan" had been to ask students auditing him to write letters to themselves outlining ways in which they could "help the president." This seemingly earnest proposal provoked a reaction so vitriolic from sections on the political right that I began to wonder whether I was missing a point--to wonder, in fact, that I, as a recent immigrant to this country, had failed to integrate well enough to grasp the nuances of American political debate.

What to make of this conniption, for example, from Steve Russell, a Republican Oklahoma state senator? "As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education--it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality. This is something you'd expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq." Kim-Jong Obama? You reckon? I concluded not, opting, instead, for the view that the senator had taken leave of his senses.

Kooky, too, was the paroxysm from Jim Greer, the chairman of the GOP in Florida, no less: He was "absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology." And Rick Perry, the governor of Texas--a man I'd never call a kook, and I don't propose to do so now, even though he has made some common cause with kooks on this issue--has said that he understood where the criticism of Obama was coming from. Perry, however, was at pains to point out that he's "certainly not going to advise anybody not to send their kids to school [on Tuesday]."

Bravo, Governor: Why not give us a civics lesson, too, after the president has spoken? "Parents of America, the fact that the president of America is addressing your children is not, I repeat not, a reason to disrupt their education by keeping them at home...We cannot, repeat cannot, allow our schools to become no-go zones for presidents..."

Not so long ago, it was the right's indignant lament that Democrats did not accord sufficient respect to the president of the United States. The president in question happened to be the right's president, and Democrats, it is true, were universally dismissive of him, treating him with a contumely that brought them no credit. Overheated sections of the right--first the "birthers," now the "speechers"--are meting out to Obama precisely the sort of disrespectful treatment they execrated when it was directed by the left at President Bush. (How refreshing it would be, I say, and how restorative of civic decency, if George W. Bush were to make a statement today urging his party to accept an American president's right to connect directly with America's schoolchildren. After all, what was Bush doing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001? And didn't his father speak to America's schoolchildren in 1991?)

Call me naïve, but I believe that Americans ought to accord their president a formal, ex officio respect, irrespective of party affiliation. He is, after all, the president of all of us (whether we like him or not), and it is unseemly that we should withhold civility from him on grounds of political disagreement. As things stand, no blow seems low enough, no criticism off limits, if the president happens to be from the other side. The pursuit of happiness has given way to the pursuit of picayune point-scoring. E Pluribus Unum ... Why do we still bother with that silly foreign phrase? Our great nation has become a Manichaean nation.