We just don't do this sort of thing in democracies!

This is not a partisan issue. It's simply not. Substitute "Ronald Wilson Reagan" or "George Walker Bush" for "Barack Hussein Obama" in the video below, and it's every bit as creepy- and every bit as wrong.

A few days ago I posted a video of various Hollywood personalities "pledging allegiance" to President Obama in terms entirely out of keeping with our democratic traditions. We do not pledge allegiance to our presidents, regardless of party; instead, we hold them accountable to us. We may like them. We may support them. But we never, ever, "pledge allegiance" to them. To do so is to get the relationship between an elected official and the people in a democracy exactly backward.

Ever since Athens, democracies have feared and distrusted the cult of personality, and with good reason. And while I do not believe that President Obama is planning a coup (or anything so preposterous), there simply can be no question but that treating any political leader the way Kim Il Sung is treated in North Korea or Stalin was in the Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein was in pre-invasion Iraq is radically inappropriate in a democracy. If nothing else, it's as unhealthy a precedent as can be imagined. And that adult Americans of voting age should fail to see this is itself a frightening thing.

But what is below is much worse. This is children in a public school- the children of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike, who may or may not have voted for Mr. Obama or approve of his policies- being indoctrinated into the Cult of Obama at taxpayer expense.

Some have reacted to the previous video with the red herring that the goals and values and objectives recited by the Hollywood Obamaphiles in themselves were commendable. But they were neither the point of the video, nor of my objections to it. The point of both was the glorification of a national political leader in terms more appropriate in a totalitarian state than in a democracy.

Similarly, the wonderful values the kids chant and sing about it aren't the issue here. The issue is that the taxpayers of Burlington, N.J. were, without being consulted, compelled to pay for the indoctrination of their own children into Saddam or Kim-like cult of a president of whose policies their parents may or may not even approve. And both the name and the party of that president are entirely irrelevant.

ADDENDUM: As you can see, they've removed the video. Don't know about the people responsible for this.