Like many of you, I like to watch movies. Even today, there are still a lot of feel-good, old-fashioned hits that make your heart warm. Ones like Slumdog Millionaire and National Treasure.

In National Treasure—the sequel, that is—there’s a scene in which Nicholas Cage, the protagonist, kidnaps the president. It’s something he needs to do to “find the treasure.” It’s one of the scenes I remember, not because it’s particularly memorable or even good, but because of how the scene portrays the executive’s character. The movie respects the president. He’s fundamentally a decent guy or gal who’s going to do the right thing in the end. For that, the president deserves our respect. And in National Treasure, he gets it.

Perhaps a large number of more sophisticated people might view these sentiments as naive. But I’m sure many viewers of Fox News have the same, old-fashioned beliefs. With regard to George W. Bush in particular, I’m sure many of them believed that he was decent man trying to do the right thing for our country. Whatever his mistakes, he deserved our respect.

Which is why it so disturbs me to watch Fox News today. The channel’s attitude is consistently disrespectful to our president. Fox commentators are free—encouraged, in fact—to ridicule and malign the leader of our nation. They operate on the assumption that Barack Obama is not a decent man and that he does not want to do the right thing for the country. They seem to think that our commander-in-chief is an enemy or something, just because he happens to be a Democrat.

That’s bad. It’s bad for the president. It’s bad for our country because a polarized nation with a paralyzed leader is always in a state of weakness. Think about Iran today. It’s even bad for Fox News and the Republicans, because when they do come up with legitimate criticism, the president’s not going to listen. They’ll have lost all their credibility.

Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned type of guy, but I think that our president deserves respect.