February is African American History Month. Yet these are days of sadness.

The brilliance of hope, so blinding a few short years ago, has dimmed. The dreams of a 21st-century America, where achievement is based on skills, determination and merit, free from an arbitrary color standard, have been replaced with injuries inflicted by present-day haters as malevolent as some of our worst enemies of the past.

Who could have imagined a U.S. publication suggesting that Israel “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place.” In case you were unsure of what you’d just read, the writer clarified, “Yes . . . order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence.”

Those words were written only a few weeks ago, in a column by the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1925. Andrew Adler’s call for President Obama’s assassination was immediately condemned by major Jewish organizations. He apologized, resigned from his post and has reportedly put the paper up for sale.

But it can’t be unsaid. To read in a mainstream publication that Barack Obama should be killed takes the breath away.

How many other Americans think the same way? Such thoughts didn’t start with Adler. They don’t stop with him. READ MORE

Colbert I. “Colby” King writes a column — sometimes about D.C., sometimes about politics — on that runs on Saturdays. In 2003, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for “for his against-the-grain columns that speak to people in power with ferocity and wisdom.” He is also a regular panelist on ABC’s “Inside Washington” and a regular commentator on WTOP Radio. King joined the Post’s editorial board in 1990 and served as deputy editorial page editor from 2000 to 2007. Earlier in his career, he was an executive vice president of Riggs National Bank, U.S. executive director of the World Bank, a deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, Democratic staff director of the Senate’s District of Columbia Committee, a State Department diplomat stationed at the U.S. embassy in Bonn and a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army Adjutant General’s Corps. King grew up in Washington and attended Howard University. He is married to Gwendolyn Stewart King and has three adult sons.