You're being disingenuous, Tom. You're too good a writer to claim that I misunderstood. I credit you with full responsibility for your subtext as well as your surface text.

If you want to split hairs, note that I didn't say that you literally called each object of your disdain "un-American". Your black-and-white, us-versus-them view of the world is long established. You consider yourself a genuine American, and certainly not a jerk, idiot, fool, leftist, and all the other epithets you apply to those who disagree with you; what, then, must these Others be? Your meaning was quite clear, Tom, and a too-strictly-literal reading isn't much of a fig leaf. You said more than you wrote.

Lots of the same old stuff in your post, the long list of slights against conservatism and fingerpointing at the hordes of wrong-thinkers who, you imagine in your demon-haunted world, have dedicated their lives to undermining America, for no reason you could explain any more than a "leftist" could explain the catchall term "imperialism" (I do read your posts).

This one quote serves as a useful stepping stone:

People...who had made a career of pissing on the United States and its values...

It's hard to see the mote in your own eye, isn't it? I've been reading your political writing for a long time now, and I'm hard pressed to think of one group of Americans, outside the 80th percentile of conservatism, that you have not pissed on. Therein lies the central paradox: A self-styled True American who hates large numbers of Americans. You love an abstraction of America, but despise the reality of its people. How is it possible to respect America without respecting its people?

We're all you have, and we deserve more respect than you seem willing to give. The Constitution in its glass case won't preserve America, nor the parchment of the Bill of Rights, nor a copy of The Wealth of Nations, nor even the flag. Just us. You and me and Mary Anne and George Bush and E'Telekeli and Ed and the NYFD and PD and Justin and Colin Powell and Splinx and Dan and Lindy and[breathe!]...acknowledging and respecting each other as Americans.

We shall all hang together, or we shall all hang separately. Tear off thirteen pages and bring your calendar up to date--we have more important things to do these days than perpetuate tired old political feuds.

--Robert