If you did not support the president's trip to Denmark to lobby for the Olympics coming to Chicago, you are an unpatriotic moron.

If you opposed bringing the games here, you hate America.

Those are the deep thoughts brought to us by the netnuts in blogdom and even the White House , who equated RNC Chair Michael Steele's opposition to Obama's trip (that 43% of Americans opposed also) with not "rooting" for America.

Now some might think it hypocritical for the left to point to anyone and say they hate America or wish America to fail. Given the incredible crap George Bush had to put up for 8 years from this crew, it might behoove our lefty friends to recall their own cheering on the insurgency in Iraq, gloating over American casualties, and generally acting as if losing the war would be a good thing.

And when they protest a bit too much that it's simply not true, remind them of what Gary Kamiya wrote in Salon Magazine as our troops were rolling to victory over Saddam's army: (Via Ace )

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness -- ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds.

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative -- four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

Lefty blogs today are full of accusations that the right hates America and hopes Obama fails. How one can connect the two - tying the person of the president to whether one loves their country or not - escaped much of the left for the last 8 years. They have suddenly discovered that they love America in the same way that the right does - at least as long as Obama is the president.

So let's allow them their spite. No one takes their charge that the right hates America seriously - I mean, really now. Who are they kidding? They just spent the last 8 years telling the right that their blind love of America was destroying us. Now all of a sudden the right hates the country? Phooey.

I devoutly wish that the left's discovery that they love America the same way that conservatives love her will be a permanent thing. But somehow, I think the next president - whoever she may be - will cause liberals to revert to type and see our flaws all to clearly while ignoring our virtues.