One of the Right’s favorite rants is that to fail to support this president is to be unpatriotic. To them, there is apparently no room for dissent, no possible honorable path besides blind obedience and trust in the state, which is of course an idea with no merit at all. In fact, to call it “intellectually bankrupt” would be an insult to bankruptcy.

And yet, they still do it, which means some idiots are actually buying it. We outlien for you now a distinction:

It is the Right that insists its opponents are unpatriotic; that they hope the enemy wins; that they are in Osama’s camp; that they support Al Qaeda; and that they hate the troops because they want to bring them home. They do this because, we assume, it is the best they can do. They cannot admit their failure and their folly because they equate apology and course-changing to weakness. Instead, they want to run out the clock (and troops and country be damned) and slink away in 18 months.

It is the Left that insists none of these ideas have any merit on their face, and that it is in fact supremely patriotic to insist a President be answerable to those who elected them, to the Constitution, to the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution (once held so dear by the GOP when Clinton lived at 1600 Pennsylvania). No one on the Left ascribes treasonous motives to their opponents — well, unless clearly wishing to establish an Imperial presidency is treasonous (and it may be).