“Peter – Think Chron’s Tom Fleming is a big defender of the Confederacy/States Rights etc. Doubt he has much to offer on the subject of patriotism to, ah, Unionists… ”

Indeed, Thomas Fleming is exactly that, except he didn’t write the piece I pointed to. Nice of you to dismiss it though without even looking.

And it’s curious that you seem to define “Unionists” as something antithetical to “states rights.” What do you suppose it’s a Union of, then, other than a Union of States? Which have their rights.

But then, state’s rights has nothing whatsoever to do with the “patriotism” of folks on the Left, like the Great Saint O. Rather it’s the rights of the ruling class that matter, and trump all. The right to tell the rest of us how to live. To quote once more from the article you didn’t read.

Towards the end of his speech, Obama reasserted his propositional creed… [quote from Obama]… You may love America (“the place on the map”) with all your heart, and you may care for your fellow Americans (“a certain kind of people”) before all others. According to Obama that does not make you patriotic, however, unless you also believe that “anyone” can and therefore at least in principle should become an American, on the grounds of his or her loyalty to the ideal of a multicultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, tolerant, all-inclusive, diverse, anti-discriminationist, redistributionist America…
The Obama phenomenon reflects the hysterical temperament of a huge segment of the American public, temperament prone to adolescent over-excitability and willful self-deception bordering on self-hate.