What you're bumping into, here, is the totalitarian idea that a nation, and that nation's government, and the leader of that government, are all the same thing. Identical, indistinguishable, melting into each other. The leader is the personification of the nation. Whatever the leader does, by doing it, by definition, he makes it a patriotic act.
So, criticism of the government is hatred of the country. Criticism of the leader is treason. This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the American Founding Fathers said, so it is ironic, to be called unpatriotic for criticising our President. As a nation, we went down this road in the 1950s with McCarthyism, and it looks like we are heading down that same road again. |
