When Republicans say they love America, I take them at their word. I certainly don't believe many of them hate this country.

But some on the Very Far Right -- a small Tea Party's worth of Republicans, LaRouche followers and Ron Paul die-hards -- are another matter. Spewing nonsense, hate speech and incitement to violence, these are the Americans that Hillary Clinton defended when Barack Obama tried to explain the political alienation felt by people who "cling to guns and religion."

These are the people pushing back against Change. The world seems to them headed for hell in a hand basket and they just can't cope. They are the people who perpetually answer "Wrong" to the "Right Track/Wrong Track" poll question. The ones who have no connection to the political process other than through demagogues like Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and all the rest of the tin gods who make a career of tearing down government and never offering anything constructive in place of it.

But they do offer fear. And fear is the combustible precursor to hatred.

Chris Broughton, who carried his AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle in protest against President Obama last month, is among the terrified dispossessed. The day before the president gave his address in Arizona, Broughton listened to his pastor, the Rev. Steve Anderson, sermonize on "Why I Hate Barack Obama."

Anderson made clear he wasn't speaking metaphorically. "I hate Barack Obama," he said. "'Well,' you say, 'you just mean you hate what he stands for.' No, I hate the person."

Anderson's Gospel of Hatred is not peculiar to our times nor new in politics. It is the same drumbeat of madness that has accompanied civil war in Sudan, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, and every pronouncement since time immemorial that "God is on our side." It is the cry of al Qaeda, only with a different accent and a right-to-carry license. The same apocalyptic paranoia that enthralled followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh to their dooms.

The Andersons and Broughtons and Palins of our land don't hate America, per se. They hate our shared heritage: the uniquely American optimism that embraces the future without feeling the urge to build a fallout shelter or to lock and load against the fact that the world will never be as it once was nor long remain as it is now. They don't hate America in the concrete sense of hot dogs and highways and free speech. They hate America in its abstract essence: the country that is always in the process of becoming, the eager nation that abides more in the future tense than in the present. The country of our dreams, our ideals, our tomorrows. What Shakespeare called "the undiscovered country."

Those too fragile to live without a comforting sense of the familiar now cling to guns and religion to defend their way of life, even if that means depriving others of their lives. Make no mistake, the frightened fanatics are waging war already. It doesn't require Bibles and bullets, only the willingness to defend a health care system that kills thousands annually. The rotting corpses are piling up just as surely as if they had been cut down by assault rifles and assassination. And all because of misbegotten fear desperately seething against the Great Unknown.

Nothing says "I hate America" so much as threatening the deaths of Americans to preserve a system that kills Americans. And that is why even most Republicans would be appalled if the Very Far Right were to have its way.