(Update below)

You've undoubtedly heard that Chicago - the American city that Bush U.N. ambassador John Bolton fantasized about being the victim of a terrorist nuclear attack at CPAC, garnering laughter from the audience - lost the Olympics for 2016. Reportedly it was because of draconian immigration policies which makes you wonder whether or not the United States may be permanently out of the running.

Perhaps you've also heard - and this ought to be plenty obvious and expected by now -- that Republicans are thrilled that the United States lost the Olympics. No exaggerations, no political grandstanding here, and despite political operatives desperately trying to keep their party from celebrating such a huge loss to our nation, many mainstream conservatives simply can't contain their anti-American glee.

Bush Deputy Press Secretary Scott Stanzel warned his party on Twitter to "resist the temptation to pile on about Chicago losing the Olympic bid just because Obama made the pitch".

That admirable suggestion has been roundly ignored.

According to John McCormack, "cheers erupt[ed] at WEEKLY STANDARD world headquarters", in a post titled "Chicago Loses! Chicago Loses!". The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative rag that has defined the Republican agenda for much of this past year (they are without a doubt one of the biggest pushers of the birther crap despite having their own forgery experts declare the conspiracy theory to be completely without merit), promoted the post on its official Twitter feed.

CNN Producer Peter Hamby noted that he had "never seen so many conservatives cheering for a U.S. loss."

Media Matters for America documented the anti-American celebrations on the right taking place over the past 24 hours.

Glenn Beck, the far-right's superstar of conspiracy theories and hate speech rants, told his listeners to "enjoy this" and to "savor this moment" in his lead-in to announcing that America had lost the Olympics. An editorial on Drudge protégé Andrew Brietbart's new anti-government website said "it is kind of like the world community saying to President Obama, 'Not only no, but Hell No.'"

Hell No to America, it would seem, is just fine with Republicans so long as America is lead by someone who is not One Of Them. A scorched earth analogy seems quite apt just now; America is worth doing anything to protect right up to - and including - becoming the enemy, unless a Democrat is running the show, then it's perfectly acceptable to cheer for its destruction.

Because to them, America is being run by the enemy.

Beck, Brietbart, Drudge, racist Lou Dobbs, and of course Republican party leader Rush Limbaugh aren't celebrating the loss of the Olympics to the state formally represented by our President - and it's not even his home state, to remind you how incredibly pathetic this entire smear campaign has become - they are celebrating a loss to the country that cannot ever be slighted.

Republicans took on the mantel of God himself over the last nine years, sitting in judgment over everyone and everything. Nothing was said, no vote taken, no decision carried out without a conservative somewhere pulling it aside and either stamping it with their little American flag stamp of patriotic approval, or declaring it an enemy of the state.

To oppose any agenda of the Republican party was to hate America, to want it to fail, to want us all to die. Worse than the enemy are words I've heard mainstream Republicans use to describe liberals, worse than bin Laden.

Of course it wasn't true then, but it certainly seems to be true now. Republicans proudly pray for the economy to get worse because Democrats passed the last stimulus bill instead of them. And now they openly root for foreign countries to win out over America in the contest to land the 2016 Olympics, and now that they've gotten their way, they are celebrating America's defeat at the hands of foreign powers.

It wasn't whispered in cloak rooms or alleged under the breath. Republicans routinely and openly asked liberals why they hated America for years, and largely got away with it when liberals simply turned their backs on what amounted to a real life version of Internet trolling.

Who would have thought that just a few years later we'd see Republicans openly rooting for America's opponents, "erupting in cheers" when America fails on the world stage, and smiling when the world says "Hell No" to the United States.

Limbaugh doesn't deny it, and why should he? It's obvious that he hates America. He defiantly declared that he wants America to fail, and nobody on the right had the guts to call him out for it. To the contrary, even mild criticism was quickly followed by public apologies from Republican party officials.

When MoveOn.org ran a contest for TV ads during the Bush administration, and one unaffiliated entrant submitted an ad that compared President Bush to Hitler - strongly denounced by the right even though they remain painfully silent today while their own people do it to Obama - the right forced Congress to denounce both the ad and MoveOn.org in a non-binding resolution.

In any real democracy, that kind of assault on the principals of free speech where a government officially denounces its own citizens would be virtually unthinkable.

But in America not only is that common place whenever the right demands it, it's oddly missing when the right commits far more inflammatory sins.

"For those upset that I sound gleeful", Limbaugh confessed to his listeners, "I am. I don't deny it. I'm happy".

Happy that America lost the Olympics, rooting for America not to recover from the recession. This is the person publicly leading the Republican party, who gives orders to the highest party officials who will meekly apologize to him whenever they are deemed to have stepped out of line. This is the right's brightest star, and not the far-right either, this man is considered the voice of mainstream conservatism in America.

Erick Erickson laughed on RedState.com in a mandatory homage to GOP leader Limbaugh, saying "apparently the rest of the world wants Obama to fail too". That's what accounts for humor on the right, that's what's funny. In just a few short years they've gone from labeling anyone that doesn't agree with them as traitors who hate America and want it to fail and be destroyed, to laughing when America fails and rooting for further failures on the world stage and "erupting in cheers" when former GOP ambassadors joke about American cities being nuked by The Terrorists.

By their own metric, by their own actions and rhetoric, Republicans would now seem to be the ones that hate America.

Democrats and liberals didn't root for America to fail when NYC wanted the Olympics and didn't cheer when that bid failed under George W. Bush. Those saying there are an equal number of misfits on the left are simply manufacturing lies to cover their naked hatred for civility, and apparently for their own country as well.

Update - National Journal has a video of the "Defending the American Dream" summit, held by corporate lobbying group Americans for Prosperity. AFP is one of two major corporate lobbying groups that created and continue to fund and organize the fake "tea party" protests. In this video, a blogger announces that America lost the Olympics for 2016 at the summit, and "the room erupted in applause". Apparently the American Dream which is desperately in need of defending by brave patriotic corporate lobbyists, doesn't include having the global honor of hosting the Olympics.