Old coworkers and America-bashing (not necessarily in combination)

Was out with a few former coworkers yesterday. I wasn't in a particularly sociable mood, but figured I had to go because these people are nice to see and I don't get a chance to see them often, especially Siva who usually lives in Texas. And they were very nice to see, in spite of the fact that they sometimes mentioned unprintable words like "functional programming". Cessu and APL even came up to my place for a while to see the apartment and smell raspberry vodka (Cessu wanted to taste it, but after smelling it changed his mind very quickly. Weird.).

One of them (I don't mention by name because I've seen the phenomenon many times and my rant is against it in general, not against this person in particular) expressed hope that Bush should be elected US president again in November, thus causing the US a lot of problems. I realize of course that a lot of people here like to say nasty things about the US that they don't necessarily even really mean, for a variety of reasons: first of all, it's fashionable at the moment, second, the US is the richest and most powerful country in the world, causing understandable jealous resentment in those who aren't, and third, the US really does have the dumbest president in the industrial world at the moment.Given fashion, jealousy, a president who belongs in a baboon cage and a cabinet that such a president has put together, it's not surprising that people just blurt out random nasty things about the US, much in the same way as I have sometimes blurted out wishes for turning the country Afghanistan into a lake Afghanistan a couple of years ago, or for bombing Saudi Arabia.

The only difference here is that, to the best of my knowledge, I've never said any of these things in the presense of any actual Afghanis or Saudis. Not, of course, that I had a lot of chance to, but I wouldn't even if I could, at least not unless I am attempting some personal insult as well. And that's the problem: when people engage in such recreational America-bashing (as opposed to, say, normal discussion of America's latest fuckup) in my presense I can't help taking it as a certain sign of disrespect for me. That's assuming that said people know that I am an American. "In my presense" here means in my physical presense or when I am actively present on an IRC channel. Can't really expect people to restrain themselves when I am idle on an IRC channel.

Strangely enough these people are often otherwise very nice and polite people whom I cannot imagine saying anything like that to a person from any other country. I wonder whether this is because they really think/feel that such politeness in unnecessary towards the Americans, or because they don't consider me a "real American", or both? (Although the second possibility is to some degree an offshoot of the first.)