I gathered as much, Little Hawk - I was just marvelling at an attitude that could fail to recognise that a foreigner who pledged "allegiance" to "the flag" - as opposed to paying respect to it - must be either a traitor or a liar.

This is thread drift, but... There does seem to be something very special about the relationship between Americans and their flag. I am reading a book by Steven Pinker, (The Blank Slate) at the moment, and there is one passage where he is giving examples of cases where it is implied that ordinary people are likely to feel that some moral boundary is being offended against, even though no evident harm is done to any person - and in among hypothetical cases involving incest and cannibalism comes this one:

"A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn't want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.