Patriots want the best for and of their country and are eager to identify where it's gone wrong, so tha it can be set right. Michael Moore, for example, is my idea of a real American patriot.

As always GK Chesterton put it memorably: "My country right or wrong" is a thing no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother drunk or sober." No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink, he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery."

From A Defence of Patriotism (in The Defendant)