Appearing with comedian Erik Bransteen on The Dean Obeidallah Show last Friday (Independence Day), C&L favorite Hal Sparks went on a must-hear rant about patriotism and our duty to stick by the American experiment. Hal took on our current government's authoritarianism and how every country, including ours, must face the natural human tendencies towards it. MUST listen clip and transcript below, with host Deah Obeidallah bringing up Independence Day and patriotism:

DEAN OBEIDALLAH (HOST): There is a partisan component [to polls on patriotism], right? When it was a Democratic president, Democrats were high and Republicans were lower.

But I do think, honestly, and I could be wrong, and you tell me, I have a lot of listeners who call and we talk about this.

It seems like a fundamental foundational shaking of your belief in this country. That's what Trump is doing to us now in five months. So what's your take? What do you think?

HAL SPARKS: No, I'm I'm an extraordinarily proud American.

I think our system is fantastic.

I think democracy is messy.

And if any German ever calls me out, am I ashamed of being an American?

They can go pound sand.

No country gets to skip history.

And we all go through this like re-monarchization or authoritarian shift at some period.

It's how you respond to it and push back on it that matters.

And seventy-five million people voted for a woman of color last year.

So I know I'm not ashamed to do this.

And this is the most unpopular bill to ever be brought before Congress.

And there are even Republicans who consider themselves hardliners who would never break with this monarchical maggot leader who are having to.

That's the nature of democracy.

And one of the things that makes me a Democrat is the difference between a Democrat and a Republican.

At their root is that Republicans believe in the electoral college and the power of land ownership and the Republic.

They believe it is a control structure that has been meant to be built on counties, almost a fiefdom and serfdom kind of situation.

But Democrats believe in one man, one vote, one person, one vote.

And as messy as that is, this is what we have to go through.

And if we needed to recognize there were a bunch of loopholes in our system that we just assumed nobody would take advantage of, never mind John Yoo and George Bush and all those guys slip-sliding through the authorized use of military force. That should have been the canary in the coal mine.

A bunch of Americans stood up last year and said no.

But another group of them, you know, by three, by about two point five million, a margin that was smaller than Hillary Clinton's, said yes to this guy.

And even they are not all on board with this.

We are a democracy.

And so I'm proud of this system.

I'm proud to be a part of this country.

And the fact that you and I can bitch about our leader as far and away authoritarian as he would like to be, his ability to do anything about it is comparatively minuscule compared to China, Russia, Iran, a lot of the other countries that we're up against in this situation.

So I'm not worried about that.

We have a responsibility to fix it.

And that's on us as Democrats.

If we haven't convinced people that our system is right, we've got to double down and do that work.

If the if people fell for the flim-flam of the 'brown march across the border' or whatever, that's our fucking fault.

And so I'm not going to hang it around the neck of the Greatest Generation or anybody who kept this country afloat during that time because, you know, Gen Zers have been taught, by the way, that warts and all history is just really about warts.

And that's one of the reasons why you've seen a generational shift in pride in the country, is because they don't know, they have no comparison point, because that was the you know, the sort of the Howard Zinn ending of history in the United States.

Let me, the easiest example I can give is: there is no such thing as a society with an oral history where they were the bad guys.

The more you write stuff down and the more you go over stuff, the more we have things like Abu Ghraib, where we have congressional hearings about it, the more we do that kind of stuff.

We stack all the information, the bad stuff we've done.

We confront it.

Well, the more you confront it, the more reference there is to you know, no one is sinless.

But everybody else in the world, the rest of the countries in the world that we're dealing with largely, are jettisoned.

'That was that a long time ago. That wasn't even us. We're not even the same country. That was the USSR. We're not even that anymore." When they're still doing the same shit today.

It is slavery is legal in Russia today. Slavery is legal in China today. Not sort of kind of. And people can call it 'forced labor' or 'forced conscription.' It's SLAVERY.

And it is part and parcel to how the governments are run.

So, the fact that we had a war over it and stopped it, as imperfect as we are, shows that we're going in the right direction.

And it wasn't going to happen overnight because humans can be awful.

So I'm willing to put in the time as a human being supporting this system as a way where everybody gets their rights and everybody gets a social safety net that we all give a damn about each other, even as we have to strangle and bonsai these, you know, these limbs of authoritarianism that exist in the human psyche and have been around for a long time.

We don't get to skip it.

We don't get to, and we have to treat it seriously.

And when we assume everybody's fine, we're past that point. 'Women's rights are taken care of. Pin in that, move on. Roe v. Wade is taking care of it. We haven't passed the law, but it's in the books, and nobody's going to touch it because why would they?'

Well, there's a new batch of religious fanatics born every year. So of course.

Hal ends his rant by showing off a Captain America figurine he keeps on his desk.