Taking Pleasure in Other's Suffering

I caught a bit of Rush Limbaugh's Morning Update this morning. This is a three minute spiel he does on whatever strikes his fancy. Today it was on how happy he is to see human suffering in France (and, tangentially, how the Kyoto Pact is a bad thing). Basically his thesis was that the French people deserve to suffer. Frankly he sounded rather pleased with himself. And check out these comments from yesterday's show.

The riots have spread to within the city limits of Paris, and the fires are raging, and the French, the good old French, the cops are still ordered not to shoot back. It's just a question of how long it's going to be before the French surrender.

The story in the Right Blog-O-Sphere is more or less the same. They are pleased as punch to see France suffering. The Mahablog has a piece on their glee.

What's interesting to me is how, well, un-Christian this sort of behavior strikes me. This is a crowd that is pretty regularly reminding us all of how much better they are than us, mainly because they call themselves Christians. Is this the way Christians act? Happy at the suffering of others? If so, than boy have I been barking up the wrong tree.