Don’t Tread On Me

Captain Ed reports on how The Guardian‘s project to influence Ohio voters is failing miserably and even pushing voters towards Bush:

Terry Brown had received a letter from a Scottish Guardian reader. The navy veteran and retired lorry builder was “offended” as he read the polite note, from Nicola Smith of West Lothian, with its denunciation of the Iraq war as a “farce”, and closing plea to remove from power “the parties responsible for this war”.

Mr Brown looked out at his front garden, decorated with a US flag on a tall pole, a giant carving of an American eagle and a wooden cross marked: “September 11, 2001”.

“I feel very strongly that this was an invasion of my privacy,” he said. “The right of my wife and myself to decide whom to vote for should not be affected by any other country. That was a freedom we fought for many years ago. It was 1776.”

Ms Smith’s letter was addressed to Mr Brown’s son, Sean. Mr Brown opens the mail because his son is in the army in Missouri, pending a possible posting to Iraq.

“My son will have choice words to say about this that you can’t print,” said Mr Brown.

Please, if only we can get Le Monde and Der Spiegel to do the same thing, it’ll be a Bush landslide in Ohio. Europe, as always, remains clueless as to how America works – one would think that after 225 years they would have realized that this is not the kind of country that thinks much of a bunch of effete foreigners trying to dictate what we should and should not do. Then again, given that Europe still hasn’t learned from its own history, one shouldn’t be all the surprised.