Brilliant

The Guardian prints responses to 'Operation Clark County', the plan (pinched from Tim Blair) for concerned readers to explain to benighted American voters who they should elect in 2004.

My dear, beloved Brits,
I understand the Guardian is sponsoring a service where British citizens write to Americans to advise them on how to vote. Thank heavens! I was adrift in a sea of confusion and you are my beacon of hope!

Feel free to respond to this email with your advice. Please keep in mind that I am something of an anglophile, so this is not confrontational. Please remember, too, that I am merely an American. That means I am not very bright. It means I have no culture or sense of history. It also means that I am barely literate, so please don't use big, fancy words.

Set me straight, folks!
Dayton, Ohio


Consider this: stay out of American electoral politics. Unless you would like a company of US Navy Seals - Republican to a man - to descend upon the offices of the Guardian, bag the lot of you, and transport you to Guantanamo Bay, where you can share quarters with some lonely Taliban shepherd boys.
United States

UPDATE - the open letters by John Le Carre, Antonia Fraser and Richard Dawkins are interesting.

Le Carre seems to have metamorphosed into his character Bill Haydon, the MI6 mole who in the struggle between East and West chose the East. And it's always entertaining to hear a public-school-educated millionaire talking about how the rich have grown richer. Does he resent the loss of Empire and feel that 'if we can't have one, they're not gong to' ?

Antonia's letter is sweet, funny (not deliberately) and useless.


O duty

Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie ... ?

Why art thou so different from Venus?

And why do thou and I have so few interests in common between us?

And Dawkins - For an intelligent man he's incapable of putting himself in another's shoes.

Now that all other justifications for the war are known to be lies, the warmongers are thrown back on one, endlessly repeated: the world is a better place without Saddam. No doubt it is. But that's the Tony Martin school of foreign policy [Martin was a householder who shot dead a burglar who had broken into his house in 1999]. It's not how civilised countries, who follow the rule of law, behave.

The vast majority of US voters would support Martin, just as UK voters would. If he thinks that's a vote-winning analogy he needs to get out more. He does make one concession to reality though - he manages to repress his antipathy to Christians. It must have been hard to delete the lines about Bible-bashing fundamentalist bigots - but he managed it.

UPDATE - I managed to beat Mark Steyn to the same conclusion, though he does write rather better. He also covers the Boris/Bigley brouhaha.