The Other Charlotte and I continue to be fascinated by the efforts of Euro-intellectuals to sway the U.S. presidential elections in favor of M. Kerree (mais oui!). Last week TOC wrote about the European “observers” the Dems plan to send to the battleground states to monitor our ballot boxes and ensure that no one votes Republican (see Is Your Blood Boiling Yet?, Oct. 15).
Now comes the latest (as reported by National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg): The Guardian, the ultra-liberal U.K. newspaper, launched a letter-writing campaign to undecided voters in Clarke County, Ohio in order to drum up some Kerry votes there. Some 11,000 letters apparently went out, according to the Guardian–but the response from America’s heartland, as Jonah notes, wasn’t exactly what the newspaper’s letter-writers had anticipated.
In a column titled “Dear Limey A–hole” (after the salutation of one of the letters from America), the Guardian gamely prints a sampling of the U.S. responses. They’re mostly along the lines of this one:
“Have you not noticed that Americans don’t give two sh–s what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies … I don’t give a rat’s a– if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don’t. If you want to have a meaningful election in your cr—y little island full of sh—y food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipsh–. Oh, yeah – and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals.”
Nonetheless, a few Americans did express gratitude to their Euro-betters for taking an interest in them. Here’s a letter from–where else?–California:
“Right on! Just wanted to say thanks from California for your effort and concern. This IS a very important election … There are so many people here in the States that care about the impact America has on the rest of the world. I am personally saddened for the loss of all innocent lives. The best statement Americans can make to the rest of the world is to not elect Bush for president. Thank you so much for getting involved in our world.”
Elsewhere on the Euro-American relations front, my old friend John J. Miller of National Review has teamed up with Mark Molesky, a Harvard historian currently teaching at Seton Hall University, to write the Amazon No. 10 best-seller Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship With France.
Naturally les francais n’aiment pas Messrs Miller et Molesky. On a website titled miquelon.org (which John says is named after an incident in which Charles de Gaulle threatened to order his troops to shoot American forces), the wonderfully named Marc Saint Aubin du Cormier calls the book a “one-sided patchwork of historical events taken out of context for one purpose only: fanning the flames of Anti-French prejudice in Conservative circles.”
Regarding the two authors, M. Cormier writes:
“Miller is well known for his talent as a polemicist, but he probably wasn’t sufficiently versed in obtuse history to write this book alone. He therefore teamed up with a Harvard lecturer, Mark Molesky…, thus gaining, in the eyes of some, a certain intellectual respectability.”
Obtuse history? Well, we all know that seulement les francais–such as the recently departed Jacques Derrida, father of deconstructionism and impenetrable prose–have mastered the art of obtuse writing. We didn’t expect a Frenchman to be so blunt about it, however.