2004
Can you take the country out of the man?
I asked two people I respect that question in the past few days.
It depends on the man, the time, the circumstances and his ultimate allegiance.
I don’t think it is possible, we are part of the soil and climate we are born on or into.
With the US heading into an election that hasn’t been this polarized since 1968, this is a cautionary tale. An Edmonton guy got wholloped with hate mail from the US for putting up a website on Wesley Clark. The fallout spread faster than a volcanic explosion.
This is not funny.
The web is a powerful tool, and the misunderstandings that happen occur so quickly, people get flattened. For what?

Less than 12 hours later, the Canadian made headlines in the conservative New York Sun, which proclaimed: “Anti-Bush Foreigners Eye Web for Donations to Democrats.”

By the end of the day on Friday, the Edmonton website had become part of the election: George W. Bush’s campaign team sent millions of Republicans a fundraising letter that accuses Mr. Clark of “raising foreign cash to attack our president.”

The whole thing was so unnerving for the Canadian student who runs the Wesley Clark site that he will identify himself only by his first name, Rob.

“I knew something big was up when I checked my e-mail one day and found over 200 of them, all of them hateful and quite ignorant,” he said yesterday.

Politics are a form of religion to many people, a blinding passion.
As a Canadian, I’ve made a conscious decision to tread lightly this coming year with pundit friends. The hyper-sensitivity coming out of the US in regards to this election has a lot of underlying currents I can’t begin to assess.