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SHORELINE - Ken Potts calls himself a patriot. That's what his front yard tells you too.

Metal American flags are staked in the ivy beside the driveway. A red, white, and blue pinwheel spins near the front sidewalk. One flagpole flies the American flag. A second flagpole carries the banner of the Army's 101st Airborne.

Even his mailbox on North 185th Street in Shoreline sports the image of the Airborne's screaming eagle.

But he says that in the last year the mailbox has been blown up twice with fireworks. The house has been egged. Paint has been thrown on the house too. The flags have been torn down and ripped up more than once.

And the 101st Airborne flag has had the word "murder" and a swastika written on it with a permanent marker.

"It's really difficult for me to see something like this and not feel sad," Potts told us of the vandalism that started around election day last year. Especially, he says, since the 101st led the charge in World War II to defeat Nazi Germany.

But the biggest insult to this house with a permanent Bush-Cheney placard attached to the second story and a collection of mostly Republican election signs in the side yard, is the spray paint someone left on his vinyl siding this past weekend.

In two-foot tall letters on the side of his house facing Meridian someone painted "Bush Nazis."

"Where do they get off calling the President of the United States a Nazi," he said.

This former soldier with three tours of Vietnam says he feels like his own freedom of speech is under attack.

"When you have someone or a group of people who want to take that away from you, who probably didn't do a thing to defend them in the first place, it's really sad." But to fight back he always puts new flags back on those front yard flagpoles.

He installed a security camera that keeps watch over his front yard. And for his own political jab he put an electronic readerboard in a front window. 24 hours a day it says: "Liberalism - is a mental disorder."

"I want to make sure that they know I can't be pushed around."

And he says he'll leave the spray painted "Bush Nazis" on the side of his house for a while to show people on this busy corner what tolerance "doesn't" look like.

He also says he's turned the other cheek and doesn't want prosecution or revenge. He says he'd like to meet the vandal or vandals and have a friendly American debate instead.

"If we want to have disagreements in this country there's ways to have disagreements and there's ways to have a dialogue. If you've got a problem with me come up and talk about it. We may not even agree but we can agree to disagree."