MURDOCH SCRIBE FIGHTS BACK Bush-bashing leads inevitably to Dubya trouble

ONE week ago I wrote a piece that said that much of the world was getting to terms with the fact that President George W. Bush is a fraudulently elected nitwit.

You always expect some kind of reaction from statements like that. On Monday morning, I opened my e-mail, something I always consider a minor triumph. There are usually a handful of them, politely derisory ones from editors, merchants offering me wine deals, troubled people from the travel pages wondering if I ever would get to write that piece about Damascus.

This time the inbox showed 674. By the end of the week there were more than 1000.

A handful were from Australia and the world. All the rest were from the US and for days they handed it to me as if I were the greatest threat to democracy since Joe Stalin.

The hatred and invective was quite staggering.

Then I found out what had happened. I had been picked up by the Drudge Report, the website started by a right-wing zealot called Matt Drudge.

The report ran the column and then Drudge read selected bits of it on his US national radio program, urging listeners not to let me get away with it.

Well, whee-hoo, as they say down on the ranch.

Drudge obviously aims at a lowest common denominator, since most of my electronic correspondents failed to catch on that I was an Australian. They saw the London dateline, and said: "OK, let's trash this limey."

Mainly I got it for being a limp-wristed nancy-boy (Bruce is thought to be a poofie name in the rednecked areas of America) whose nation (Britain) was twice saved by ever-brave American military might and GI know-how.

You simply don't have time to read 1000 e-mails and they clog up the memory. I took them randomly while wiping them out, reading about one in 20, and then replying if the sender was making some kind of a point or other, saying I was Australian, not British, and used to work in the US and some of my best friends were Republicans. Then I detected the pattern. It was clear that a network existed to organise the outraged responses.

They ran on two levels: "Come to Texas . . . and we'll show ya." And, "We saved your asses and if you keep this stuff up we won't do it again."

Some were so offensive I replied in kind. Some I tried to tell that the US came very late into World War II and Britain already had fought its two major battles without them.

Then, as the week went on, there came a slow and then increasing inbox of what might be described as the still, small voice of reason.

"Thanks. Nobody's saying this stuff often enough here," was the general theme. September 11 had created a president wearing false clothes, said one. But nobody would say so. Or if they did, not loud enough.

About 150 Americans e-mailed me -- from Seattle and Denver and Tacoma and New York and Smallsville, Ohio -- asking me not to pay attention to Matt Drudge, or the organised Right, and to keep at it.

I will.

Really, what this screed comes down to, is as follows:

"As a Leftist, I have a right to hate Bush and use ad hominem to attack him. I called him a nitwit, and then.... A right-winger attacked me for it. Note that Matt Drudge is a right-winger, therefore, he's not legitimate. I, as a leftist, do not have to take this smear. The mindless boobs of the right, American rednecks all, then proceded to attack me by making outrageous statements I easily refuted due to my rapier wit. They have no right to disagree, as I, as a leftist, am always right. Later, some left-leaning Americans who obviously are not American rednecks came to my aid, which proves I'm right."

The issue with Election 2000 was not the electoral college. The issue was that Republican appointed Justices on the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes to find out who won. That was a subversion of Democracy.

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