“This is rich” part …

“This is rich” part deux.

The Guardian yesterday ran up the white flag and called a halt to “Operation Clark County”, the newspaper’s ambitious scheme to recruit thousands of readers to persuade American voters in a swing state to kick out President George W Bush in next month’s election.

The cancellation of the project came 24 hours after the first of some 14,000 letters from Guardian readers began arriving in Clark County. The missives led to widespread complaints about foreign interference in a US election.

It also prompted a surge of indignant local voters calling the county’s Republican party offering to volunteer for Mr Bush.

Ah, the poor British libs. They just know so much better than the hicks of Clark County. Pity the Ohioans are such independent thinkers.

The paper said it had closed the website where readers collected an address to write to and had abandoned plans to take four “winners” to visit voters in Clark County. Instead, the group would be taken to the “more tranquil” area of Washington.

(Wouldn’t want to scare the “winners” (why the quotes?) with living, breathing conservatives.)

Albert Scardino, the paper’s executive editor for news, simultaneously denied and conceded that an early halt had been called to the project. “It is roaringly, successfully completed. It has been an overwhelming triumph,” he said.

He then acknowledged that no more addresses were being distributed, blaming attacks on The Guardian website by Right-wing hackers.

Ah yes, blame those who Al Gore called “digital brown-shirts”. So much easier that admitting you were both wrong and foolish.

The scheme seemed to backfired from the start as the reactions of the first recipients varied from indifference to anger and even alarm.

The surrender was announced in a lengthy “mea culpa” by Ian Katz, the G2 editor at The Guardian, who dreamed up the scheme.

He began with a lengthy denunciation of the American Right for over-reacting to his scheme, and painted his project as the victim of its own success, after many thousands of readers wrote to Clark County voters.

Further down the piece it became clear that Mr Katz was calling it quits. “Somewhere along the line, though, the good-humoured spirit of the enterprise got lost in translation,” he wrote.

Yes, Guardian readers do get a good chuckle out of demeaning conservatives and sticking their collective noses where they don’t belong. Truly a high humor more elevated that the “American Right” knows what to do with.

This is (or rather “was”) pathetic. It really serves these people right and I’m glad the lesson was learned quickly. (Well, I hope a lesson learned was the reason rather than just the bad PR. I’ll hold not my breath on that one.)

And this doesn’t speak well for the Guardian, either.

Yet there is one last Guardian letter Mrs Rosicka would still like to see – one containing a cheque for $25 (about £13), which the newspaper still owes her for its purchase of the county’s electoral roll.

“I was nice and made the file available, because their reporter said he was right on deadline,” she said. “They said the cheque is in the mail. As of this morning, it still hasn’t arrived, and it’s been more than a week.”

Did I mention “pathetic”?

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