LONDON NOTEBOOK
LONDON – Anyone who wonders why President Bush is such a controversial figure in Britain should just read the vitriol that’s typical for some of the British press.
Democratic 2004 presidential candidates like John Kerry and Howard Dean could never match the anti-Bush attacks of newspapers like the Daily Mirror, which yesterday ran a fake “interview” painting Bush as an ignorant, foul-mouthed jerk.
As the Mirror imagines it, Bush’s answer to the mystery of what happened to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction would be crude and dumb: “Like I give a s- – -.”
The fake “interview” concludes with this assessment: “Bush is a force for evil, not good.” A lot of BBC broadcasts, stressing everything negative in Iraq, create the same impression though not in such blunt words.
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It’s not just the press. London Mayor Ken Livingstone is holding a “peace party” at city hall to welcome anti-Bush protesters and insists Bush is “the greatest threat to life on this planet.”
Still, a new poll in the Guardian – a left-leaning British paper – yesterday suggested there’s nowhere near as much anti-Americanism here as the Mirror and BBC suggest.
The poll found Britain is still overwhelmingly pro-American with 62 percent of Britons saying America is “generally speaking a force for good, not evil in the world.” Only 15 percent see America as an “evil empire.”
It also found that British sentiment is now shifting back in favor of the Iraq war as suicide bombers step up their attacks there – 47 percent now believe the war was justified while 41 percent oppose it.
And two-thirds of Britons say U.S. and British troops should stay in Iraq until it’s “more stable.”