An open letter to our cousins in Great Britain

What does it mean that Tony Blair is considering lifting the ban on wiretapping members of Parliament? It means America isn't the only country willing to throw hundreds of years of history and ideals out the window.

It's bad enough that George Bush has been willing, and able, to challenge and dismantle some of the most basic tenets of our American democracy - the system of checks and balances, an independent judiciary, and the right of a people to be free from government intrusion and persecution - but to see England fall prey to the same simple-minded authoritarian leanings is simply very sad.

Perhaps it's because, as Americans, many of us have always had a somewhat glorified view of Europe.

Europe is the old country. It's where our parents, grandparents, and many of our ancestors and much of our history comes from. While we can understand, begrudgingly and in horror, how Americans could foolishly accept George Bush's growing affinity for the police state, somehow we hoped, we believed, that Europeans were better than that. That the weight of history made Europeans more level-headed than their ADD-riddled American cousins, and that the lessons of recent history (to the extent that World War II is recent), the lessons of what horrors befall nations that refuse to challenge nascent dictators and their police-state paranoia, were more firmly planted in the European mind than the American.

Obviously, we were wrong.