The Guardian expresses the proper amount of respect for the big dogs of the internet: Will UK politics ever wake up to the web?

Film-maker Michael Moore made his anti-Bush hate-umentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, available for download the day before the election to try to convince floating voters to come out against Bush, while the Democratic pressure group, Moveon.org, invited its users to create 60-second videos giving reasons why Bush shouldn’t win a second term.

And yet win he did. Why? Because, while the Democrat supporters had right on their side, the Republican supporters were far, far better at fighting dirty. Conservative mega-sites such as Freerepublic.com galvanised their hundreds of thousands of visitors into an army of amateur attack dogs - ready to yap and snap the moment a foolish journalist wrote anything bad about Bush. Woe betide any TV reporter who didn’t check his facts properly before claiming that George W didn’t finish his national guard service. And pity any liberal British newspaper that launched an online campaign to convince the voters of a small county in Ohio of the merits of a Kerry administration. The mass yapping and snapping worked like a charm - making even the most fearless journalists think twice before they questioned Bush’s suitability for a second term.

Woof.