Unless you live in Mexico, you probably have never seen the following ad:

Really, Absolut? I need some details about this, stat. FOX News go:

The Absolut vodka company apologized Saturday for an ad campaign depicting the southwestern U.S. as part of Mexico amid angry calls for a boycott by U.S. consumers.

The campaign, which promotes ideal scenarios under the slogan “In an Absolut World,” showed a 1830s-era map when Mexico included California, Texas and other southwestern states. Mexico still resents losing that territory in the 1848 Mexican-American War and the fight for Texas independence.

But the ads, which ran only in Mexico and have since ended, came as the United States builds up its border security amid an emotional debate over illegal immigration from their southern neighbor.

Absolut said the ad was designed for a Mexican audience and intended to recall “a time which the population of Mexico might feel was more ideal.”

When Mexico owned the land it was nothing more than rocks and dirt. After we — Americans — took over the land, we heavily invested our labor into the area and built cities, mined minerals, extracted oil, etc. Now after all of our hard work the Mexicans want it back? Yeah, sure.

Of course, the counter-argument is that the Mexicans would have done the same with the land if they had the time; but we’ll never know, because the land has already been changed, so it’s not even worth talking about.

But back to the ad campaign — how ridiculous is it? Did Absolut really not expect Americans to get angry about this? Or if they did, did they really not expect that Americans would discover their Mexico-only ads? (Umm… have they heard of this new thing called the “internet”?)

Perhaps, though, if it weren’t for the power of the blogosphere, we would not have discovered the ad. Here’s more from the FOX News article:

More than a dozen calls to boycott Absolut were posted on michellemalkin.com, a Web site operated by conservative columnist Michelle Malkin. The ads sparked heated comment on a half-dozen other Internet sites and blogs.

So it looks like all credit is due to Michelle. Good for her; I like her (and she likes me). Here’s a new take on the ad, as contributed by a reader of Michelle’s:

Haha!

I think the real question, though, is: Why risk running an ad in Mexico that might anger Americans? I’m not an expert on the topic, but I’ll bet Absolut has about a 1% share of the Mexican liquor market — with tequila accounting for the other 99%.

In conclusion, am I going to stop drinking Absolut? No — because I never started. Stoli and Grey Goose are much better.