In a Jack Daniels world we would have taken all of Mexico. Then we wouldn't be having all these problems.

The latest advertising campaign in Mexico from Swedish vodka maker Absolut promises to push all the right buttons south of the U.S. border, but it could ruffle a few feathers in El Norte.

The billboard and press campaign, created by advertising agency Teran\TBWA and now running in Mexico, is a colorful map depicting what the Americas might look like in an "Absolut" -- i.e., perfect -- world.

The U.S.-Mexico border lies where it was before the Mexican-American war of 1848 when California, as we now know it, was Mexican territory and known as Alta California.

Following the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw the Mexican territories of Alta California and Santa Fé de Nuevo México ceded to the United States to become modern-day California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Arizona. (Texas actually split from Mexico several years earlier to form a breakaway republic, and was voluntarily annexed by the United States in 1846.)

The campaign taps into the national pride of Mexicans, according to Favio Ucedo, creative director of leading Latino advertising agency Grupo Gallegos in the U.S.

Ucedo, who is from Argentina, said: “Mexicans talk about how the Americans stole their land, so this is their way of reclaiming it. It’s very relevant and the Mexicans will love the idea.”

Some conservatives are angry at this. I just can't help thinking how many fewer Democrats there would be in the House and Senate. Tell you what, if Mexico will take John McCain as well as the land we'll have a deal!

Oh, and a memo to the Mexicans who persist in pissing and moaning about how we stole their land. There isn't one square inch of habitable land on this planet which hasn't traded hands due to conquest at some point in history. Before the white man got here the indigenous peoples of North and South America were doing it to each other with as much gusto as the Europeans ever showed. If you doubt this look at how the Aztecs conducted themselves.

The reason that the Europeans were able to take the land away from the natives was simply that they were orders of magnitude better at warfare than the natives were.

And the reason that the American Southwest is American rather than Mexican is that the British/Northern European Protestant culture that the US got from its British mother country and all of its English, Scots, Irish, Welsh and German immigrants was superior to the Spanish/Latin Roman Catholic culture that Mexico got from its Conquistador founders.

Sorry if that offends anyone, but it is self evidently true. In the cold cruel world (otherwise known as the real world) a nation only truly owns what it can successfully defend.

BTY, I'm not a vodka guy but in the future if I must have vodka I'll drink something other than Absolut.