It may take a while - a day or two, anyway - for the Limbaugh dittohead/Oxycontin crowd to get a satisfying narrative to explain why Spanish voters rejected the supposedly "tough guy" conservatives just days after a major terrorist attack, why that proves John Kerry is a flipflopper and why Bill and Hillary Clinton are to blame for it all. But I'm sure they'll get there.
Here in the real world, people who try to figure out what's actually going on in the world are taking a look at the outcome. Laura Rozen is challenging the version suggested by Bob Dreyfuss in this post on his thought-provoking blog at TomPaine.com. Dreyfuss thinks the message of the Spanish election was, "Get us out of Iraq and they [al-Qaeda] won't attack us anymore." In the context of his other recent posts, it's clear that's a message he finds congenial.
I think Rozen is closer to the mark:
... I think Bob misses the possibility that what Spaniards were voting against Sunday is not just Aznar having taken Spain into the Iraq war, although that is surely true, but Aznar's government's reluctance to admit the likelihood that Islamist terrorists had been responsible for last week's attacks. Spaniards were voting against the lying. What people were screaming at Aznar when he and his wife went to the polls and at their demonstrations was "manipulators," and "liars" and "peace." But the "manipulators and liars" part is just as important as the peace part, surely.
Most of all, I am perplexed why Bob, who has written two blog entries the past few weeks saying Democrats should downplay the threat posed by Al Qaeda and terrorism, seems incapable of admitting how very wrong he is about the threat posed by Al Qaeda, and the political salience of the terrorism issue in elections. What was the first thing Spain's new incumbent Socialist prime minister told voters today? That fighting terrorism will be his government's number one priority. Bob has been advising Democrats that they should make fighting terrorism a lower priority. Does that really seem so wise in retrospect?
No comments:
Post a Comment