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Monday, March 15, 2004
YEAR OF THE MONKEY, PART XX
[updated 3/16/04]
The Monkey doesn't like liars in power.
In Spain, young and alienated voters pushed voter turnout to 77%, and they voted overwhelmingly for the Socialists.
More on Spain's stunning turn (i.e, what the NY Times, Fox, or your shitty local corporate newspaper won't tell you):
**"Our Dead, Your War"
**New Spanish Leader Lashes Out At Bush and Blair Over Iraq War
**"The Spark That Set The Prairie Afire" (In Spanish...you can translate here.)
Meanwhile, the US counterspin is in full swing--note this piece from, yup, USA Today, in which "homeland security consultant" (what a ridiculous title) Randall Larsen comments, ""This event rivals 9/11 in terms of a victory for al-Qaeda."
(For balance, the writer also offers a quote from the supposedly liberal Brookings Institution.)
But the stupidity of this argument is patently clear.
90% of Spaniards have barely tolerated Aznar and the Popular Party's pro-Bush, pro-war stance from the beginning. But they may not have turned against the Popular Party so dramatically if the PP did not leap to blame the ETA. In other words, by playing politics with the blame game, they made the war on terrorism the last minute campaign issue, as opposed to the terrorism itself. Spanish voters punished the PP government for lying to them twice.
It was a campaign blunder of colossal proportions, with consequences that utterly shake the Bush and Blair administrations from the bottom up.
Instead of drawing Europeans closer into the war on terrorism as they had hoped, the Popular Party's blunder draws more attention to the uncertainty and instability that terrorism creates, rather than the stability that the war on it supposedly fosters. It has the ironic effect of empowering truth-telling doves, not agenda-hammering hawks.
Surely the Bushites and Blairites are deeply upset about all this--and we can expect that their counterspin, as in the above article, will be in full-court press mode for this whole week. By the end of the week, expect some counter-counterspin from the rest of Europe.
ADDENDUM: As for the timing of the bombing, there is one line of inquiry that believes it may have had nothing to do with the elections at all. Message boards have been buzzing with the numerological significance of 3/11/04, coming 911 days after 9/11/01.
posted by Jeff @ 7:12 AM
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