Here's some Yankee-bashing mental diarrhea by one Suso de Toro in last Sunday's Vanguardia magazine. Check it out.

Hey, have you seen that photo of the Iraqi prisoners and the American soldiers? Which one, which one? I'm referring to some in which the prisoners are tied up with hoods over their heads, stuck in the back of a truck, and a smiling American soldier walks among them with a machine gun pointing at them and a can of cola in his hand. No, I didn't check. I don't know if it was diet or normal. What's for sure is that it wasn't that Mecca-Cola made by Arabs, but for sure it was a nice cool can with American flavor.

No, man, it's nothing special that I'm saying. It wasn't anything special, but just suddenly I was stunned seeing it, all those people prisoners with hoods over their heads, not knowing what's going to happen to them, scared, thirsty, and the other guy, the American, walking around smiling and drinking a nice cold can. You can say whatever you want, but this must really suck, I say. That some foreign son-of-a-bitch comes to your country and does that to you, some guy who talks English and doesn't understand your country's language. It's not the same being arrested by the police as it is by an enemy soldier. And in your own house...I don't know, it would piss me off. If I'm Iraqi I would be pissed, it would fill me with hate. Well, you, whatever. But me, yes.

(Note: The Americans did not arrest these people just for fun. They are suspected of doing something very bad or they would be left alone. Very bad stuff might include, say, being one of Saddam's secret policemen who stuffed prisoners into shredding machines. Second, anyone with any common sense would much prefer to be made prisoner by the Americans than by Saddam's police. Mr. de Toro seems to have absolutely no common sense. Third, what's going to happen to those guys, as everyone knows, is that they will be decently treated, housed, fed, and allowed to practice their religion. They will be interrogated but not tortured. They will be held prisoner until they are tried or released. If they're real bad dudes they might get sent to Gitmo. And everyone, Iraqis and Americans, will be better off.)

It's brutal, just brutal. Man, what do you want, the scene is intolerable. Yeah, I know that everybody does that, that all the wars are the same. And the thngs that they'll do to them and we won't find out. But those hoods...that's fucking scary. See, these good guys in the movie are worse than the bad guys. I know, I know. The soldier in the photo is doing what he does every day, it was the photographer who portrayed him like that and now we see it and we say, wow, that's wild. There's no other word for it, bastards (cabrones).

That's enough of that. There are three more paragraphs, but I have better things to do than translate them, like, say, pick my nose and scratch my ass.

What brought on this rage on the part of Mr. de Toro? I'll tell you. He knows that Catalonia and Spain and Europe are weak and they cannot impose their will on anybody. The United States can. The United States can say to any tinhorn dictator like Saddam, "Behave yourself or we're going to eliminate your ass. With extreme prejudice, if that's what's necessary."

How can any sensible person side with the dictator Saddam Hussein and his henchmen against the democratic and liberal United States? Answer: Those people have no sense. Mr. de Toro is so full of rage at his chosen power units' (Catalonia, Europe, Socialism, whatever) lack of any real power that he'll side with anybody against those (=the US) who have that real power and exercise it--no matter how evil those who oppose his hated United States are. There is absolutely no logic or reason in his diatribe. He himself admits it's pure emotion.

Newspapers are supposed to tell us the news and give us their opinion on said news. I expect those opinions to be based on facts and logic and reason, not on nationalistic fury. My expectations are obviously far too high in the case of La Vanguardia.