Hey, is this thing working? I can get into Blogger just fine and blog away as I please, but I can't view the website; every time I click on it I get a 404.

Lots of news from our friends at La Vanguardia today. Their international coverage, especially related to Iraq, is so slanted that they're no longer making any attempt to pretend they're unbiased observers. The headline is "Bush's Iraq plan doesn't convince". Says Sebi Val on page three,

George W. Bush couldn't overcome the general skepticism about his plans for Iraq...Only Republicans who had made up their minds beforehand saw, in the President's speech, a solid proposal to get out of the crisis.

And that's just the lead paragraph. (No, Spanish newspapers do not normally use the 30-word, two-sentence, 5-Ws-and-H, inverted-pyramid style they teach you in high school journalism in the States.)

Later on in the story, Sebi says,

Bush still trusts everything to his so-called good will, a Wilsonian idealism accompanied by military force. Crude reality on the ground has barely altered his way of thinking: the US is involved in a noble and necessary task, despite mistakes and setbacks, and there's no turning back.

I don't think I'd call Bush "Wilsonian", myself. I'd go more with Hamiltonian by birth, Jacksonian by temperament. No American political leader, however, is immune from an occasional bout of Wilsonianism (see: our various military interventions in Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, etc.)

Says our man in London, Rafael Ramos, the guy who states flat-out that you have to go out with an American girl ten times before you can get her in bed,

Again Tony Blair has said the same thing as Bush but better. The Prime Minister, shackled to an American policy that he does not control at all...Blair's words reflect the collapse of the moral authority of the occupants after the publication of images of tortures in the prison of Abu Ghraib and the massacre of dozens of Iraqis who were merely celebrating a wedding near the Syrian frontier. Desperate, in their desire for survival, to find a solution that so far they had not bothered to look for...at least Blair, contrary to Bush, pronounced the words "Abu Ghraib" correctly...

Boy, that's snotty, isn't it? Ramos himself can't even speak English, much less Arabic, so it's not exactly his place to criticize Bush's pronunciation. He doesn't mention the fact that the Pentagon states they were going after a terrorist meeting point and arsenal, or that the Coalition still has plenty of moral authority, a lot of which is coming from the publicizing of the Abu Ghraib abuses and the trial of those allegedly responsible.

This ugly scandal may even rebound favorably in the Iraqis' eyes: yes, there are a few bad guys among the Americans, but they get punished by the American authorities if they mistreat Iraqis. This is considerably better than what the Iraqis had under, say, Saddam Hussein, and I bet a lot of people are beginning to recognize it, if they didn't already.

By the way, neither Sebi nor Raffy bothers to mention all the good news out of Iraq, like that it's 95% pacified, that the people already live under elected local governments, that the port of Umm Qasr and Baghdad Airport are both open, that Iraq now has the freest press between Tel Aviv and Tokyo, that people's salaries are up, that the schools are open, that the hospitals and clinics are open, that the irrigation canals are functioning again, that there's a stable currency and effective banking system in place, that entrepreneurship and capitalism are blossoming all opver the country...but then again, nobody else seems to be reporting that, either.

Spain spent a big 370 million euros participating in the Iraq peacekeeping mission. That's what, about one-seventh of what they spent on the Forum. Already today, the Vanguardia has an on-line poll asking the question, "Do you think the Forum will last out its 141 scheduled days?" A sizable majority answered No.

Well, the Socialist government is actually promising to do a couple of libertarian things that I fully support. Among them are simplifying and speeding up divorce, decriminalizing abortion under certain unspecified conditions, and legalizing gay marriage. Get this idiotic bit, though. They want to prohibit criminals between 18 and 21 years old from going to prison without a direct order from a judge. Now, I figure most judges will send serious criminals off to jail if they get half a chance, but there's always some jerk who'll use any loophole to get a victim of society a lesser sentence.

Comment on gypsies: Here's the problem. Most gypsies lead an underclass lifestyle. They don't have a steady residence or a steady job; they actually don't have anything in particular except cars and trailers, and not all of them have that. Their subculture (no, "sub-" doesn't mean "inferior", it means "a smaller part of the whole") is heavily racist against "payos", as they call non-gypsies, is hostile toward work and education, and many gypsies devote their lives to drugs and criminal behavior. Spaniards often accuse gypsies of being dirty. Well, a lot of them are. Every gypsy camp you've ever seen looks like it was built on top of the city garbage dump. You also see a lot of them begging in the streets while carrying infants around. Now, other underclass subcultures, including redneck American whites up in them thar hills, are certainly capable of exactly the same sort of antisocial behavior as the gypsies. But you can take the redneck out of the boy; there's a large group of gypsies living here in Gracia, and they're all perfectly decent, law-abiding folk. As they say here in Spain, they're "integrated"; as we might say, they've joined the majority culture. Most American redneck whites and redneck blacks have made that jump, too. Both here and there, the problems come from those who haven't, who flout the norms of the majority culture way too much. And there's no question that the Barcelona areas where there is a significant non-integrated gypsy presence, Can Tunis, La Mina, Sant Cosme, and El Carmel, are among the less salubrious neighborhoods in the metro area.

But we couldn't leave without some more of the brilliance of Rafael Ramos. There's an exhibit on at the Tate Modern in London of Edward Hopper. Here's Raffy's criticism of the exhibit:

Edward Hopper, painter of the loneliness of the big cities, but also of the empty spaces in the human soul, defies the very Essence of the American dream. The Tate Modern's retrospective exhibition could not be more opportune, in the middle of the moral interrogatives highlighted by the Iraq War.

Only our Raffy could somehow establish a comparison between a 1930s realist painter and the Iraq war.

Hopper is an antidote to political propaganda, to manipulated messages, to the empire of the image and of public relations.

This is what happens if you have your seventh gin and tonic BEFORE you write your story rather than afterward.

How would Hopper paint Bush's USA, the contradictions of a country both military stronger and morally more alone than ever, split down the middle, in which millions of people feel ashamed because of the photos from Abu Ghraib?

Yeah, you guessed it, he found a way to work in Abu Ghraib.