Inside Europe: Iberian Notes

Posted 19:07 by John

Here's one I've been saving up to do one of these days. It's Maruja Torres from El País's Sunday magazine.

The Only Certainty

I don't want to forget that today my eyes and my conscience are overflowing with horror and I know that I am not alone in my impotence. And although the day that you are reading me, things have changed, or even improved, I want to remember, and remind you with me, that there were days of ignominy of which we were faraway, distressed witnesses. The torn-apart victims; the children murdered one atop another, as if they were sleeping in the middle of a nightmare of the evil of others; the blood soaking badly-bandaged stumps, the mutilated bodies, the entrails. The blank stares, above all the blank stares. In the atrocious hours, long hours of the battle of Baghdad, they are coming to my house, to my country, governed by one of the most obsequious representatives of this century's moral misery, those blank stares of pain and surprise, of infinite sadness, of the loss of all hope, are coming. Of fear, of panic. Of anger, of rage. Of offended dignity, of defended dignity. Barely armed men who resist in the trenches, others who have survived in pieces and in hospital beds who barely have the strength to send to the world, through the camera, the only thing they can bomb us with: their recently discovered hate toward an enemy they do not even know. And those operations performed without anesthesia, and that rice that keeps arriving to the port when what is needed is water, and that marine who gives a demonstration of rap to the defeated children. A dark boy, surely enlisted for a hot meal, surely from a vile building in a miserable slum: you, who are like the conquered ones but without knowing it.

And the cries of the mutilated babies when a camera focuses on them and takes shots of them, as if they already knew that they are not only cannon fodder but TV news fodder.

And bombs and more bombs, and fire and more fire, and destruction and more destruction. And invading soldiers swaggering around, blinded with disdain and indifference as much as by their military superiority, leveling what were streets, houses, small shops, and whispering avenues.

Against forgetting everything we have seen, from far away with our hearts in flames. I don't know what is happening in this world today, that other cadavers have been swallowed up by the crater opened up in Mesopotamia, besides the innocence, the tranquil existence of the poor and the oppressed, legality, decency, and justice. I also don't know how many of my journalistic comrades will have died in the war that should never happened, and we know who is responsible.

If today, while you are reading, is a day in which death does not fill the headlines and we are already being invaded by the fever of what they call reconstruction, and we're busy with the ups and downs of the market, don't let them fool you. Remember what is happening while I am writing and which I am pallidly trying to write on this page, on this inscription against forgetting. And think that behind all the big words there is only one, as vile as the men which it represents: greed. We have seen what we didn't want to see, but we have seen it. And this is our only certainty.

I have several certainties. One is that Maruja is extremely self-absorbed, since she goes on and on about how she herself feels about the situation. My guess is that she is bipolar and has a narcissistic personality disorder. Trust me on this one. I'm good at this stuff. I'm the only one of you who's ever been committed to a mental hospital.

The second is that this is an atrocity piece, of which there have been so many about this and every other war. For atrocities, those perpetrated by Saddam and his international terrorist co-conspirators--and that perpetrated on September 11, 2001 (remember that one? There weren't too many bodies left after that one to pierce anybody with their blank stares)--are infinitely worse than the admittedly tragic deaths of some 800-1200 Iraqi civilians in the War on Saddam. Some of these deaths were admittedly perpetrated by the Americans and the British, zero of them intentionally, unlike Saddam placing military targets within populated areas, the Fedayeen forcing the ordinary civilians to be suicide bombers, and the explosions in the Baghdad markets that we didn't cause. And saying "Who cares whether you meant to kill them, they're dead anyway, just like Saddam's victims" is flat-out relativism, the idea that the morality of an act is not in its intention but in its effect.

A third certainty is that this here tantrum Maruja spit out onto paper is caused by a deep, deep anti-Americanism, since she never criticizes anybody else anyway and since she goes on about dignity and rage and the invaders and the like. She's what Orwell would call a transferred nationalist, someone who stakes her psychological identity on a profound feeling akin to nationalism but not directed towards a nation. Maruja is a Stalinist, a hardcore Red. She bet on the wrong side, and she bet on the wrong side big-time. She lost everything when the Berlin Wall came down, and that's why her dignity is injured and she is full of rage; every time the Americans, the sworn enemy of her chosen faith, do anything that demonstrates their power, influence, and prestige, which her own Stalinism has completely lost. That's how she feels, psychologically destroyed by the failure of the godhood of Communism and especially by its rejection by most other people, and she's projecting the crash of her world all around her upon the suffering Iraqi civilians, imagining that they must feel the same way she does.

A fourth is that she's an ignorant racist. She obviously knows nothing about American black people and especially nothing about American Marines who are black.

Posted 17:44 by John

Here's one for you foodies that I found through Slate, a review of a visit to El Bulli, the Michelin Guide Three-Star Super Mega Famous Restaurant up in the Empordà. It's food-porn, basically. The diners involved in this meal thought it was excellent, especially given the prices, which, according to them are very reasonable--135 euros for the thirty-course meal, wine not included. You would apparently pay double or triple in Paris. Don't bother if you don't book, like, a year in advance or whatever.

Since I am an amateur eater, I would not waste my money on such a meal since I'd never appreciate it. As I've said before, though, there are many very good restaurants in Barcelona where you can eat very well for less than thirty bucks, wine included. For fresh seafood at unbeatable prices, the places to go are the Puerto Pesquero in Santander and the Viejas Calles in Bilbao.

Coincidentally, here's a story from the Telegraph that says El Bulli is the second best restaurant in the world, down one spot from last year.

Posted 14:46 by John

Here's an interesting article from the Weekly Standard about geopolitics and OPEC and oil production and the like. It is illuminating for those who, like me, don't really know anything about the oil industry.

Posted 05:55 by John

Methinks InstaPundit has fallen for an urban legend--note the lack of specifics and the two different versions. So--since the story is BS, let's not worry too much.

DON'T SNIFF THE MYSTERIOUS WHITE POWDER: Well, this story isn't really that funny:

An Egyptian merchant-marine sailor met "someone" in Cairo and was given a suitcase. He traveled to Brazil to join his ship, which was loading bauxite intended for Canada. He was supposed to deliver the suitcase to "someone" in Canada, but being curious about the suitcase he opened it while in Brazil, and shortly thereafter died from anthrax. Like as not, having found the legendary white powder he suspected it was drugs, and took a sniff to see.

I don't know if he really sniffed it -- another account I saw suggested that he died of intestinal anthrax -- but this is a rather serious worry.

UPDATE: Here's more, suggesting that worry is appropriate.

posted at 10:35 PM by Glenn Reynolds

Posted 14:30 by John

Well, somebody out there thinks we're right: Andrew Sullivan is on board with us (that's fun to say; we finally beat him to this one) as saying that the Times and Telegraph reports on Saddam's ties with Al Qaeda and France's leaking secret information to Saddam are a big deal and are not getting nearly enough media attention.

We agree with Andrew's Sunday Times (of London) column, now up on his site, about idjit hard-right Reps like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum shooting off their mouths and blowing all the political capital Bush has saved up. Both Newt and Rick missed good chances to shut up, and Sullivan is right to worry about the various strands of the Republican party unraveling (though they're a lot less likely to unravel than the Dems' unstable minorities-labor-feminist-university-Socialist-cadres coalition; let's not panic yet, people). However, we're not with Andrew on Bush's tax plan, which he slams as being "supply-side" economics. This article from the National Review adds a little bit of light to the extremely confusing subject of the federal budget. Check it out.

Posted 12:45 by John

The best baseball blog out there is Rob and Rany on the Royals, written by two thirty-fiveish baseball columnists. One of them is Rob Neyer, whom I actually sort of know; we lived in the same college dorm. He probably wouldn't remember who I am. Anyway, though, Neyer is now a daily columnist with ESPN, and if you like baseball a lot, you ought to read him; he's one of Bill James's disciples. Warning: Neyer is a major idiotarian regarding politics, but he almost always keeps it out of the blog and his columns. We shouldn't judge his baseball writing by his political ideas.

Neyer is into a couple of offbeat stats which he and the other "sabermetric" (i.e. statisticics-interpreting) baseball writers have been talking about for a while. One is the OPS, which is simply the player's on-base percentage (better indicator than the traditional batting average of how often a guy gets on rather than making an out) plus the player's slugging average (indicator weighting how many bases the guy gets per plate appearance). It's a rough stat but really does distinguish between a guy who looks good but really doesn't do much and a guy who is better than he's normally considered to be. A pretty good major leaguer will have an OPS above 800, and a guy whose OPS is above 1000 is a damn good player. Guys like Neifi Perez whose OPS is under 500 should be playing in, like, Omaha.

Another rough stat Neyer uses to measure the overall quality of an entire team is to look at the team's position in its league in two hitting categories, home runs and walks, and two pitching categories, home runs allowed and walks allowed. A team gets one point for its league position in these four categories.This is the Beane Count, named for Oakland executive Billy Beane. The top score is of course 4, meaning you are the best in the league in all four categories. A good playoff team would be in the 20s or low 30s. The Yankees so far this year have a Beane Count of four. That's how good they are. The Royals are still in the twenties.

He also uses this thing Bill James made up called the Pythagorean Standings: looking at what a team's ratio of runs scored to runs allowed is and using that to forecast what a team's record "should be according to the stats". It's pretty accurate, usually never off by more than about 3-4 games either way at the end of the season.

Let's try that with soccer. Specifically, with teams' ratios of goals scored to goals allowed. Here's the ratios for the Spanish first division in the order of their league standings.

Real Madrid 2.12
Real Sociedad 1.45
Deportivo 1.44
Valencia 1.92
Celta 1.50
Málaga 1.11
Sevilla 1.04
Betis 0.95
Atlético Madrid 1.08
Athletic Bilbao 0.92
Mallorca 0.81
Barcelona 1.17
Racing Santander 0.83
Español 0.90
Valladolid 0.85
Villarreal 0.74
Recreativo Huelva 0.66
Osasuna Pamplona 0.74
Alavés Vitoria 0.56
Rayo Vallecano 0.50

That pans out. The five teams at the bottom are all below 0.75. The three teams that descend to Second will come from these five. The ten teams in the middle, between 0.80 and 1.20, are mediocre. Then there are three teams that are good, at around 1.50, then Valencia at 1.92, and then Madrid at 2.12. The two real anomalies are Valencia, who ought by all rights to be in second place rather than fourth, and Barcelona, which should be in sixth place rather than twelfth as the best of the mediocre crew.

So what factors are causing Barcelona's and Valencia's poor actual performance compared to their goal ratios? Well, Valencia is still fighting for a Champions' league spot, so they're not doing that lousy, and they played this year's Champions League all the way to the quarterfinals, which neither Deportivo, Real Sociedad, and Celta had to do, so their guys are a lot fresher since they've seen fewer games. Particularly interestingly, second-place Real Sociedad, who I thought would wilt under pressure, is having a terrific season and are a legitimately fine squad. It may help that their foreign stars, Nihat, Kovacevic, and Karpin, are from such non-charismatic football countries as Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Russia and don't go to big-time Nike exhibition games in, like, Japan the way the Brazilians and Argentines do.

As for Barcelona, they also played in the Champions' League through the quarterfinals, and their foreign "stars" are Brazilian and Argentinian, so being tired might have something to do with it, too, though first-place Madrid has made it all the way to the Champions' semis and their guys ought to be just as tired. But Madrid has a deep bench with Guti and Morientes and McManaman and Solari and Flavio, all of whom can pick up the slack when they need to. Barcelona's bench is crappy.

But most importantly, Barcelona is demoralized. Their players have no confidence and can't usually hold a lead. It's already been made clear that a lot of them are going to be looking for new jobs come June 30, and the coach knows he's gone at the end of the year, and the interim club president has already resigned. Nobody's running the team and everybody knows it.

Good. I hope they descend to Second.

Posted 18:29 by John

I'm pretty sure that the next big wave of stories coming out of Iraq will be full of lots of neato information from Saddam's files. So far we've got George Galloway's corruption, the records of the meetings between Iraqi government officials and Al Qaeda, and France's passing on diplomatically-obtained American information to Saddam.

Here's a piece from the Weekly Standard about the theme; check it out. The question everybody's asking is what's going to come out next.

My guesses: much more evidence of French and Russian collaboration with Saddam, much more evidence of Iraqi ties to international terrorists in general, and much more evidence of corruption in the international press. Not real difficult guesses to make, mind you, but how much you want to bet that half the French press is on the take and a good bit of the Spanish press as well? The only name I'll mention as a for-sure suspect is Scott Ritter, and I think we know very well what Saddam had on him: photos of the guy having sex with children.

Posted 17:53 by John

If you go to National Review Online's site right now, you'll see nothing but this message on a white background:

Hacked by DarkHunter ... Freedom for palestian and Iraq ... gr33tz to #USG and #teso channels

Posted 14:37 by John

Looks to me like the documents showing French intelligence cooperation with Saddam and Saddam's contacts with Al Qaeda are going to be today's big story, so here is a paragraph-by-paragraph quick-hitter from today's interview with Baghdad Bob Fisk--well, now he's Beirut Bob because he states that his home city is Beirut and that's where the interview took place--in the Vanguardia just to show how wrong about everything Tikrit Tommy's best buddy usually is. You name the event, Fisk will figure out how to completely miss it in his forecast while beating the Allies over the head with last week's story. Anyway, the Roman numeral corresponds with the paragraph.

I) The Shiites are going to pull an uprising against the Yanks and the Brits.
II) The looting of the museum and library in Baghdad was the Yanks' fault.
III) There's some nasty conspiracy behind the looting in Baghdad.
IV) The robbery of valuable items from said museum was planned.
V) Some bad people must have given the Iraqis maps of where the valuable stuff was.
VI) The looting was obviously an American plot.
VII) Bob warned an American marine that a ministry was being torched; said marine refused to do anything on the grounds he was guarding a hospital.
VIII) The Americans did nothing to stop the looting.
IX) The Americans shouldn't have attacked Saddam's military establishments near civilian areas.
X) Doing that may have killed 14 civilians.
XI) The Yanks are evil because they used cluster bombs. They are as much war criminals as the Saddamites.
XII) Thousands of Iraqis must have been killed.
XIII) The Yanks are bad because they fired on cars that didn't stop when ordered to.
XIV) The Yanks murdered journalists.
XV) The Yanks attacked Al Jazeera TV in Baghdad on purpose.
XVI) The Yanks lied about why they fired at the Palestine Hotel.
XVII) The Yanks really lied a lot about why they fired at the Palestine Hotel.
XVIII) The Yanks are big liars in general.
XIX) The Yanks should have known there were journalists in the hotel, and they are big liars.
XXX) The Yanks are war criminals and they lie a lot, but some of the ordinary grunts are OK guys.
XXXI) Saddam is alive and is hiding out in either Baghdad or Bielorussia.
XXXII) The Sunnis and Shiites will unite and expel the American troops.
XXXIII) Judith Miller's stories in the NYT are Pentagon / CIA propaganda.
XXXIV) The Yanks won't attack Syria because it has no oil.
XXXV) The Yanks are occupying an Arab capital city.
XXXVI) "We have entered a new imperialist era".
XXXVII) The Yanks invaded Iraq for the oil.
XXXVIII) We, as journalists, must demand that those who rule over the people tell us why they are doing things and stop lying.

See how fast and easy it is to compress Beirut Bob's thought into easily digestible--well, totally indigestable, but you know what I mean--little nuggets. Thank God I took care of that or you'd never have read through the whole thing. It's two whole pages in today's Vangua.

Posted 13:46 by John

BREAKING NEWS

This article from Libertad Digital says, first, that the Sunday Times of London is reporting this morning that documents found among the ruins of Baghdad show that France was informing Iraq about the progress of Franco-American diplomatic discussions. If this is true, French perfidy is much greater than I had thought it was.

Second, the Sunday Telegraph of London is reporting that they have documents demonstrating contacts between Saddam and Al Qaeda dating back to 1998. If this is true, that's the smoking gun. There's the justification for the war: they collaborated with terrorism.

Now you have to wonder what else is going to turn up in those files. I bet plenty more incriminating stuff is yet to come out. This is going to be even more fun than the overthrow of Mr. Squalid Dictator Hussein itself was: the implication of the Axis of Weasels in Saddam's international racketeering ring. Baghdad Bob Fisk, as usual, just got dreadfully wrong-footed.

Here's the story from the Telegraph. Here's the little summary of the story from the Times--you need to live in the UK to get in to the whole thing for free.

Dossier reveals France briefed Iraq on US plans
Matthew Campbell, Baghdad
France gave Saddam Hussein's regime regular reports on its dealings with American officials, documents unearthed in the wreckage of the Iraqi foreign ministry have revealed.

Posted 20:35 by John

I swear this just happened to me. I went down to the Dia discount supermarket (it's a big no-frills chain) to pick up a few things before they close at 8:30 and don't reopen until 9 on Monday. Got some skim milk, muesli, a chocolate bar with almonds, some frozen eggrolls, some of those spinach linguine-like substances, tuna for the cats, cat litter, OJ, and Fanta lemon. Perfectly normal Saturday evening shopping experience, don't you figure? Nope.

A few other people were in line, too, and directly in front of me was a longhair dude and a local progressive-looking university chick who was about 19. I'd seen him hanging around the squat down on the plaza a few times, so I twigged them for squatters. Very ungenerously, the whole time I was waiting in line, they were bickering in wonderful communalist style about who was going to pay for the twelve one-liter bottles of beer they had in their shopping cart.

(By the way, I've heard the two checkout girls, one's Polish and one's from the Philippines, complain that the squatters "borrow" the shopping carts without asking and only infrequently bring them back. When somebody says, "Hey, you can't take those outside the store", they whiningly wheedle, "Come on, be cool." [Venga, tía, enróllate])

So, anyway, the guy, who is Argentinian, says that he's going to pay for one and that some dude named Alejandro gave him five euros to pay for six liters. The hippie-looking girl says you can't buy six liters of beer for five euros and gets out her cellphone and tries to figure it out on the calculator. The guy has to hold back some of his dough, like everything more than the price of a liter, it seems, and repeats that he has Alejandro's five euros several times. Bingo, twigged him, he's a counterculture scam artist.

Then, get this, the girl turns to him and within my hearing, not to mention that of everybody else in line and the checkout girl, and says, "Let the guiri go first while I figure this out." "Guiri" is the fairly mild Spanish ethnic slur, along the lines of "mick" or "kraut" or "wop" in American English, used to refer to people of Northern European ancestry, and the guiri is me. I am a little annoyed, anyway, and plan the devastating comeback line I would use should they actually offer to allow me to jump the queue: "No, no, que las charnegas pasen por delante de los guiris." (No, let the charnegas go before the guiris.) A charnego is "a person of Spanish ancestry" here in Catalonia and is quite an insult--and almost certainly the girl is a charnega, because there are very few Catalans who are "of pure roots".

Unfortunately, they don't let me cut in front of them and I can't use the devastating comeback line. Damn. Just when I had one all ready.

Anyway, they continue to bicker and the hippie girl calls up someone on her cellphone while the longhair dude is trying to scam the checkout girl--he's divided the bottles up into three groups and he's going to pay for his one separately from the ones that Alejandro's fiver is going to take care of, which will be separate from the rest, which the girl is going to pay for. He's trying to confuse her and slip past a couple of the bottles while she's making change from the one he bought and then the ones Alejandro's fiver bought, if you follow me. The checkout girl doesn't let him. She is no dummy. The girl talking on the cellphone is shafted because she winds up having to pay for like eight of their twelve bottles herself.

Anyway, I take care of all my business, the Philippine girl checks me out, I pay with exact change, and get out of there while the squatters still haven't bagged up their stuff and are arguing because the girl had to come up with like twelve euros for whatever the amount of beer she had to pay for was.

Posted 14:52 by John

Here' s a well-researched piece from the National Review from a couple of days ago. It explains why George Bush is going to get reelected in 2004. Bush, obviously, will be the candidate of the Republican Party in November 2004. His running mate will probably be Cheney, who's apparently done a good job as one of the President's top advisors; there's no good reason to change veeps unless 1) Cheney wants to do something else or b) we get all concerned about Cheney's health. In that case, Powell or Rice would be electable, as would Bill Frist or Hank Thompson.

The Democrats have a wide-open field with eight months to go before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries. John Kerry, the favorite, currently senator from Massachusetts, if there can be said to be a favorite--he's sort of good-looking, but not too smart and never did much in the Senate, and he reminds a lot of people much too much of Bill Clinton--has raised about $7 million in the last three months, according to the article by Jim Geraghty. John Edwards, another blow-dried airhead who's a senator from North Carolina, is the other Clinton clone in this election, and he's also raised a $7 million war chest in the last trimester. Dick Gephardt is the solid, dull candidate he's always been; he's the House Minority Leader, a representative from St. Louis, Missouri, and in the unions' pocket. Gep is always the union man. At least he stands for something, though. Howard Dean also stands for something; he's the ex-governor of Vermont and is running way off to the left, and he's got $2.6 million, pretty good for an obscure regional politician from a joke state. He's reminiscent of Martin Sheen on The West Wing--charismatic guy. Watch out for him. Dennis Kucinich, a representative from Cleveland, Ohio, who would be the nerdiest presidential candidate since Michael Dukakis, is also running way out to the left; we don't have figures on how much he's raised, but I bet not much. No figures either on Carol Moseley-Braun, ex-senator from Illinois; she's unelectable not so much because she's a black woman but because she's so notorious for playing the double victim card, for alleged financial corruption, and for her extreme left-wing views. Her goal is likely to be unifying the black Democratic vote, probably 20% of the Dems who vote in the primaries, in order to wield it decisively at the convention.

One of the great things is that the article links to the official websites of all the candidates mentioned here, plus Al Sharpton, whose link isn't working. Kerry's and Edwards's are both completely vacuous of thought, except that Edwards's tries to appeal to the lawyers and jumps all over the Social Security bandwagon; he's going for the trial lawyers' and the old folks' interest groups, both of which are powerful and spend a lot of money. Moseley-Braun's is equally dim-witted. Howard Dean is blatantly establishing himself as a lefty, and Dennis Kucinich is doing the same but in a really dorky sort of way. Gep's includes a lot of typical policy wonk wank about his alleged enviro plan, which he believes in about as much as I believe my cat can fly, and the most recent union to give him their support. God only knows what Al Sharpton's site might contain.

OK. Either Kerry or Edwards will run very well early but they're appealing to the Clintonites among the Dems and I just don't think there are that many Clintonites any more. Whichever makes it through has a very good chance of winning the whole thing, though, more likely Kerry, who's been in the Senate for years, than Edwards, who just got elected for the first time two years ago. One of the two will likely bomb out very early since they're both appealing to the same audience. Gep will be second or third in every non-Southern state and will be one of the guys who drops out midway unless no one has cleaned up the South. If Kerry and Edwards should split their vote and the Midwest becomes decisive, Gep could do well. If not, not. He may be looking for the vice-presidential nomination. Carol Moseley-Braun will get a big piece of the black vote and will stay in the race all the way to June. She'd like a cabinet post, I imagine. Denny the K will get stomped by Dean for the NPR vote; Kucinich will be the first candidate to drop out of the race. He might do something wacky like run with Nader. Dean is likely to do well in New England, and there'll be a boomlet for him early on in the race. If both Kerry and Edwards cancel one another out for the blow-dried airhead vote in the South, Dean may do very well when things get to the industrial states.

As for any other candidates, Hillary Rodham Clinton is apparently not going to run. She just made it to the Senate and she knows as well as anyone else she needs some experience in her own name to be viable for the Presidency. She won't run in 2004 unless the party gets so desperate they draft her, among other things because she promised not to run for President in this upcoming election. She will run in 2008 or 2012.

And, of course, there is not-officially-in-the-race-yet former Vice President Al Gore. Here's his--well, some "grassroots supporters" of his--website. Al's site is putting it about that he'd be running first in New Hampshire if he were running. If this is still semi-true in a couple of months and Al can pick up some big, greasy contributions, something he's always been good at, Al will run in 2004 and will win the Democrat nomination for President.

Should Al not run--if he loses again, he'll never get a third chance, and he might want to wait for 2008--it's Kerry, Dean, or Edwards for the Democrat nomination, in that order of probability.

This is wonderful news. If you're a Republican.

Bush can mop the floor with any of those guys, and we all know it, unless there's a stock-market crash or a nuclear war between now or then. Both are pretty unlikely, much more unlikely than a year ago. Bush knows there's only one Democrat with the national prominence, the willingness to run, the generally moderate record, and the solid pro-war position that will all appeal to the swing voters whose support means victory in every election. And, just maybe, give him some real trouble.

That somebody is Joe Lieberman, Senator from Connecticut.

But Joe will probably not make it through the Democrat primaries. He's only fifth in fundraising, with some $3 million, behind (presumably) Gore, Kerry, Edwards, and Gep, and he's not much ahead of Howard Dean. If the Gore campaign is telling the truth, Joe is in fourth place behind (presumably) Gore, Kerry, and Dean in the New Hampshire primary.

Things don't look good for Joe. Gore, Kerry, and Dean split the early primaries. Kooch drops, and maybe Edwards too. Then Gore sweeps the South, with Moseley-Braun second. Everyone else drops out but Dean, and maybe Joe. Gore gets at least half of the vote in the Midwest and that puts him over to win at the convention on the first ballot. Joe comes in second or third or fourth overall. We could even see a replay of the Al-and-Joe ticket in 2004.

That's fine with me. Bush and Cheney or Powell or Rice or Thompson will whomp Al and Joe, or Al and whoever else, 54-44 at best, with 2% for Nader or Kooch, come November 2004.

What I'd hate to see is an Joe-and-Hillary ticket. Hillary didn't promise not to run for vice-president. That combination would give Bush a tough race. And if Joe and Hillary lose, they both stay in the Senate with Hillary as the Democrat front-runner for 2008. But the odds against a Joe-and-Hillary ticket are at least a couple of hundred to one.

Which means that y'all kin start gittin' ready fer four more years o' writin' "Here I sit, cheeks a-flexin', just squeezed out another Texan" on bathroom walls all 'round this here world in order to work out all y'all's frustrations 'bout them Tixas politicians.

Posted 19:38 by John

Andrew Sullivan links to this Christian Science Monitor story, which nails the bought-and-paid-for-by-Saddam left-wing British MP George Galloway to the wall. That's two completely separate accounts, the Monitor's and the Daily Telegraph's, saying that Galloway was taking millions in bribes from Saddam Hussein. Scratch one libel suit. When do they open the prosecution? And can we--well, you--try him for treason, or just for accepting bribes?

Posted 15:08 by John

I've got a post up over on EuroPundits; it's a translation of a news report from Iraq written by a Spanish journalist that is, actually, like, good. Check it out. Andrew Dodge has a post up and so does Nelson Ascher, so check that stuff out too. C'mon, guys, we're getting behind on the EuroPundits duties, myself not excepted. Murph and I should have put that long bit on Zap that we did (don't blame me for too many of the rhetorical flourishes) up on EuroPundits, but we didn't think to until it was already up here.

Hey, Sasha, could you check the HTML of EuroPundits again? Nelson seems to have been having posting problems.

Posted 11:35 by John

I found this groovy site called the Sourcebook for Ancient History at Fordham University. It totally rocks. It's got connections to a lot of complete texts by the big guns of the times. I've been going through Julius Caesar and Augustus by Suetonius, who was sort of the Kitty Kelley of ancient Rome. Fascinating stuff. Skip over all the bits about which obscure dude was tribune in the fourteenth year of Augustus' mandate and all the tributes that were offered to Jupiter Biggusdickus at his temple on the Crapitoline, the little-known eighth hill the Eternal City was built on. There's all sorts of conspiracy and murder and massive dirty dealing. Read all of that. Robert Graves cribbed most of I, Claudius from Suetonius.

I looked into this because of that Italian nutcase below who compared George Bush to Julius Caesar, negatively. Lemme tell ya, every single American president, even JFK, has been like a saint in heaven, St. Francis of freakin' Assisi, compared to either Julius or Augustus Caesar. Hell, every senator we've ever had has been Mr. Upright Probity compared to any of the weasels Suetonius describes in the Roman Senate, and we've had senators even worse than Ted Kennedy. Jeez, even Aaron Burr seems comparatively honorable. I bet I find something similar to be true when I go through the other ten guys in Suetonius' scandal sheet. I sure found that to be true when I read the abridged version of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire a few months ago. My favorite was this one guy who seized power, in the period of full decline and total military dictatorship, along about 292 AD. Gibbon says about him, "He was an Arab, and so by nature a robber." Some other guy cut his head off a couple of years later and took over himself.

Posted 13:16 by John

Here's an article from FrontPage taking Amnesty International to pieces as the leftist propaganda machine it is. Check it out. Fred Kaplan in Slate has a good piece on why the Apache helicopter is way overrated and why the A-10 is the best damn weapon we've got if we have air superiority, which we bloody well ought to have.

Posted 00:43 by John

This is from James Taranto's column today at the Wall Street Journal online.

If you really believe that all sexual activity between consenting adults should be legally permitted, you ought to object to laws against incest (when no child is involved) and polygamy too. (The adultery example doesn't really fit, since adultery involves a usually nonconsenting third party, the betrayed spouse.)

Well, Jim, yeah, that is exactly what I believe. As far as I'm concerned, if everybody involved is eighteen and is acting on his and / or her own free will, what's the problem? Remember the bit about "the pursuit of happiness"? If my neighbor wants to get it on with his grandma and a billy goat on roller skates with a gallon of Crisco, that's only my business if they make so much noise they keep me awake at night. And don't give me any animal rights crap about the billy goat.

Posted 16:42 by John

WHINGING WORDS OF A WANNABE WEASEL

An examination of Spanish Socialist leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero

by Alan Murphy and John Chappell

BACKGROUND

The PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) came to power after an overwhelming victory in the 1982 general elections; the PSOE was considered, at the time, to be a party of the little man, of the underdog, having been outlawed under the Franco regime. The Socialists were believed by most Spaniards to be pure and honest, and the Socialist slogan, "100 years of honesty", spoke volumes. They were led by young, super-charismatic Felipe González, who would govern the country as Prime Minister for the next fourteen years.

What really happened after the Socialist landslide was the reign of "los Sucialistas", "the dirty ones". It was a throwback to the worst excesses of feudal caciquismo (boss rule). A myriad of financial scandals such as the Rumasa case rocked Spain shortly after Felipe, as he was universally known, came to power. Subsidies flowed like sangría to the comparatively poor southern areas of Extremadura, Castile-La Mancha, and Andalusia, buying hundreds of thousands of votes of semi-skilled semi-unemployed agricultural laborers. How much money did they steal? Nobody knows. But they scored an enormous publicity victory in 1992 when Barcelona hosted the Olympic Games and Sevilla got the World's Fair; Barcelona and Sevilla, of course, were, are, and apparently always be Socialist fiefdoms.

ETA, the Basque terrorist gang, was Felipe's most serious problem. They ran around killing dozens of people a year; their worst atrocity was the Hipercor bombing of a Barcelona department store which killed and wounded literally hundreds of people. things came to a head even before this atrocity, though, because the Spanish Army has always held a great deal of power, and many ETA victims were army officers. In 1981 elements of the Army went so far as to attempt a coup and took over the Parliament building. Felipe desperately feared another coup, so something had to be done.

Felipe looked around. He saw that the British and the Israelis had a novel way of getting rid of terrorists, as exemplified in the triple killing of an IRA hit squad in Gibraltar by the SAS and the Mossad's selective assassination of any terrorist who looked at them the wrong way. My (Murph's) feeling is that was not necessarily a bad thing; after all, these terrorists do claim that they are soldiers in a war and so they can expect to suffer the consequences. Clearly, Felipe concurred with this view. So he decided to set up an enormous slush fund to finance his very own death squad.

However, there was what they call in intelligence circles "a significant operational difference" between the Brits and the Israelis on the one hand and Felipe's GAL, his very own secret army, on the other. Whereas the SAS and the Mossad select their operatives with utmost care, Felipe hired a bunch of illiterate Corsican mercenaries and alcoholic local cops. Naturally, these Keystone Killers bungled several hit jobs, once kidnapping the wrong guy and, repeatedly, leaving their fingerprints all over the crime scene when they did manage to kill someone who actually had something to do with terrorism.

So 1992 rolls around, the apotheosis of Socialist glory, with Barcelona and Sevilla occupying the center of the world's attention. Everyone is happy, but something is bubbling under the surface, and that something erupts in a pustulent chancre in the very next year. The press gets on the money trail and blows it all wide open. The money that was supposed to fund anti-terrorist operations was used to buy mink coats for police chiefs' wives. The head of the national bank and the boss of the Guardia Civil go to the slammer. Carelessness and incompetence. Exposure. Ruin. Disgrace. Cabinet ministers behind bars. Felipe walks. His troops stay loyal.

The PSOE government was exposed as corrupt, incompetent, and completely disrespectful of the law. Next time elections came around, in 1996, José María Aznar and his conservative People's Party toasted them. Exit Felipe to his palatial home in a plush Madrid suburb. Now the PSOE have to find someone, anyone, who can restore them to power.

To cut to the chase, the result was a two-headed monster. Some guy whose name nobody can remember (Joaquín Almunia--we looked it up) was the nomenklatura's candidate, but someone got the bright idea they ought to innovate and have a primary election, which was won by the charismatic Catalan José Borrell, surprising the hell out of said nomenklatura. It was decided that the guy-whose-name-nobody-can-remember and Borrell would sort of be co-leaders. This made everybody very confused since nobody was sure who was really running the party. The ambiguity was resolved when Borrell got mixed up in another financial scandal and had to be defenestrated; the guy-whose-name-nobody-can-remember ran against Aznar in the 2000 general election and crashed and burned. He hasn't been heard from since.

The PSOE's wheels were spinning in a muddy ditch and nobody was driving the pork-barrel juggernaut. They looked around for someone, anyone, who had a learner's permit to take the wheel. Somebody had to overtake the Aznar hot rod, which was disappearing over the political horizon. Who had the horsepower?

ZAP! Along came José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whom nobody had ever heard of before, but he did look a little bit like Tony Blair. So, they figured, maybe he could do the same thing Blair had done--renovate the out-of-touch leftist party so it resembled something the ordinary Spanish José could identify with. And that's where we are today.

So does Zap's ponderous pork-barrelling eighteen-wheeler have the specs to catch Aznar's '66 Chevelle with a 350 V-8? Let's find out by looking at last Sunday's interview with the great man himself from El País, house organ of the PSOE.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Q. Hasn't this war at least served to put an end to Saddam Hussein's dictatorship?
A. No. What it's been good for until now, it seems, is to secure the oil wells. Everything has been a lie. In fact, there are other dictatorial regimes that are going to rearm themselves as a consequence of this war. No. this war was fought to exercise political, economic, and military domination in the area, ignoring the conventional norms of International Law.

...One. As this action concludes, it has been proven that none of the reasons used to justify and support this war were true. (Saddam's) regime had no WMDs, nor was the Iraqi Army a threat to the coalition or the world. Number two: the Iraqi regime was in a situation of absolute weakness, and the inspectors could have easily done their work. Now they tell us that the Iraqi war was a war of liberation. This is prohibited by the Charter of the UN, and moreover, not only is this liberation momentary, but the liberty which is being given to the Iraqi people has become libertinism. It is one of the most brazen moments that has been seen for decades, pillage, humiliation, and an absolute disregard for human rights. I believe that history will judge those who have allowed a part of our history to be destroyed. This war began outside the law, it has been carried out outside the law, and it seems that at the end of the war the law has not been respected.

...I am asking for a vote on the 25th of March as a function of the best constitutional values, as a function of the best values of tolerance, reaffirming myself in our Europeism. Reaffirming another method of governing and another method of behaving...I think the massive demonstrations correspond to three expressions. First, the rejection of the war. Second, the citizenry wants a more just international order, it wants an international order based on legality and not based on who has the most B-52s. And third, I think the people are expressing a feeling of an improvement of democracy, that their condition of citizen should be relevant and be listened to, with respect to a Government that in the last two and a half years has been conducting policy very much against the people in several ways.

...We must improve democracy in Spain. There are three aspects that seem essential to me. One, we have to improve the functioning of Parliament. Parliament has to be more and more reflective every day of what is happening in the national life. Two, I think we have to improve the truth when communicating the policies and the values of plurality, independence, the truth of information through the public media. I think one of the things that brought most demonstrators out onto the streets is the manipulation of the public media of communciation, the vulgar manipulation of the public media of communication and the attempt to control some private media. Spain needs a radical change of policy in the public media of communication. And, third, I think our democracy needs instruments and channels of participation on the part of the citizenry.

...I think that since I was elected secretary-general I said that I wanted politics to be governed by profound convictions and principles. I have been as radical in defending and supporting the Government in the struggle against ETA, exactly the same degree of radical and firm, as when opposing this war, because of moral conditions and principles. Exactly the same.

Q. Would a Government presided by you have permitted the use of the bases (in Spain) to the US?
A. For this action against Iraq, no, of course.
Q. Or the overflight of the B-52s?
A. For this action, no.
Q. And for actions in the future?
A. It would have to be in function of what the agreement, or a multilateral agreement, says, or if the territorial interests of Spain or the United States are at risk. And this is the chain of legitimacy. If not, we will arrive at the absurdity that the bases, of joint use, have no limitation, that the US can use our territory in any circumstances and that Spain cannot do anything...We democrats have chosen to construct a world in which right is not imposed by military superiority. Military supremacy cannot be the same as moral superirity and superiority in the rules of the game. The rules of the game are between everybody and for everybody.

...Sincerely, the one in a very evident minority within European social democracy is Tony Blair, and therefore, Tony Blair is the one who should reflect...I sincerely believe that Tony Blair's putative strategy has not borne fruit. Blair's discourse as an element of moderation and contention of the Bush administration has not given its fruits. It is so true, that we already see him in hot water, as when Colin Powell, Rumsfeld, and Bush start looking at Syria.

...I think every day there will be more and more positions like ours. I have certainly found this with many Latin American governments, various Arab countries, and with the climate there is in Europe that this has been a tremendous error. I think that, just as much France as Germany as the PSOE, what we are trying to do is that this erroneous line is not continued, that sensibility be recovered, that dialogue be recuperated, that the Bush Administration should listen to the rest. That there have been so many countries, the majority of the countries in the world, the majority of the public opinions of the world in disagreement, this road can not be continued down. And that is a message directed at Tony Blair and at Aznar.

...If the occupying forces try to act as administrative forces without the permission of the United Nations, we will continue in a situation of international illegality. Besides, in the political and social terms of benefitting the people of Iraq, I think that every day there will emerge a feeling among the Iraqi citizenry of seeing themselves as occupied and invaded, not liberated.

Sorry, y'all, there's a page and a half more of Zap but I just can't bring myself to transcribe any more. Just a few comments: 1) He really is this dumb. It's not hard to speak clear Spanish, but Zap can't do it. This drivel is just as drivelly in the original. And they have the nerve to call Bush a moron. 2) Spanish political discourse really is this poor. Zap doesn't say anything specific in the whole damn interview. This is not unusual in these here parts. 3) We'll see if this is what the people want on May 25. If it is, they can't say they weren't warned.

Posted 14:17 by John

The Vanguardia has outdone itself. In today's international news section, not "Analysis" or "Opinion", they've got a story by their Rome correspondent, Roger Jiménez, titled "The US, Sparta, against Athenian Europe: Italian scholars see similarities between ancient times and the present world with the war on Iraq". Just a few pearls:

It is true that historical circumstances never repeat themselves in the same way, but it is undeniable that many human motivations and behaviors maintain themselves. The conquest of Gaul was, in the opinion of historians, an example of a "preventive war". Caesar decided to act without the authorization of the Senate, and he justified himself with the pretext of coming to help one part of the Gallic tribes threatened by the others. But there is another episode even more reminiscent of the "Bush doctrine" that led to the Third Punic War. One day, Marcus Porcius Cato received as a gift some splendid figs from Carthage, the powerful city that had been defeated in 202 (BC) and on which severe conditions were imposed. Cato displayed the gift in the Senate as an affront: "Look how the Carthaginians laugh at us, we must destroy them because the danger still persists." And an army under the orders of Scipio Emilianus reduced the city to ashes.

Hoo boy. 1) Caesar's war on Gaul was a war of conquest, not a preventive war. 2) George Bush had the approval of the United States Congress for the US overthrow of Saddam, so there's no comparison with Julius Caesar. 3) The Third Punic War could be called a preventive war, but Carthage gave no provocation to Rome, unlike what Saddam gave to every decent country in the world with his support of international terrorism and his program to develop weapons of mass destruction. I'd call it another war of conquest, like most Roman wars. Now get this one.

Luca Canali, Latinist, translator, and writer resists making comparisons between George Bush and the leaders of ancient Rome. "The problem is that those were extraordinary men and he (Bush) is not. They went off to die in battle, something that Bush junior (sic) and his people do not precisely do. He has nothing in common with Julius Caesar, not even from the personal point of view. It is enough to remember that Caesar was highly cultured, a friend of the greatest intellectuals of his time, while Bush confuses Slovenia with Slovakia. Caesar was a great political leader, the only one in history who made a revolution and did not install a reign of terror. He trusted that the justice of his works of peace and war were worth the favor of his entire people. He was assassinated after breaking up a group of Spanish cavalry that he had as bodyguards because he preferred to die than to live protected day and night."

I am extremely happy that no reasonable comparison can be made between George W. Bush and Julius Caesar, who was an absolute dictator and who would attack your country, enslave your people, and steal your property just as soon as look at you. Why the hell is Mr. Jiménez allowing some Italian Fascist to attack Bush for not being Caesar in his pages? I'd be a lot more concerned if Bush did try to emulate Julius Caesar. And, by the way, Caesar offed his enemies just like any other dictator, and his "revolution" was a military coup.

...In all wars there were, like today, economic reasons. Slaves were the "petroleum" of the era. And also, like today, there were people who, like Colin Powell, played the role of the "dove"; these were the senatorial aristocracy...

1) Thucydides, whom these people should have read, said that there were three motives for war: honor, fear, and interest. Not just interest, and it looks to me like the motives for overthrowing Saddam were, in order, a) fear of Saddam's attacking us in the future with WMDs or terrorist acts b) American honor, demonstrating to the world that we are not to be trifled with in the wake of 9-11 c) interest, the stability of the volatile Middle East, and d) a motive unimaginable to either Thucydides or today's Spanish anti-Americans, common decency. 2) What Julius Caesar did, idiot, was to strip all power from the senatorial aristocracy.

Bush is surrounded by a group of eminences grises, from Vice-President Cheney to the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, whom many consider to be the real decision-makers in the White House. Some emperors also had powerful advisors, like Augustus, who left the management of the state to Agrippa in his absence...and, as influences on young Nero, Seneca and the emperor's mother, Agrippina, a version of Condoleezza Rice.

Boy, that's damning, that is. Bush has advisors just like Augustus did! And comparing Condi Rice with Agrippina the Younger is like comparing Marie Osmond and Marilyn Manson.

Continuing the thread of parallelisms with ancient Rome, similarities have been found between the US president and Crassus, a very rich man who aspired to gain a reputation as a great warrior. Absolute military superiority is common to the two peoples. Rome could lose a battle but would win the war. Afterwards it constructed monuments, highways, bridges, and aqueducts in the whole world, conscious that it was necessary to give people water, theaters, culture.

Comparing Crassus and Bush is like comparing...oh, you finish the simile. And is Jiménez arguing that it is the job of the state to give people culture? That, to say the least, is a highly illiberal attitude.

Question: How did this crap get into a newspaper that considers itself the paper of record in Catalonia with a circulation of over 200,000? Answer: There are a lot of pretentious jerks in this country, many of whom are alleged intellectuals at the universities or in journalism, who are so full of themselves that they have no idea how stupid they seem in the eyes of the world. This is because nobody in the rest of the world particularly cares what they have to say, nor is anyone willing to take the time to bother refuting their nonsense. Thus a great deal of nonsense goes unrefuted around here, and the average Jordi, who is no smarter nor dumber than your average Joe, believes it because "it says so in the paper".

Posted 11:40 by John

FrontPage links to this article from the Times (of London, natch) on the so-called oil-for-food program which financed Saddam for the last twelve years. Check it out for even more information on the cupidity of the United Nations, the "moderate" Arab states, and France, Russia, and China. Then check out Dick Morris's piece, also from FrontPage, on the general scuzziness of Saddam's friends on the Axis of Weasels.

The oil-for-food scam must end instantly. What I would do is this: Cancel all contracts signed by the Saddam regime. Confiscate all Iraqi assets overseas and use the money for reconstructing Iraq. Put all oil contracts up for bids just as soon as possible; exclude France, Russia, Germany, and China from the bidding, and also exclude American and British companies to prove to the world that we did not overthrow Saddam for the oil. Have the contracts run out after three or five years; by then, if there is a democratic government in Iraq, they will be able to manage their own business for themselves and can deal with whoever they decide to, even if it is TotalFinaElf. Don't do this for reconstruction contracts; give the jobs of, say, fixing the port and putting out the oil fires and the like to whoever can do the job the best, even if it is Halliburton or Bechtel.

By the way, Joe Queenan has a funny piece in the Wall Street Journal. There's a not-so-funny gag in the Onion on Christopher Hitchens, whom I firmly believe is a jerk, but they insist on portraying him as a drunk. Why does everyone who takes a shot at Hitchens accuse him of being a drunk? Is he one? And why do they say that Hitchens was attacking the antiwar crowd "from the left"? I thought he was attacking the antiwar crowd because he hated Saddam, and as far as I could tell he used pretty much the same arguments as pretty much everybody else on the right, in which direction he has plainly moved.

Posted 18:24 by John

Here's a link from InstaPundit:

THIS PAST WEEKEND, Jim Bennett asked where all the European Fascists had gone. Apparently, they were standing in line to read this book, which argues that Franco wasn't such a bad guy after all:

"A controversial, revisionist history of the Spanish civil war which claims it was sparked by a leftwing revolution and that Winston Churchill was crueller than General Francisco Franco has proved a surprise publishing success.

The Myths of the Civil War, by the former communist guerrilla turned Franco apologist Pio Moa, has outraged the Spanish left and many mainstream historians with its attacks on the icons of the period.

But it has become the second most popular non-fiction book in Spain as it is snapped up by former Franco supporters and those curious to see a different interpretation of a civil war which most historians agree was started by a rightwing military uprising against a democratic government." (From the Guardian.)

Humph. Wait until you read my soon-to-be-bestseller about how Marxism was actually a plot by British Intelligence to hobble Britain's adversaries with a self-destructive ideology. Hey, weren't you always a little suspicious of how a guy like Marx worked so freely in the bowels of the British Empire, with support from a wealthy industrialist?

The book is by Pío Moa, a regular contributor to Libertad Digital. They've got a file of all his pieces going back several years. Moa really is an ex-terrorist; he was one of the founders of GRAPO, the Spanish equivalent of the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhofs. He has "repented", as they say around here, and is a convert to free-market democracy.

It is not fair to call Moa pro-Franco. That's a smear thrown at him by the modern Spanish left. It's more accurate to say that, regarding the Spanish Civil War, Moa believes in "A plague on both your houses".

So do I.

Stanley G. Payne is, in my opinion, by far the best historian writing about Spain. He is a legitimate historian who has written extensively not only on Spain and Portugal, but also on European history, and especially on Fascism. His book A History of Spain and Portugal is the standard introductory textbook used in American universities on Iberian history. And, guess what, it's available online! I've linked to it before, and I'm going to link to it again.

Here is Payne's chapter on the Second Spanish Republic, which lasted between 1931 and 1939, and here is his chapter on the Spanish Civil War itself, which lasted between 1936 and 1939.

Posted 13:30 by John

From Sports Illustrated, here's the geniusy sports story of the week:

During a tour of Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico, a military policeman asked if any of the Expos wanted to know what it felt like to get shot. Reliever T.J. Tucker volunteered, and the MP shot him in the rear with a simulated 9-millimeter pistol used for training. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing," said Tucker. We hope so.

Speaking of sports, tyrant-loving FC Barcelona, the team that protested in favor of Saddam and against the United States and then took money from Qadafi's son in exchange for an exhibition game, tied Real Madrid in the Bernabeu on Saturday 1-1. It was a sloppy but exciting game, with neither team able to put together a sustained offensive attack. Barcelona slapped young midfielder Thiago Motta on Madrid's Zinedane Zidane and took him out of the game, but they were playing on the defensive and looking for the counterattack during most of the match. This strategy, which is the opposite of playing your game and taking it to the other team, is the equivalent of a dink-and-doink passing attack in pro football, the approach you use if your players just aren't as good as the other team's. Johan Cruyff is disgusted with the current Barcelona squad and their approach to the game, of course.

Barcelona is currently in twelfth place in the twenty-team Spanish league, with Real Madrid, Real Sociedad, and Deportivo de La Coruña in nearly a dead heat for first place with eight games left to play; Valencia and Celta de Vigo will fight over fourth place and the last Champions League berth, and Betis is likely to take sixth place and the last UEFA berth. (One UEFA spot automatically goes to the winner of the Spanish Cup, either Mallorca or Recreativo de Huelva.) Looks to me like next season Barcelona will stay home from European competitions for the first time since they were instituted. Their only hope is to win the Champions League to qualify next year, and realistically, they're the seventh-best team of the Elite Eight, so it ain't bloody likely.

Barcelona plays Real Sociedad next weekend at Anoeta in a league game that la Real has to win to keep up with Madrid and Depor. Barcelona has nothing riding on it, so they're probably going to blow it. Tonight Juventus of Turin comes to the Camp Nou for the return leg of the Champions League quarterfinals; Barcelona and la Juve tied 1-1 at Delle Alpi in the first leg. This is, of course, a must-win game for both teams; Barcelona advances to the Final Four on a win or a 0-0 tie, while Juve advances on a 2-2 tie (or more) or a win. In case of a 1-1 tie they go to overtime and then to penalties. The other team is eliminated. The game is on TV1 tonight.

Also, this evening, Inter Milan plays Valencia (1-0 in the first leg); tomorrow, Real Madrid plays Manchester United (3-1 in the first leg), and Ajax Amsterdam plays AC Milan (0-0 in the first leg). The Final Four is most likely to be Juventus, Inter, Madrid, and Milan. I'm rooting for Ajax but I have few illusions. They're a good team, well-coached by Ronald Koeman (a true sports hero, a widely respected gentleman), but they're just not a superstar squad.

How 'bout them Kansas City Royals? What the hell are they doing winning games? They're supposed to suck! They sure did last year, anyway. Keep an eye on their young pitcher, Runelvys Hernandez. He's the real deal. They have four established, competent players, Mike Sweeney at first base / DH, Carlos Beltran in centerfield, Raul Ibañez in leftfield, and Joe Randa at third. The rest of the young pitching staff looks pretty good but they'll come down to earth. If they come anywhere near .500, though, we can call the season a great success.

Posted 12:15 by John

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that Saddam's mouthpiece in the British Parliament, Old Labourite George Galloway, was taking payoffs of over 375,000 pounds a year from the Iraqi government. It sure looks like they've got him red-handed, since they've found a bunch of documents in Saddam's files pointing at him by name. He was taking a slice of the "oil-for-food" money that was supposed to benefit ordinary Iraqis and prevent their suffering under the regime of sanctions that was intended to hurt Saddam and his minions.

If Galloway has any decency, which I doubt, he'll resign. He should be immediately prosecuted for taking bribes and anything else they can pin on him. Now let's check up on some of our own more notorious Bonior-McDermott-Owens-McKinney Saddamites and see what kind of skeletons they've got hanging in their closets. I'll bet at least one of them was on the take.

Here in Spain, I'd like to know where Zap and especially Gas have been getting their money from. We know that Gas's Spanish Communist Party was getting "subsidies" (i.e. bribes) from Moscow until the Soviet Union collapsed, but nobody's ever been prosecuted for that. Not too surprising. Wonder how much they've received from other unpleasant sources.

Posted 23:23 by John

Here's a guy named José Luis Orihuela who runs a blog. J.L.'s site is mostly a collection of links to dozens of other blogs in Spanish and Portuguese, or about similar themes, along with commentary. He was nice enough to list us as one of his "recent discoveries", especially since I bet we're a little too right-wing for his political taste--my guess is he's a fairly reasonable moderate lefty. J.L.'s site is a great resource for all kinds of stuff in the Iberian languages, and he's put a good bit of work into finding all of this, so check it out if you can read fuzzy furriner talk.

Posted 15:15 by John

Check out this wacky website (mostly in Spanish) called www.legitimidad.com. It's by some guy named Luis Toribio, whom I've never heard of and whom I will not stick my neck out for--that is, if he turns out to be some kind of neofranquista weirdo it's not my fault. He's got it in big-time for the Spanish left and for the Basque and Catalan Nationalists. He's registered a whole bunch of URLs like www.pasqualmaragall.org which get you into his website. Now, the website is full of absolutely outrageous comparisons between, say, the Socialist Party and the Nazis, and not such outrageous comparisons between the Basque Nationalists and the Nazis, but it's fun to check out for a bit of right-wing demagogy. The organization of the site reminds me of what John Gunther said about the front page of the Denver Post back when it was notoriously the worst newspaper in America--"It looks like a confused and bloody railway accident." I figure his analogies are no worse than the ones you'll see in the article below by a professor of German at the U. of Barcelona.

Posted 13:57 by John

Here's an article by one Josep María Ruíz Simón on page 34 of today's Vangua. Its title is "Analogies".

It seems that the invasion of Iraq has come to its end. Maybe it's time to remember the arguments that were used to attempt to justify it. Or maybe not, since nobody ever, not even those who used them, believed that those arguments were the reasons behind the war. Maybe it is more pertinent to remember, as the Brazilian politologist Luis Alberto Moniz Bandera reminded us a few days ago, what Adolf Hitler said in 1939 to the high command of the Wermacht (sic): "I'll give a propagandistic reason to start the war, it doesn't matter whether it's plausible or not. The winner is never asked whether he told the truth." Only a little later, the Führer ordered Operation Himmler: members of the SS and the Gestapo, dressed in Polish uniforms, attacked a radio station in Gleiwitz. The propagandistic motivation was provided. And the world preferred to swallow it. (Gee, I thought Britain and France declared war about two days later. It was the Soviets who allied themselves with Hitler to divide up Poland, remember?)

It's never a bad idea to remember. And I think that, though it may seem like an exaggeration to many, remembering the Third Reich when the "Project for the New American Century" is being implemented is not out of place. Despite the fact that the hundred years projected for American dominion don't reach as far as the millenium that had been prophesied by the German National Socialists.

We suppose that something must have rubbed the American administration on a raw spot when it pressured the German government for the resignation of the minister of Justice for comparing Bush with Hitler and when it also pressured the UN so that a reproduction of the painting by Picasso, so that the bombardment of Guernica by the Nazis would not be forgotten, would be covered by a blue cloth the day that Colin Powell presented his inconsistent arguments in favor of war. (False. The UN covered the painting not because of American pressure but because they always do so when a speech is televised.) And I don't think that it was only the memory, also brought up these days, of the close financial connections that existed between George W. Bush's great-grandfather and the Hitler regime. (False. See Cecil Adams's column on this.)

Analogies give us something to think about. And those (leaving aside the question of the negligence of the American secret and security services) who have spent months thinking about the analogies between the political use of 9-11 and that of the fire in the Reichstag (the German parliament) in 1933 (sic) are many. Without getting into conspiracy theories, it is clear that in the same way that that fire was the pretext for Adolf Hitler to seize extraordinary powers and establish a police state without the necessity of revoking the Constitution of the Weimar Republic, George W. Bush, after the attack on the Twin Towers, has also obtained extraordinary powers and has installed a repressive system (through, among other laws, the Patriot Act) that violates the civil rights of the United States, permitting, for example, that American Moslems be arrested and imprisoned without a trial, or the creation of secret military tribunals to try, imprison, and execute foreign citizens without the possibility of appeal.

Guantánamo is no joke. Neither is the fact that FBI agents are now authorized to observe what citizens read and the sites they visit on the Internet. The "war on terrorism" has its domestic front. And it's worth it to reflect, without leaving aside the copycat effect that American politics generates, about whether on this front, like overseas, arguments are also being fabricated to justify decisions that have already been made.

You heard it here first! We're Nazis! Bush is Hitler! We're all stupid sheeplike followers! 9-11 was a setup! The war on Saddam was just like the Nazi attack on Poland! America is a repressive police state! The FBI is watching all of us! And the jails are full of innocent civilians! And Spain is going to copy America and Aznar is Mussolini!

If this had been printed in an American paper, could Bush sue for libel?

Posted 13:13 by John

Well, today's Vanguardia has a few entertaining bits. On the first page of the Culture section, of all places, they have a story about Madonna's new album. This is just another example of the weird multiple personality (not schizophrenia) that the Europeans have regarding the United States and its popular culture--you know, they hate us but they're still fascinated by us. Madonna is not a successful recording artist anymore in the US--it's been years since she had anything resembling a hit song. Last thing I heard on the radio by her was her version of "American Pie", which sank like a stone, if I recall correctly. In Europe, though, once a celebrity, always a celebrity, no matter how crappy the person in question's career has gone. Oh, get this, they call her "the legendary singer-songwriter". I thought Joni Mitchell had copyrighted that title.

Says Madonna, "The album cover is an homage to Che Guevara, because my current state of mind is revolutionary. I feel that the world needs a serious change and because of this I was looking until I remembered that image of Guevara. I think that most of the lyrics and a good part of the feelings that I have put into this album are revolutionary." That's our Madonna Luxemburg Goldman, that is. Next thing you know she'll be throwing herself in front of the King's horse at the Derby. I bet Madonna had never heard the word "revolution" until she saw it in a Benetton ad back in about ninety-three or so.

By the way, one of the songs on the album is titled, quite accurately, "I'm So Stupid".

Posted 11:25 by John

The World Health Organization is blasting China for having covered up information related to SARS, the mutant form of pneumonia that seems to have started there (like most forms of flu and pneumonia, since humans seem to pick up these diseases from pigs and poultry, and China has by far the largest number of these animals kept domestically).

I wonder if the Perenially Indignant Catalans are going to hold any demos or pot-bangings, since China hid information about a disease that could become an epidemic from the rest of the world, and if that's not irresponsible, I don't know what is. How much do you want to bet that when SARS gets to Africa it wipes out that one-third of the population (in some countries) that has AIDS? Remember, you don't die of AIDS, you die of some other disease, normally pneumonia, that you picked up because AIDS has damaged your immune system.

So let's see. There were some 1000 civilian deaths in the War on Saddam, more or less, and the United States has been excoriated in the simple-minded Spanish press and by the simple-minded Spanish populace as the epitome of evil. Millions will die in the Third World from SARS, and where are the protests at China's behavior? Sorry, dumb question. Only America is bad. I keep forgetting.

Let's hold a contest. The first person to find an article blaming America for SARS wins a prize of some sort, probably something along the lines of getting your name published in the blog.

Posted 22:18 by John

Here's an article from Fox News giving a rather different perspective on the looting in Baghdad that the Spanish press has gotten so worked up about.

It's a low-on-news weekend, which is just as well because I'm on a mild blogging break. Good Friday is a holiday in Spain and Easter Monday is one, too, in Catalonia. It's been a very nice weekend and Barcelona, which can be gray and dull (though never too cold, at least not outdoors) during the winter, is now green and flowery. The wisteria is in bloom and so is the jasmine. Everybody's geraniums are out; the geranium is definitely the most popular balcony plant in Spain, I guess because they are hardy and don't require a lot of attention. We had an epidemic about five years ago of worms that infested all the geraniums in town and a lot of them died; the ones that didn't, which include all three of mine, seem to be immune, and now the streets are almost as geraniumy as they were before the worms came. The herb garden is just fine--we've got oregano, thyme, lavender, parsley, mint, and some weird kind of parsley that Remei brought back from the pueblo. It's just fine, tastes like strong parsley, but I have no idea what it's called.

Baghdad Bob Fisk has gone back home to his undoubtedly very expensive British residence--like most lefties with jobs, Bob talks big about solidarity and the like, but I'll bet he sacrifices very little of his paychecks to help those less fortunate. But we don't have to read Bob's whinings in the Vanguardia any more. The Catalan lefties are all notorious for behaving in such a way--they all make a lot more money than I do, anyway, and every time Catalan Socialist leader Pasqual Maragall (who got raked over the coals by none less than the Economist for having compared José María Aznar with Hermann Göring) gets all solidarious, we should remind him that he comes from the most bourgeois Hochkatalanisch family imaginable.

Posted 14:18 by John

I'm getting really annoyed at the moronic leftist Spanish media for trumpeting over and over that the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein because of the arms sales and the oil. That is flat stupid. First, war is bad for business. It causes uncertainty, and business hates uncertainty. It eats up resources unproductively (not only natural resources, of course, but capital and labor), taking them out of the economy as a whole. It gets people killed and wounded, removing their skills from the economy and costing us, uh, an arm and a leg to take care of them. Stuff gets destroyed and it has to be rebuilt, costing us even more resources. Wars always cause internal political friction, which, to say the least, is not helpful to the smooth running of an economic system. You simply don't make money off participating in a war. You lose money. Unless, of course, you are a neutral country selling goods to both sides. Then you make a ton of money. Case in point: Spain, neutral in both WW I and WW II. Especially in World War I, the Catalan textile and leather industries got incredibly rich supplying the French Army with their uniforms and boots. This is why Spaniards think that people make money off wars. Because they did.

Now, let's look at the United States economy. In American billions (1 followed by nine zeros, called a "milliard" in Europe) of dollars, the US economy is by far the largest in the world, at $9,100 billion a year GDP, according to the 2002 Economist Pocket World in Figures. Japan is second with $4,300 billion per year, Germany is third with $2,100 bn., the UK fourth with $1,400 bn., and France fifth with $1,400 billion. Italy, China, Brazil, Canada, and Spain round out the top ten.

The American economy is just plain enormous, and it runs extremely well despite the mild slump we are in now. It would be just moronic to risk all we have going for us on an unnecessary war. Absolutely moronic. Mr. Bush and his Cabinet and the leaders of Congress are not morons.

Now, first, let's look at international arms trading. According to the US State Department, in 1999, the US was by far the world's largest arms exporter--we exported arms to the tune of $33 billion. The UK was second with $5.2 bn., Russia third, France fourth, and Germany fifth. Now, 33 billion dollars is just a drop in the bucket in the total economy of more than $9,000 billion. Are we sufficiently idiotic to risk screwing up our whole economy--and, of course, getting our own people killed--to make five or ten billion dollars extra in weapons sales? I just bet we aren't. Arms exports are less than one-tenth of one percent of the American economy. By the way, the leading arms importers in 1999 were Saudi Arabia with $7.7 billion, then Turkey with $3.2 bn., then Japan, Taiwan, the UK, and Israel, in that order. The big importers of arms are not rogue states but established, legitimate governments (though I don't like the Saudis any better than anyone else, it is a functioning state).

Now let's look at oil and other forms of energy. First, we are the world's largest producer of energy, second after Saudi Arabia in oil production, second after Russia in natural gas, and first in coal. We produce 73% of the energy we use, again according to the Economist's little handbook. (Spain produces only nine percent of its own energy.) We also get a good deal of our imported energy from our NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico. Mexico is the fifth world producer of oil and Canada is tenth; both are ahead of Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, and Indonesia in oil production. In addition, Canada is the third producer in the world of natural gas. Let's face it, Middle East oil is nice and cheap and importing some of it is good for our economy. But we could live just fine without it, unlike Europe and the Far East tigers, who are completely dependent on it except for the North Sea countries.

By the way, again according to the Economist, of the twenty largest companies in the world in sales, only three are oil companies: America's Exxon Mobil, third in the world with $163.9 billion in sales, the UK / Netherlands company, Royal Dutch Shell with $104.5 bn., eleventh in the world, and at seventeenth, the Anglo-American BP-Amoco with $83.6 bn. in sales. These statistics are from 1999.

Now, these here companies are powerful and influential, and rightly so, since what's good for them is good for the world economy as a whole, and especially for their hundreds of thousands of workers and stockholders. But to think we attacked Iraq so we could get fifty or a hundred billion dollars more in oil money is just ridiculous when you look at the United States' total GDP of NINE THOUSAND BILLION DOLLARS. Oil, like everything else, is an important part of our economy, but it just isn't the be-all and end-all, and if anybody knows this it is George Bush and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice, all of whom actually know something about how the petroleum industry works and what its comparative importance is.

You might be wondering about the makeup of the US economy. You might have thought that it really was based on weapons and oil. It certainly is not. Here are the stats for 2000 of the components of the American economy according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in billions of dollars.

Agriculture $135 bn
Mining $127 bn (oil and gas extraction, $99.5 bn--remember we're second in the world in both oil and gas production)
Construction $463 bn
Manufacturing $1,566 bn
Transportation $825 bn
Communications (includes the entire media industry) $281 bn
Utilities $230 bn
Wholesale trade $674 bn
Retail trade $893 bn
Finance / insurance / real estate $1,936 bn
Services $2,164 bn
Government $1.216 bn

Posted 16:04 by John

The European Union held its summit in Athens and signed the deal expanding itself to 25 countries. The three Baltics, Poland, the Czechs, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta, and Greek Cyprus are all in. The treaty of admission is 4900 pages long, so everybody, of course, has been able to read the whole thing. Wonder what kind of nasty hidden clauses they stuck in there which won't be fully exploited until they're faits accomplis. We'll find out in a few years.

What this means, of course, is that it's going to become a hell of a lot more difficult to get any sort of consensus on a common EU foreign and defense policy, especially since eight of the new members are very pro-American and not real fond of the arrogant, bullying French government, which threatened to keep them out of the EU if they didn't behave themselves appropriately over the Iraq crisis. Well, they didn't behave themselves, especially not the Poles, who took on some fighting and by all accounts did a good job in a tough situation.

I think it's interesting to note that France and Germany (and their lapdog Belgium) are surrounded, going clockwise, by Britain, Holland, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, all proud members of the coalition. The Axis of Weasels has broken up, and the countdown is on for the collapse of the Schröder government in Germany and for a Christian Democrat-Free Democrat takeover. Russia, of course, is waffling. France is going to wind up all by itself. The Americans, unilateralists? I'd look first at Paris if I were looking for a country that likes to throw its weight around all by itself (see Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, etc.)

By the way, since when did the European Left think Chirac was a hero? Anybody remember when they sunk the Greenpeace ship or tested nukes in the South Pacific? How about the nuclear reactors they've sold to everybody and his dog--France, of course, is less dependent on foreign oil than other countries because they've built so many nuke plants in France itself. What about the race and immigration problem that France can't handle? How about the massive corruption in French private and public life? Does anyone remember that France sells weapons of all kinds to the highest bidder, which is often an unlovely African satellite or, worse, a belligerent and aggressive Arab non-satellite? One would think the Left would be against all these things. But they forget all about them when France opposes America, because what the Left really hates is capitalism and democracy, not nuclear plants and nuclear testing and international arms sales and propping up Third World dictatorships and drowning hippies and invading African countries and beating up Muslims and Jews in the streets and all the other things they say they hate that France habitually does.

Anyway, there's a whole bunch of meaningless guff spouted by various high commissioners for this, that, and the other thing. You don't want to hear about any of it, trust me.

Spain is offering to send the Spanish Legion, their best troops, to Iraq for peacekeeping purposes. They also want to send elements of the paramilitary police force, the Guardia Civil, for public safety and police training. This worked out pretty well in Bosnia; both the Legion and the Guardia Civil were there, gaining useful experience. They also want to send teams of Army engineers to help with rebuilding; these guys have been active in Afghanistan building things like police stations and schools. Meanwhile, Spain will maintain its supply base at Umm Qasr, from where they will distribute aid flown into Kuwait by transport planes. This sounds to me like a good, solid, honest offer of help that we need to take them up on. I'll also point out that taking measures of this sort prove that Spain is really an important actor on the world scene. One of the things that has always irritated Spaniards of all political persuasions is the feeling that Spain was being ignored, that the world didn't pay it the attention it deserved. Well, José María Aznar has succeded in bringing Spain to a position of international prominence for the first time since about 1715. Spain now has some weight it can throw around itself, and this is mostly thanks to Aznar's intelligence, clarity, decency, and courage.

Xavier Sala i Martin, the groovy Catalan economist, has another piece. This one is on privatizations, mineral wealth, corruption, and Nigeria. It's good, as always, and I'm going to post it on EuroPundits since it's an internationally themed article. Check out EuroPundits, by the way, for a damn good article from The Radical, lots of stuff by Nelson Ascher, and a very long piece by Murph that I liked and put up over there. So check it out!

Posted 14:40 by John

Well, there's actually a good bit of news in today's Vangua, most of which is not related to the war, for once. They gave Baghdad Bob Fisk the front page again, and his "news" report begins,

This is going badly. Worse than anybody could have imagined. The "liberation" army has become an army of occupation.

I dunno, Bob. I can imagine a lot of things that are a lot worse than the edgy first days of attempting to reconstruct a country that hasn't had a decent government since 1958. Like, for instance, this imaginary Vanguardia headline that Baghdad Bob and Tikrit Tommy would have loved to see:

Chemical weapons kill thousands; Republican Guard massacres hundreds of prisoners; Saddam uses human shields to protect self; Pakistan threatens nuclear attack; Oil fields blazing out of control; Western journalists taken hostage; Scuds hit Israel, Kuwait with biological weapons; President Gore to retire American troops.

How's that, Bob? See, I imagined something that's a lot worse than mild disorder in a city of five million. You'd probably think it was much better, though, because all your reporting is just a restatement of one sentence:

"I, Robert Fisk, hate the United States of America."

Just print that every day, Bob, and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble writing these damn long three-tabloid-page dispatches that all boil down to those nine little words.

Posted 00:00 by John

Here's the ineffable Rafael Ramos, from London, on page nine of the Vanguardia. This is a news story, not marked as "Analysis" or "Opinion".

Bush's first priority is reelection so he can have four more years to continue assaulting civil liberties, increasing the differences between the rich and the poor, reducing taxes for the millionaires, and promoting the agenda of the Religious Right.

Posted 13:10 by John

Here's a damn good Spanish blog called the Blog Liberal Andaluz, or, for short, "Bla Bla Bla". Excellent proof that there is intelligent life in Spain. Check this one out.

Posted 22:11 by John

Mark Steyn, as usual, has another kick ass column--this one's from a couple of days back, but I didn't find it until about five minutes ago. Read it if you want a quick summary of what Baghdad Bob Fisk is going to be writing about next week, with common-sense rebuttals for the so-called arguments that Bob will be using.

Posted 17:37 by John

Here's an excellent Brazilian blog called Picuinhas, which I assume means "pequeñeces" (little things). It has some links to other Portuguese-language blogs, and a link to us right here. It's really not that hard to read Portuguese if you read it out loud and remember that "nh" is "ñ" and "lh" is "ll", and "o" is masculine "the" and "a" is feminine "the". Check this blog out and give it a try.

Posted 17:07 by John

I've been bashing the Vanguardia steadily for the last year and two months, and today they're at it again with Baghdad Bob Fisk and Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro. They're saying just what you think they're saying, so I won't bother with any of the details thereof. We do, however, have an article by groovy Catalan economist Xavier Sala i Martin titled "The hard part is providing solutions". Sala i Martin teaches both at the Pompeu Fabra here and at Columbia in New York, and when he's not doing that, he volunteers his time as an economics advisor to Third World governments. Just so y'all know that there are a few people here who have their heads screwed on straight around here, this is today's column. I wish Sala i Martin would write more often.

The other day I was at the university when I heard two students planning future mobiliations against the war. "I just had a brilliant idea," one said. "First you stand with your legs apart, and I'll kick you real hard in the nuts. Then I'll stand with my legs apart, and you kick me real hard in the nuts. That'll show those American imperialists." "Fantastic," the other said."For sure the Catalan university rectors will consider that our behavior is 'educational and enriching'."

No. I'm kidding. I made up that conversation. but it came to my mind when I saw that the students were demonstrating by blocking streets and highways. When you get down to it, if it's true that 91% of the population is against the war, the poor citizens who get stuck in their cars due to the demonstrations are, with all probability,against the war too.

Something similar is the story with the nocturnal "pot-bangings", which awaken our neighbors' (they're against the war, too) babies, or the boycott of "American" products like McDonalds, which they do not realize is a franchise system with Catalan owners who, in their turn, buy meat, lettuce, and potatoes from Catalan producers--who, of course, are against the war too. They buy thousands of Cokes and pour them out in the streets (as if the producer cares what you do with the product after you buy it) and so add to the profits of the company, whose proprietors are certainly in favor of the war. The attempt to pressure George W. Bush by hurting those who are against and benefiting those who are in favor of the war is just as peculiar as that of the two students practicing mutual testicular aggression.

Another curious aspect is that everybody is protesting against something: against the war, against the (conservative governing) People's Party, against representative democracy. Well, taking advantage of the trend toward saying what one is opposed to, here's my list: I am against the war because I do not like it when governments use the power we citizens give them to kill innocent people. Of course, for the same reason, I am against bloody-handed dictators like Saddam, who murder and torture their own people. The problem is that, as far as I know, no one has come up with a peaceful method of kicking Saddam out of power (the sanctions and the UN inspections were nothing more than a bad joke), which leads me to wonder whether the war and the following elimination of the dictator are going to end up causing more or less suffering than the status quo.

In addition to being against the war and against Saddam, I am against the absurd idea that a war is only 'legitimate' or 'legal' if the Security Council of the UN authorizes it. We all know that the members of this Council act because of obscure interests or use their vote to gain economic favors that have nothing to do with ethics: does anyone really believe that Chirac was in search of peace and not the protection of his petroleum contracts with Saddam? Does anyone really believe that the war would have been more 'legitimate' if the US, and not France, had managed to buy (I repeat, buy) the votes of Cameroon, Guinea, or Angola?

I am also against the people who organize demonstrations against the war in Iraq and ignore other much bloodier conflicts like those in Congo, Rwanda-Burundi, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia-Eritrea, or Ivory Coast, conflicts which, I might add, did not have UN approval. The selective irritation of the organizers reveals anti-American hate difficult to reconciliate with true pacifism.

I am against the political use of the genuine pacificm of the citizenry. The speeches by some leaders accusing one another of being Nazis or Hitlerian are not worthy of a civilized country like ours. I am also against the leaders who stir up anti-Americanism in Europe and anti-Europeanism (especially against the French) in the US in order to scratch out a few miserable votes. Terrorism is a common problem that all Westerners face and when politicians campaign on fomenting divisions, the real winners are the terrorists.

And I am against the witchhunts that have been unleashed in all of Spain against those people who disagree with the majority. the high priests of pacifism have awarded themselves a supposed moral superiority and dedicate themselves to chasing down everyone who does not agree with them. Some go as far as insults and aggression (though, I must say, I applaud those students who acted as 'human shields' to protect other people or buildings against the violence of the more delinquent*). But even if there is no violence, I am against the criminalization of disagreeing voices, as small a minority as they might be. Not long ago, in these pages I denounced the persecution that sectors linked to the People's Party fomented against Marta Ferrusola's and Heribert Barrera's statements about immigration. With the same emphasis today, I am against the physical and verbal persecution that the offices and the members of the People's Party are the objects of.

You see: all of us, including myself, have our list of things we are against. Criticizing, saying no, and being against are all very easy. The hard thing is finding solutions.

* Sala i Martin is referring to an episode when a group of pacifist protestors placed their bodies between a group of rioters and a government building that was being attacked a week or two ago here in Barcelona. We applauded them here at Iberian Notes, as did some of our readers, as being true pacifists with a sense of ethics who put their bodies where their mouths were. I just bet they were from a Catholic pacifists' group--those guys don't riot, and they know what they believe in, unlike the high school kids, whom it would be just as easy to whip up into a pro-war frenzy with real, pitiless propaganda, or the SocioCommunists, who are mere opportunists.

Posted 19:27 by John

Murph and I were sitting here looking through the news on the Net and we came upon this opinion poll in French from Le Monde, so we took it. We were particularly attracted by their promise to send the results and comments to Monseeur Jack Chiraq himself. Then we checked the results.

Keep in mind that this is a self-selected survey and therefore not representative of French opinion as a whole, but it bloody well is representative of the mentality of those French folk who read Le Monde, 2700 of whom had filled out the survey when we last checked.

Anyway, out of these folks, 47% said they thought the Iraqis saw the Americans as an army of occupation, not liberation; 57% think humanitarian goals are not of concern to the Coalition forces; 56% say the Coalition should not have intervened militarily in Iraq; 64% say Chirac did not err in his diplomatic efforts; 43% of them say they totally disapprove of the intervention and another 19% somewhat disapprove; and, get this one, 52% see the United States as a danger to the world, as against 29% who see the US as protection against dangerous countries and 18% more who say the US is neither one nor the other. Fifty-two percent of any survey, even a self-selected one like this, is pretty significant, I submit.

The most fun part is that there's a place where you can put your commnets, so we said M. Chirac was a big tete de merde and then Murph added this joke:

Q: What's the difference between the Republican Guard and Jacques Chirac?

A: The Republican Guard knew when to quit.

Posted 16:25 by John

Oh, yeah. Does anybody remember where I got the name "Inside Europe"? Or care?

Posted 16:22 by John

Well, in case you folks are interested, today is April 14, 2003. We've been blogging for about fourteen months now; we started off on February 8, 2002, over on the old Homestead site, and we came over here to Blogger in October 2002. Antonio dropped out of the blog around that time, though his spirit is still with us. When Iberian Notes got started (we were using the name Spanglolink--get it? Spain? Anglo? Link? This is what happens when you listen to Murph's suggestions. Perry deHavilland from Samizdata politely informed us that the name sucked. He was right), we were getting ten or twenty page views a day. Now we're getting 300-500 a day, and we're likely to get more than 15,000 page views for the month of April. Also, we've helped to found another popular blog, EuroPundits.

Anyway, the official Iberian Notes birthday was April 11; your chronicler turned 37 though he doesn't look a day over, say, 35, his age when he started this thing. (Hint.) So, in case you're wondering, I've set up a wish list over at Amazon. (Hint. Hint.) It's not hard to do at all; just CLICK HERE. (Hint. Hint. Hint.)

Posted 15:27 by John

Cinderella Bloggerfeller has a new Remei Margarit translation up on EuroPundits! I find I understand Remei Margarit best when I don't take my antidepressants and then smoke a joint. That puts me in the appropriate state of manic-depressive paranoia that Mrs. Margarit seems to inhabit. My theory is that mutual comprehension is state-dependent. Do not try this at home. There are also some very fine posts up by The Radical and Nelson Ascher. So go check them out!

And a million thanks to the lovely, talented, and operatic Mrs. Sasha Castel for doing what she can to fix the EuroPundits template. It's already a functioning blog now that Sasha's given it a good going-over. So if you find EuroPundits to be like, legible, send at least one or two mental "thank yous" to her.

Posted 12:02 by John

Here's a cool blog in Portuguese (I understand most of it) called O Intermitente. Check it out. This guy is doing tremendous anti-idiotarian work.

I love commentarist and classics professor Victor Davis Hanson and he's got another excellent column up on National Review Online. Here's the intro paragraph and then the thesis statement.

The jubilation of liberating millions from fascism and removing the world’s most odious dictator apparently lasted about 12 hours. I was listening to a frustrated Mr. Rumsfeld last Friday in a news briefing as he tried to deal with a host of furious and crazy questions — a journalistic circus that was nevertheless predictable even before the war started.

I thought immediately of the macabre aftermath to the battle of Arginusae in 406 B.C.

Only Victor Davis Hanson is immediately reminded of the battle of Arginusae in 406 BC by any event us normal folk might imagine. I sure can tell you that nothing has ever reminded me of the battle of Arginusae in 406 BC, immediately or not.

Posted 15:27 by John

Just another comment on urban warfare. I assume you have seen the American Civil War photographs of what used to be Atlanta, Columbia, Richmond, Petersburg, and Vicksburg. They are not pretty. In fact, those cities were all pretty much destroyed. Should you want to take a look, try Google images. I guarantee you there are lots of Civil War photos there.

Now, the American Civil War is often considered to be the first modern war, the first total war ever, in which the complete economic resources of both sides were thrown against one another, in which the static front became more important than warfare of movement, in which an entrenched defense was first seen to be stronger than the attack, in which primitive blitzkrieg (Sherman's march) was first used to outmaneuver a static defense, in which railroads and steamboats were first used for rapid troop movement and supply, in which there was mass conscription on both sides, in which new technology, especially the rifled musket with the conical bullet, was used for the first time. If they'd had machine-guns and barbed wire (both were invented within fifteen years after the end of the war) we'd have killed five million of each other. Actually, some 620,000 were killed in combat, and some two million total died from starvation, disease, and the like. The wounds the Civil War inflicted upon American society aren't completely healed yet.

I would suggest that future Saddam Husseins and Osama Bin Ladens should devote some serious study to the American Civil War and think, "If they were willing to do that to one another, what might they be willing to do to us?"

Posted 14:36 by John

PRO-ALLIANCE PERSON: "We won. We captured Baghdad and overthrew Saddam."

PRO-SADDAM PERSON: "No you didn't. You've failed to establish control of Baghdad and looting and anarchy reign."

This is the new argument, folks, and Baghdad Bob Fisk and Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro are all over it. I've seen several writers refer to this weaselly strategy as "moving the goalposts." That is, you cross the line marked "Victory" thinking you've scored a touchdown, but they tell you "Nope. The real Victory line is twenty yards farther along." This is, uh, cheating.

What's the most repulsive is that Bob and Tommy and their pals are quite obviously playing the blatant anti-American card. Blatant anti-Americanism is when you blame the Yanks for something bad no matter what they do. F'r instance, we've been pretty loose about allowing the Baghdadies to blow off steam. Bob and Tommy therefore yell that the Americans are allowing the rabble to trash the city. However, if the Americans got tough and started shooting looters, Bob and Tommy would holler that they're murdering innocent civilians and arrogantly using overwhelming force. You can't win either way, of course, in Bob and Tommy's world.

By the way, it's being claimed around here that the tearing-down of the Saddam statue (eerily like the scene in which they tore down the statue of Stalin in Budapest) was staged by the Yanks. That isn't true and Baghdad Bob is your witness--he was right there, you can pick him out in the film of the people surrounding the statue. He saw it with his own eyes. I might add that I was watching it live on Catalan TV and they were showing the Al Jazeera feed, and Catalan TV and Al Jazeera are not normally considered to be CIA stooges.

Comment on the local attitude toward cheating: There was a soccer game last night and the stinking, putrid FC Barcelona tyrant-lovers got creamed at home 2-4 by Deportivo. They have to play in Madrid next week, and then they have to play Real Sociedad at home the week after that. If they get their asses kicked both times, which I certainly hope they do, they'll be perilously close to 18th place and the Second Division. Anyway, in the first half, Barcelona's Javier Saviola got yellow-carded for taking a dive in the area, trying to draw a penalty. That is, he was cheating and trying to steal a goal. Not very sportsmanlike, to say the least. Then, in the second half, Saviola intentionally used his forearm to bring down a high ball in the Deportivo area. That is, he was cheating again, controlling the ball illegally to try to steal another goal. He got yellow-carded again, meaning that he was kicked out of the game for receiving two yellows. The crowd was furious and the newspapers are just as mad, pointing out that he did not injure anybody. Yeah, but Saviola committed, not once but twice, absolutely blatant unsportsmanlike conduct, the kind that gets you a fifteen-yard penalty in football, directly kicked out in baseball, a technical foul in basketball, and a five-minute misconduct in hockey. He deserved to get kicked out of last night's game, and he deserves to be scorned by the fans, for intentionally cheating. Real sports heroes, like Gary Lineker, don't need to cheat. That's why we were all shocked when FC Barcelona idol Pep Guardiola tested positive for drugs last year in Italy and got suspended for four months. We never thought Pep was a cheater. Well, it sure looks like he's one now.

Posted 13:53 by John

I've been reading, online, a book by David Irving called Uprising about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Before y'all jump all over me, I know perfectly well who David Irving is, and I don't like him any better than you do. He is best known for his Holocaust denial; he lost a lawsuit over it a couple of years ago in Britain. There's no question he's an anti-Semite; one of the major themes of Uprising is that many of the Hungarian Stalinists who were rebelled against were Jews, and Irving revels in pointing this out. His flimsy cover for banging on this drum is that, so he alleges, traditional Hungarian anti-Semitism directed against the Jews in the Communist Party was an important factor in the rebellion.

The book's interesting, though, because it deals with an urban battle. I've read Antony Beevor's Berlin, another story of an urban battle, I recently read another online book on the Paris Commune, and we've all seen what just happened in Baghdad. There's a major difference between Baghdad and the other three. As far as I can tell, there are no lynch mobs roaming Baghdad as there were in the other three cases. It also looks like there's food and water in Baghdad, or at least enough to survive until the shipments start rolling in. It also seems that the opposition in Baghdad has pretty much given up after only about three days, unlike the other cases. Also, the conquerors of Baghdad are Americans and have no old scores to settle like the Red Army, the Budapest mob, or the Communards. And, simply, Baghdad was not destroyed like the other three cities. You wanna see destroyed? Check out Grozny. Or Beirut about 1985. Or Phnom Penh ten years earlier.

This is why today's Vanguardia is just ridiculous, as usual. Baghdad Bob gets page one to gripe about the looting. Plàcid Garcia-Planas gets page four to whine about how the Yanks aren't stopping the looting. Rafael Ramos gets page five to allege that the Americans are going to plant some chemical weapons in Iraq. Tomás Alcoverro gets page ten to whinge about the looting. Baghdad Bob gets page fifteen, again, to blame the Yankees for the looting and smear them as war criminals for the death of civilians. Finally, on page eighteen and nineteen, Castro's repressive crackdown in Cuba gets a mention. Carlos Nadal gets page twenty to remind us all the Yanks are just a gang of imperialists. On page twenty-three there's a story about how wonderful and peaceful Barcelona is because they had another anti-war demo yesterday, with 300,000 according to the organizers and 25,000 according to the Government. The gummint's figgers tend to be closer to reality than the SocioCommunist organizers', as a rule. On page twenty-four there's an ode to the solidariousness of the rich kids holding a campout in the Plaza Francesc Macià.

Question: Why do they always have campouts whenever they're protesting against something? Answer: Because the campers are high-school and college kids, and adults under age 30. People don't leave home here till they're thirty or so. They live with their parents, under the scrutiny of their watchful Catalan mamas. And most of them don't have cars. This means that they have nowhere they can go to smoke pot and, mostly, have sex. Imagine if you were a twenty-seven-year-old male living in a three-room apartment with your mom and dad. Or, for that matter, a female, though I naturally identify more with the male perspective here. You'd never get any action. It would be awful. You'd be horribly frustrated all the time. No wonder all the kids are always protesting against the system. They need some kind of outlet for their pent-up energies. And, of course, when they go on the protest campouts, what they're really doing is protesting two hours a day and fornicating in the tents for the other 22 or so.

Posted 21:58 by John

There actually has been some coverage here of Castro's crackdown on prominent dissidents, sending dozens of writers and journalists to prison for long terms. However, there's been little criticism on the editorial pages (Baltasar Porcel has actually spoken out on this, to his credit. For once. Libertad Digital has been very critical of Castro. That's all I've seen as far as opinion pieces go.) Seems to me that if we're hunting down enemies of democracy, we'd do a lot better looking in Havana than in Washington. The Spanish left, of course, is never going to admit this. They're too busy criticizing America for the Baghdad looting and calling American troops "murderers" for having killed a Spanish journo to notice such an atrocious and blatant act of injustice and censorship.

Well, here's a story from Fox News about three guys who hijacked a ferry trying to get to Florida last week. They didn't kill anybody. They were sentenced to death and summarily shot. Now, the Spanish left periodically works itself up into paraoxysms about the fact that in most American states we execute murderers after due process of law. Somehow they never seem to notice it when Fidel has people shot after a mock trial, though, for having done much less.

Here's the link from Libertad Digital on the story. They've got a link to a petition you can sign, and they're calling a demo for Saturday in front of the Cuban Embassy in Madrid. LD says that Mariano Rajoy, Aznar's No. 2, blasted Castro, calling him a "tyrant". CCOO, the Communist labor union, of all people, has protested too. The Socialist Party, the PSOE (People Subsidized with Our Earnings) somehow managed to avoid any condemnation of Castro's actions and voted no, along with Batasuna (ETA's political puppet) and the Communists, on a Parliamentary proposal to condemn Castro's actions.

Posted 15:36 by John

Unsurprising Anti-American Memes in Today's Vanguardia:

1) The Yanks got away with killing a lot of Iraqis in Gulf War I. (A. Abián, p. 2)
2) The poor Iraqi soldiers were innocent victims. (Ibid.)
3) The Yanks promised the Turks that the Kurds would be kept down, and they Welshed on the deal. (M. Josa, p. 3)
4) The Yanks might let the Turks grab the oil in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Ibid., p. 4.)
5) The Turks are under Yank orders. (Ibid.)
6) The Yanks are letting the Iraqis sack and pillage Baghdad. (T. Alcoverro, p. 4.)
7) Little Ali's arms haven't grown back on yet. (Ibid.)
8) The same people who are looting Baghdad are the victims of the looting. (Ibid.)
9) The American occupation of Baghdad is humiliating to the Iraqis. (Ibid.)
10) The Yanks are losers because they haven't captured Saddam. (Staff, p. 6.)
11) The Yanks are going to pay Spain off for their support. (X. Batalla, p. 6)
12) The perfidious Yanks may try to weasel out of paying Spain off. (Ibid.)
13) Tony Blair isn't really allied with the Yanks. (R. Ramos, p. 8.)

Aw, hell, I've had enough for now. I'll come back later and pick things up starting with Baghdad Bob on page 10!

UPDATE: Here we go with Bob "Iraqi resistance stopped the tanks" Fisk!

14) The naive Americans imagine they have "liberated" Baghdad.
15) Allowing the looting is a violation of the Geneva Convention.
16) Since the Iraqi leadership had such offensively bad taste in palace furniture, defeating them was nothing to be proud of.
17) The new government will have no legitimacy because its foundation is based on looting.
18) The army of "liberation" is really an army of occupation.
19) American soldiers are mean because they search Iraqis for, like, guns and bombs.
20) The Yanks are still killing innocent civilians.
21) The Yanks are not doing a good job clearing dead people out of the streets.

Bob is just bent out of shape because of all this looting. I don't ever remember him getting all indignant over anything the Americans aren't somehow involved in. But if he can blame even a minor sin on the Yanks--like benign negligence while a repressed people explodes in its first two days of freedom--somehow it instantly becomes the epitome of evil.

YOU LOST, BOB! YOU'RE FINISHED! What respectable newspaper will hire you, now that you've proved to the world what a lazy, one-sided, and just not very smart reporter you are? HA HA HA HA HA HA--oops, sorry, I just spit out my drink, I'm laughing so hard. BOYCOTT THE INDEPENDENT! DOWN WITH THE BRITISH DR. GOEBBELS! Chortle, chortle...

Posted 18:16 by John

Today the Vangua printed a back-page interview with William Easterly, an American economist who used to work for the World Bank. He's a lefty Democrat, against the war, not fond of Bush, and prejudiced against Middle America. However, he points out that wars are lousy for the economy because they create uncertainty and that oil wasn't a motive in the war, since "if Bush wants more oil, there are many friendly countries willing to sell it to him." Also, arms manufacturers are such a small part of the US economy that their gains in production are way more than offset by the losses any war would cause to the economy as a whole. He also said, most importantly to him since he's written a book about it, that charity to the Third World don't work no good at all and the only ways to improve Third World countries are to lower immigration barriers so students and workers can come North and gain the necessary experience, and to eliminate customs barriers so that when they are able to produce something cheaper than we can, they can sell it in our markets.

So three cheers for Mr. Easterly, even if he is a lefty Democrat ashamed of his West Virginia roots, for saying "The demagogy of NGOs and institutional charities while we keep them from competing is the problem. It's more comfortable for us to give them charity than to open our markets and our frontiers so that they can share our salaries and jobs." That would be putting our walk where our talk is. It's much easier to yell about peace and love than it is to actually get any changes made that are actually going to help people, and those changes are going to have a short-term cost and a long-term benefit for us. We're going to have to adjust to the short-term shock of actually dealing with cut-price competition that is willing to outwork us.

Not a single one of the oh-we're-so-moral "No a la guerra" marchers is aware that we can only help the poor by letting them help themselves. In fact, 95% of them would be against it because they're afraid of immigration and competition, and they're very generous about demonstrating in the street when they think a problem doesn't affect them personally. But they won't agree to anything that might interfere with the security of their peaceful bourgeois lives. And they like them moros just fine over there on the other side of the Med, but they're not real big on havin' 'em in Terrassa and El Ejído and Tàrrega.

Sorry. That's how the free market works, people, and yelling about how this shouldn't be so is like yelling at the waves to stop breaking on the shore. And it's the only way to help those poor folks become prosperous. That is, if you actually care anything about their welfare.

Here's a small article about Mr. Easterly from yesterday's Vangua by the X-man himself, Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, former correspondent in Washington who has seen at least part of the light since coming home. He went just a little bit native over there and he didn't recognize it until he came back here, I figure.

Economist Easterly casts doubt on Barcelona aid to Iraq

There are cities that have no restraint when it comes to solidarity with other cities at war. Barcelona is an example. It did so with Sarajevo and it will do it again with Baghdad. Mayor Joan Clos met last Friday with 25 NGOs to prepare the aid that will be sent to Iraq.

these actions, however, do not convince William Easterly, one of the most prestigious American economists. His specialty is development and his theory is that no action of solidarity is successful if it is not accompanied by incentives for the affected populace to help itself. In this sense, he does not believe that cities are in a better position than states to reconstruct the damages of war. Barcelona, for example, may cmake Baghdad's water supply potable, and this will have an immediate positive effect, but then it will not function without some public or private entity that is honest and effective.

Easterly, who was in Barcelona yesterday promoting his book, "In Search of Growth", believes that Barcelona, like the World Bank and the NGOs, fall into the temptation of offering aid that serves its own mediatic interests but not the people who need it. Barceloan, for example, didn't only send aid to Sarajevo, but opened an office there that built housing, schools, and services. This effort, however, was not supported by wider actions that would have guaranteed the correct use of this infrastructure. Easterly, now a professor at NYU, considers that Western solidarity always ends up in whatever programs will get the biggest possible headlines, as is now happening in Iraq. This dynamic, impatient and not transparent, damages the majority of the poor countries and has caused reconstruction plans in Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Somalia to fail.

Posted 16:14 by John

More Schadenfreude. The National Review has a post up that's simply a serious of quotations from media idiots and idiotarians which have now been proven incredibly stupid. Snicker, snicker, guffaw, guffaw.

InstaPundit links to this Washington Post article about blogging and journalistic ethics. I think it's something we need to be talking about, since a well-known blogger has been nailed for plagiarism. My perspective on blogging ethics is basically this. If I report something as news, state it as fact, then it's true as far as I know. I swear. I make my own opinions clear, so you folks know I'm not unbiased or impartial. A lot of things I say are my own impressions, which I am willing to debate about. I translate a lot of stuff; you'll just have to trust me for accuracy. I do the best I can and often check with my wife if I'm not sure. If I get something from somewhere else, I credit the source. I have been known to fudge details on personal stories, especially with regard to illegal or immoral activities I may or may not have participated in. For instance, I don't give the real name or address of my hash dealer. And I'm probably not as good-looking as I let on.

As for plagiarism, you know I'm already on a personal crusade to nail a plagiarist from our local paper, La Vanguardia. My attitude is don't publish it if you didn't write it, unless you say who the real author is. That's pretty simple, isn't it? I think we can hold bloggers to that minimum.

Posted 15:53 by John

I just watched the news on Catalunya TV. They say that the Kurds and Americans have taken Kirkuk. The Kurdish peshmerga are being received as heroes. An American armored column is moving on Mosul. It should be there within hours. There has been light, sporadic fighting in Baghdad, apparently mostly between the Yanks and the "foreign legion" of Arab and Muslim volunteers and mercenaries who are still holding out. They put a lot of emphasis on the sacking of the government buildings which, as Scrapple Face said, consists of the Iraqis stealing stuff bought with their money.

The Spanish transport ship Galicia has arrived at Umm Qasr and is distributing food and water to the people there. Some of them said, "Thank you, Spain", and one of the soldiers said that the Iraqis had plenty of food but what they really needed was water. The Iraqis are calling the Spanish troops "Mister Water" instead of, say, "Tommy Atkins". Another one said, very seriously, that he was very proud to be there and to be helping people. That's the way to talk, my man. Congratulations to you and your clarity and decency among all these misguided fools looking for the dark lining within the silver cloud.

The attempted general strike in Barcelona has been a massive failure, as the only protestors are the high school kids. All the shops remained open and public transport worked normally. Supposedly there was a "march of pickets" up the Paseo de Gracia "informing" the banks there that they should close for the strike. "Pickets", in Spain, are not what we call a "picket line". They're small groups who "inform" people they'd better close down or their place will be wrecked. There was nobody at the McDonalds on Mayor de Gracia except for people having lunch there. A lot of "Aturem la guerra" signs on people's balconies are down.

In case you're interested, the mani in the Plaza Sant Jaume at lunchtime didn't get much turnout. There's another scheduled for 7:30 PM in Plaza Catalunya. There'll be a pot-bangin' tonight at 10. The theater actors will close down and march from their shows to the Plaza Catalunya carrying lighted candles. And we're gonna hear some Aaron Copland up here on Calle Martí in the barrio of Gràcia. "Chemical Inma" Mayol lives on this street. I hope she hears it. And hates it.

Posted 15:22 by John

Here's Baltasar Porcel!

There are so many absurdities in this war that, forcibly, we must deal with new realities that we have not yet codified. So can Bush himself be as closed-minded, petulant, reactionary, and ignorant as he appears, along with Rumsfeld and Rice? Maybe we should look at it from another angle: they're making war in order to make America the eternal world superpower and therefore need to ostentatiously kill not a bestialized tyrant, but a great many civilians, and meanwhile beat up on an entire country, while demonstrating that Europe is either a little lamb at their orders or a bunch of weak loudmouths. At the same time, Washington takes over all sources of energy, which it will control at its pleasure, while it shows how the Yankee people, isolated and robotized, makes up an obedient and robotic mass that, armed to the teeth, has no rivals.

Naturally, with the Twin Towers, a real hecatomb that nobody would have imagined despite the fact that it had been suggested in both movies and novels, the exact nature of inconquerable horror was put to the test. That's why it was the tipping point between the "old" and new United States, it is possible that Rice, Bush, Rumsfeld, who weren't in office because something like that was expected, who were mere members of a conservative and simplistic tendency, have become the instruments of a historic leap, of a very profound objective. People like Powell, of a superior level of intelligence, have also participated. And this ambition, or according to them the necessity, of the great leap is not new in history, in the 20th century Lenin and his followers thought like that, and they went very far in the attempt, or Hitler. George W. Bush wouldn't have lost his head like that, he'd have inagurated the era of the planetary empire.

Wow. That's a wild one. If I understand it, and I'm not sure I do, since Remei and I tried to decipher it for at least ten minutes, and decided we had other things to do like sit around and watch the news, then Porcel is comparing Bush to Lenin and Hitler--except Bush has done a better job!

Posted 13:45 by John

Boy, the Vanguardia is in a nasty mood today. Heh, heh, heh. As everyone's been saying, this is pure Schadenfreude.

Guess which reporter got the front-page article? Baghdad Bob Fisk! Here's a summary of Baghdad Bob's dispatch: "The Americans "liberated" Baghdad yesterday...sacking, pillage, anarchy...bloody hospital operating rooms...men who had servilely obeyed the most minor secret policeman have become gigantic figures, shouting with hate against the dictator...the "liberators" are a new, foreign, and all-powerful force of occupation lacking in the culture, language, race, and religion necessary to contribute to the unity of Iraq...an epic of the same large-scale orgy of robbery and destruction that the British managed to successfully prevent in Basra...(The Americans), when (Saddam) was in their hands, did what they could--in the decades of the seventies and the eighties--to arm him, help him economically, and offer him political support, making him the authentic dictator that he in fact became....(History says) in these cases, the prisons pass into the hands of the new authorities, like the torture chambers and the methods of easily making weapons of mass destruction...(The Iraqis tell me) "we will want to get rid of the Americans, they want our oil. There will be resistance and then they will call us terrorists."...At bottom I admire their ingenuousness, despite the devastating realities that await the United States in this dangerous and barbarous land...(They killed) two Western journalists and then lied about it...Baghdad lay last night at the feet of its new master...new "friends" of the United States will appear who will inagurate a new relationship with the world, new fortunes will be made which will benefit the "liberators" of the Iraqies and--also undoubtedly--new relations with Israel will be developed with the opening of an Israeli Embassy in Baghdad:"

This is a good summary of the anti-American slurs that will bloom like a million flowers in the Old European press. Let's run through Baghdad Bob's arguments, along with a few easy rebuttals:

1) The Americans are not liberators. (Gee, could have fooled me.)
2) The Americans tolerate anarchy and looting. (So Bob wants the marines to shoot them or what?)
3) Innocent people have been killed. (About a thousand, a good day or two's work for Saddam.)
4) The jubilant Iraqis are hypocrites. (And Bob calls Americans arrogant.)
5) The Yanks are ignorant about Iraq. (Well, they know more about it than you do, Bob.)
6) The Brits are superior to the Yanks. (I don't mind British gloating. I mind British gloating coming from Bob.)
7) The Americans propped up and armed Saddam. It's all their fault. (Big Lie. Try the Russians and the French.)
8) The new government in Iraq will be as bloody as the old one. (I bet it isn't.)
9) The Iraqis believe the Yanks want the oil. (For the last time, it's not about the oil.)
10) The Americans are naive fools. (Who's a fool? Maybe the guy who hasn't been right once in his career.)
11) Disaster awaits America in Iraq. (You hope so, Bob, you hope so, you swine.)
12) The Iraqis are dangerous and barbarous. (That's what we call racism where I come from.)
13) The Americans murdered foreign journalists. (That's completely absurd. See Jack Slater's piece.)
14) The Americans are the new imperial masters. (Two answers. A) the US is the nicest imperial master in history. The Brits would be second. B) that sentence makes more sense without the word 'new'.)
15) The "Americans' new friends", i.e. the Iraqi opposition, is corrupt. (Give them a chance.)
16) The US and its Iraqi puppets will get rich. (The US is already rich. Let's hope the Iraqis get richer.)
17) Israeli interests are behind it all. (Bob, you're an anti-Semitic bastard, aren't you?)

I think those are approximately all the existent anti-American arguments related to this here war against Saddam. Baghdad Bob got 'em all into one article. And the Vanguardia put it on the front page.

I'm laughing. Baghdad Bob is having a conniption fit. It's all over, Bob! You lost! You were wrong! You're the laughingstock of the world! So what else is new?

Posted 12:49 by John

Jack Slater from Slate has a column on the journalists that were killed by American tanks firing on the Palestine Hotel and Al Jazeera headquarters. As he says, it's too bad they died, but people covering wars sometimes get killed. Happened to Robert Capa, for example. And, probably, Ambrose Bierce. Stephen Crane's health wasn't helped any by his covering the Spanish-American War; he died shortly afterward. George Orwell, admittedly a combatant, nonetheless nearly got killed in the May 1937 fratricidal fighting in Barcelona. Plenty of journalists got taken hostage in 1980s Lebanon. Hell, more than several journos were taken prisoner by the Iraqis in this here war, and one of the two dead Spanish journalists was killed by an Iraqi missile, along with another reporter and a couple of American soldiers. Everybody here in Spain, though, is going ballistic about the dead cameraman in the Palestine Hotel who was apparently killed by American tank fire. Highly selective morality here, folks. Pathetic. The "No a la guerra" shock troops, including 100% of the Spanish reporter corps, have LOST, so they will now do everything possible to smear mud on the Coalition forces. Be prepared for stories over the next several years showing how terrible things are in Iraq and how it's all our fault. When you see them, just laugh. I bet we have a good laugh every day around here.

The pathetic losers held a pot-banging last night in protest, so I cranked up the Hag doing "The Fightin' Side of Me" and "Okie from Muskogee". Then we heard Charlie Daniels and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". Finally, though I don't like the song, I played Lee Greenwood singing "God Bless the USA", and then I played ZZ Top doing "Tube Snake Boogie" just to be a jerk. They were still banging the pots, so I put on Bob Seger's Greatest Hits because it's the worst CD I've got. The banging went away after about the first three songs, which I was just as happy about, so I could stop the pain. Murph played Frank Sinatra doing "My Way" and "New York, New York". Tomorrow night we get sophisticated and play "Fanfare for the Common Man", "Appalachian Spring", and then the horrific "Grand Canyon Suite".

There's a two-hour strike today against the war. Little late, isn't it, guys? There's also going to be, get this, "people's lunches" in front of American fast-food outlets at 2:30; I assume those who show up will be squatters munching on chorizo sandwiches and swilling boxes o' wine. I'm a vegetarian, but I'm thinking about going to the Mickey D's on Mayor de Gracia and seeing what happens. I'll get a Coke to show my support.

Posted 19:56 by John

Catalunya TV is now running a talk show which has as guests Anna Balletbó and Maruja Torres, who are Eulàlia Solé and Remei Margarit clones: stupid, loudmouthed women. I have no problem with loud women as long as they're not stupid. Women involved in Catalan politics, however, and especially in Catalan journalism, are universally morons. I challenge readers to name one who isn't.

I guess that isn't fair. The men aren't any more intelligent, though they generally have better manners. There are, however, several bright Catalan men.

Anna and Maruja, anyway, went on a long tirade about how the Americans were occupiers, not liberators, and about how the whole scene of pulling down the statue was choreographed by the Yankees, and how the gringos may have won the war but can never win the peace, and Palestine and Palestine and Palestine. They're just furious. I chortled to see their worked-up, twisted faces spitting blind hate.

All you "No a la guerra" people, now hear this. YOU HAVE LOST. For all your whining, the war happened and now is almost over and we won. And the Iraqi people won. And the world is a good bit safer, and the air seems just a bit cleaner somehow. And you, you hypocrites who care nothing about the Iraqis but will jump on any anti-American bandwagon rolling down the turnpike, you have been shown for what you are. Sad, pathetic people whose idea of morality is to shout arrogant and aggressive slogans and bang your pots and pans. You are no more moral than anybody else--in fact, you're much less so, because you allowed your hate for the United States to come first when you chose up sides in this here War against Terrorism. You chose the terrorists. You are morally bankrupt.

Posted 16:56 by John

The statue is down. They hitched a cable around its neck and pulled it down with a crane attachment on top of a tank. the Russians are denying that Saddam is in their embassy.

Tele 5 is all in a snoot about their guy who was killed yesterday and they're still making it their co-big story. Everybody else has dropped it for now and is filming downtown. It seems like the Spanish networks have their own cameras there, but they're using pickups from Al Jazzera and Abu Dhabi TV.

All four of the major channels here, TV1, TV3, Tele 5, and Antena 3, have cut away from their normal programming for special news coverage.

Posted 16:21 by John

The rumor going around is that Saddam has taken refuge in the Russian Embassy. The Americans are in control of all of downtown Baghdad.

Posted 15:54 by John

This huge, muscular Iraqi is taking a sledgehammer to the base of the statue; won't do too much good, I'm afraid, but I'm sure it makes him feel a lot better. They've got a big thick rope around the statue's neck, but I don't think that'll be enough, since this statue is like fifty feet high and made of steel and concrete. If they're smart they'll get a chain, use the rope to pull it up, and then hitch it to the back of a tank. The two high-rise hotels where the journalists are staying, the Sheraton and the Palestine, have been occupied by the Marines.

The disgraceful Spanish episode of the day is that a Spanish cameraman was killed yesterday when an American tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, and the Spanish correspondents claim to have berated the marines as they came into the center of the city for having killed their friend. It's hard to criticize them--their friend was killed, after all, and they must be very sad--but, guys, this is a war zone. Also, wouldn't it have seemed just a little inappropriate to have reminded the Allies as they liberated Paris that they were scum because a journalist had been killed?

Posted 15:32 by John

They are trying to pull down the statue of Saddam in downtown Baghdad. Abu Dhabi TV is showing it live. It seems that hitting someone in the face with your shoe is a serious insult in Iraq, since the crowd around the statue are throwing their shoes at it. There have been several shots of people hitting pictures of Saddam in the face with their shoes. Some guy just hugged a Marine. The Americans are swarming all over downtown Baghdad.

Posted 15:15 by John

There is more fighting to be done. Tikrit, Mosul, Kirkuk are not yet in Allied hands. Not all of Baghdad has yet been occupied. It's not all over. But the fat lady is singing. I couldn't be happier. Saddam is finished. We should have done this a long time ago. Like in 1991.

Posted 15:13 by John

Breaking News: Baghdad Falls to Americans, Population Jubilant

Catalunya TV is reporting right now, live from the Palestine Hotel in downtown Baghdad, that an enormous column of American tanks has rolled into downtown Baghdad without meeting resistance. Saddam's forces have collapsed. The people are out in the streets of the residential areas, cheering and defacing portraits of Saddam as they denounce his murderous dictatorship and shout "We love Mister Bush!" The fear is gone. The Fedayeen and what's left of the troops seem to have disappeared.

Indignant Iraqis showed Catalunya TV reporters a prison with a torture chamber where Saddam's victims were imprisoned and murdered. There is widespread looting and there is no police presence. The American forces do not have complete control of the populace and right now the situation is chaotic. It doesn't look like there are out-of-control mobs or fratricidal murders, though, at least not for now. My impression from seeing the film is that the people are, first, very happy, and second, willing to obey, more or less, the standard rules of human society.

The Marines have now flooded the center of the city. Catalunya TV has "come over to our side"; they can't help but admit that the bad guys have lost and the good guys have won. Now, as images from Al Jazeera of the Americans taking over downtown are on screen, they are already beginning to pontificate about the new international order of preventative warfare that has been established.

Posted 16:12 by John

Here's Tomás Alcoverro's report from Baghdad in today's La Vanguardia (slightly edited for length).

The Americans have big bombs. They dropped them on Baghdad. An American missile blew up an Iraqi antiaircraft cannon. We saw lots of big tanks. They went into one of Saddam's palaces. There were some snipers. The Iraqis failed to blow up a bridge. Lots of Iraqi soldiers ran away. The Iraqi spokesman told some lies. The buses are running and some shops are open. Some civilians have been killed. The Republican Guard held out in the Rashid Hotel. They lost. Victory has been decided though resistance has not ceased. The Iraqi antiaircraft fire has lousy aim. The people are afraid. Everything smells like gunpowder because guys with rifles keep shooting them in the air.

"Together with other journalists, I return to Al Kindi hospital to visit Ali, the boy with the body burned and arms amputated by a coalition "smart" bomb. Ali cries night and day, he moans in pain when a nurse softly rubs his scorched trunk with a lotion. Ali now knows that he is all alone, that his whole family died in the explosion. He moves his head from one side to the other, he moves his bandaged stumps in his desperation. In Baghdad Araji now there are hundreds of children with their lives broken like Ali."

Posted 17:49 by John

FC Barcelona plays Juventus of Turin this week. Remember, Barcelona is the only soccer team in the world that has publicly joined the anti-American protests and it accepted 300,000 euros from Qadafi's son's soccer team to play a friendly match just last week. Qadafi's son himself owns 7.5% of Juventus. It is morally unacceptable to root for either of these two teams. I therefore hope all the players get non-fatally injured (they volunteered to play for the disgusting clubs that they play for, so any consequences are their own fault), that it rains like hell all night and soaks the horrible fans that cheer for these two horrible clubs, that something non-fatal but really obnoxious happens that gets Juventus's stadium closed for the rest of the season, and that the Barcelona players hold an orgy after the game like they allegedly did last year in Madrid and all catch the clap from the call girls they hire.

Posted 17:30 by John

OK. I wrote to Libertad Digital (an excellent on-line news site in Spanish. It's conservative in its perspective, but generally pretty reasonable; the only weird stuff on there is that they have something against the Masons--there was something wacky about the Masons and the Trilateral Commission a few days ago), El País, ABC (the Madrid-Sevilla newspaper), La Razón, and the COPE radio network about our friend Màrius Serra. Let's see what happens.

In case you want to write to Josep María Casasús, the Vanguardia's ombudsman, about what you think of Mr. Serra and his "article", his e-mail address is ombudsman@lavanguardia.es. His telephone number (it's printed in the Sunday paper) is 93-481-23-38 if you have some late-night minutes to use up. The telephone code for Spain is 34. Please be polite. If you don't know Spanish, use English. They'll figure it out.

Posted 14:27 by John

Boy, I've sure been pissed-off and nasty over the last couple of days, haven't I? Can't help it when I am surrounded with such idiocy. Some old drunks were slagging off the States and the British down in the café this morning when I went down for my morning Vanguardia-and-coffee dose. The gist was, "The Americans are the biggest murderers in world history and the Germans are second. And the English are the biggest pirates." I restrained myself and nobody got hurt.

Humor is a healthy answer to frustration, I hope. Murph and I put up a joke piece on EuroPundits--we think it's pretty good. Check it out. Many thanks, by the way, to Andrew Ian Castel-Dodge for fixing the EuroPundits template. Let's see if you people using Mozilla can get through to it now. And thanks to the other collaborators on EuroPundits, who have all sent in some very good pieces.

I'd like to use this space to ask that other blogmeisters take a look at EuroPundits and, if you like what you see, add it to your blogroll. I'd also like to call on other collaborators to join up--the more the merrier. All you have to do is write about Europe and post it.

Posted 16:14 by John

I posted the following on March 20:

[3/20/2003 11:16:43 AM | John Chappell]
Márius Serra, who is a self-righteous prick, is the guy who writes the crossword for the Vanguardia. He adds these pearls to the discussion: One of the most respectful forms of protest is, without doubt, silence. Even if it's only a minute, or thirty seconds, to remain silent in memory of the victims of human predation gives us space to think, distance ourselves from the most-shouted slogans, and be aware of things. That's why, on a day like today, it is worthwhile to bother ourselves to tremain silent for one minute in homage to the four thousand American civilians (of course, actually, it was around 3000) who died in New York on September 11, 2001, victims of the mad warmongering of some fanaticized beings. Since we're already remaining silent, we could be silent for 13 minutes in memory of the 130,000 Iraqis that the bombardments of the civil populace during the Gulf War killed. (Bullshit. He's just making up numbers. It was more like 5000. And while the death of civilians is a tragic and unfortunate cost of war, the Americans' plan wasn't to kill those people. There's a major difference in motivation between the US Army and Al Qaeda. But there's nobody to blame but Saddam for the death of these people since if he HADN'T STARTED THE GODDAMN WAR they wouldn't have died. That there seems to me to be one of those "root causes" that sophisticated Old Europeans are supposed to be non-simplistic enough to realize.) Doesn't all that silence make you think? So, since we're at it already, let's lengthen those 14 minutes that we've been shut up with 20 more in homage to the 200,000 Iranians killed by their Iraqi neighbors with the weapons (literally of mass destruction) that the Americans sold to Saddam Hussein while he was their ally. (OK, Iraq and Iran go to war, and, guess what, let's blame America! Of course, the great majority of Saddam's arms were and are of, uh, Russian and French manufacture, and the rest are illegally acquired from, say, North Korea. And Mr. Serra isn't saying that those Iranians were, uh, the soldiers of an aggressive and dictatorial regime.) Then we could dedicate another quarter hour to the 150,000 Russians and Afghans killed at the hands of the Taliban, also with American arms and training, including Bin Laden. (Wait. The Russians INVADED Afghanistan, remember? Isn't any of this their fault? Second, we never armed the Taliban because when the Russians pulled out in 1989, we pulled out too, and the Taliban wasn't formed until 1994. During the eighties we did arm the mujihadeen, some of whom later joined extremist and terrorist groups, not because we loved them but because they fought the Soviets. Third, we never armed Bin Laden. And fourth, these dead people were Soviet soldiers and Afghan revolutionaries, not civilians.) Since we've gone so far, we only have 11 minutes left in the hour, we could dedicate them to the more than 100,000 Japanese victims, direct or indirect, of the nuclear barbarism of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention Vietnam, Panama, Chile, Guatemala...(Please. You could name a number of past American actions that are morally questionable, just like you could do for any other country on the face of the earth--including both Spain and Catalonia. But remember, the Japanese started the war, and we had to stop it somehow. Many fewer civilians were killed in the atomic bombings than would have died in a full-scale invasion of Japan, which would have been just as horrific as the German-Russian war.) All added up, this makes an hour of silence. One minute for the American victims and fifty-nine for the victims of the Americans. How much longer will we have to lengthen our sepulchral silence? (Marius, you prick, do you or do you not understand that the great majority of American actions of questionable morality occured in the context of the Cold War, when there were lesser evils like the Shah and Pinochet and greater evils like Communism, responsible for 50 or 60 or 100 MILLION deaths in the 20th century. World War II had to be won and we won it, and the Cold War had to be won and we won it too, and you should thank your god for the preservation of your sad little asshole, Marius, because instead of getting all worked up about your right to speak Catalan, you'd be cheerfully obeying the orders of your masters in either German or Russian. No, Marius thinks too highly of himself and his culture to admit anything of the sort. You know how, sometimes, someone can be your political adversary but you like him? I like Jordi Pujol despite everything, for example. But I just know I'd hate Marius. He's one of your snotty uptown bourgeois Catalans who thinks because he's a medium fish in a tiny pond he's something special, and he hates us because our example proves the truth, which he will die before admitting but which he also knows in his heart, that he and his culture are insignificant in the eyes of the world, so insignificant that their most recognized sign of their identity around the world is a football team whose players are almost all from somewhere else.)

A reader, Angie Schultz, noticed the similarity between Mr. Serra's text and an anonymous piece that has been floating around the Internet for at least a year. She suggested that I should Google "We've just kept quiet for one hour" and see how many times it showed up. What do you know! There was Mr. Serra's article--but in English! Many different times! And all of them dated long before Mr. Serra's publication date of March 20, 2003.

I put two and two together, as Angie had, and came up with this solution to the equation: Mr. Serra's text is plagiarized from the anonymous Internet piece. So I telephoned La Vanguardia and spoke personally to the ombudsman, one Josep María Casasús. He assured me that he would undertake an internal investigation. I then sent him an e-mail, at his request, in which I gave the URLs of five different sites that contained the text.

Today Mr. Casasús responded to my complaint in his column. It seems somebody else complained, too.

Reader Julio Lamaña wrote to Màrius Serra with the request that a letter be published asking that this case be clarified.

This reader said the following to the abovementioned commentator: "I read, today, the beginning of the war on Iraq, your article about the methods of silent protest against the war. And I found, with great surprise, that the last part of his article coincides point by point with one of those anonymous "mails" that circulate around the net and that we send one another, also as a method of silent protest, among the users of Internet."

Another reader, John Chappell, made a complaint to the ombudsman about this coincidence between part of the abovementioned article and some anonymous texts that can be found on the Internet. In his e-mail, sent March 25, he provided the addresses of five Web pages that contained the objectoniable text, and added, "There are some 15-20 more web pages containing the text. The oldest I have found is from January of 2002. It seems that the country in which this text originated is Pakistan and that it was written shortly after 9-11, though I cannot prove that."

I have asked the author of the article, Màrius Serra, an explanation of this case.

He puts it like this: "I admit my error and I apologize for it. As I responded to Mr. Lamaña, I did not know about the e-mail, but I obtained the coincidental facts from the same source as its anonymous diffusor, surely one of the web sites found by Mr. Chappell. How can I cite an anonymous source of which, besides, there are various versions? My error consisted of not having included the formula "is circulating around the Internet" to the final text of the column committed to peace which I wrote and signed the same day the war broke out. It seemed to me that it was a superfluous formula, the same as "they say, they comment". Now I see that I erred and I appreciate the chance to make amends. Will those who provoked my article make amends?"

WILL THOSE WHO PROVOKED MY ARTICLE MAKE AMENDS?

You smug, self-satisfied plagairist. I'm going to have your job for that.

Mr. Serra, what you did was this. You came across something that was floating around the Internet. It was appropriately anti-American and you liked it. So you stole it. You changed it around a little, sure, but you stole it and you signed your name to it and you know it. Your text is not an original work. It was written by someone else--we don't know who that someone else was, admittedly, but we do know it wasn't you, because I've found this text dated January 2002, not March 2003. And you stole it. You signed it. And you got paid for it. That is STEALING, Mr. Serra. That is PLAGIARISM. That is against the rules of journalism, no matter where you studied it. It's rule Number One, I think: "Don't sign your name to someone else's work."

As for your weak excuses, 1) you MUST say "I found this on the Internet" if you found it on the Internet instead of writing it yourself. Quim Monzó, someone from La Vanguardia who does give credit to his sources, often writes about things he came across on the net, with this difference from you: He always says, "I found this on the Internet". He does not say, "I wrote this myself."

2) Exactly what is the "same source" that you and the anonymous author consulted and got exactly the same numbers from? Please name it so that I may consult it. What, Mr. Serra, is your alleged source? The dead giveaway is the statistic of "150,000 Russians and Afghans killed in Afghanistan." Isn't it quite a coincidence that this point, along with all the other points you make, Mr. Serra, are in the text you claim not to have seen previously?

3) You seem to take plagiarism very lightly, Mr. Serra, since you describe your error as one of having merely omitted the "superfluous formula" (i.e. fact) that this "article of yours" was something going around Internet. Your error was actually that of representing the ideas in the stolen text as your own. They are not your own ideas, Mr. Serra.

4) The smoking gun, the fingerprints, the blood on your hands, Mr. Serra, is your comment about "various versions" existing on the Internet and your affirmation that the text was anonymous. These are the two reasons you give for not having cited the original text. How did you know, Mr. Serra, that there were "various versions" of the text circulating if you hadn't already seen them? How did you know that it was anonymous? Why did you think it was OK not to mention the fact that it was circulating--something your own words prove you to have known? And, Mr. Serra, you claim never to have seen the text in question before you wrote the article.

5) Y encima con chulería al final, como si no hubieras hecho nada malo.

I therefore accuse you, Màrius Serra, of being a thief and a liar, and I accuse La Vanguardia and its ombudsman of openly tolerating plagiarism. Sue me, please, if you have the courage.

I am e-mailing this post to Libertad Digital, El Mundo, ABC, and El País.

Posted 19:33 by John

Catalunya TV is reporting that Pasqual Maragall, jerk, Catalan Socialist leader, and ex-mayor of Barcelona, has spouted off again. This time he compared Prime Minister José María Aznar with Hermann Goering. Now, that seems a bit excessive to us, but, you know, comparing Goering and Maragall doesn't seem at all unreasonable. Let's try it.

GOERING MARAGALL

POLITICAL AFFILIATION National Socialist Party Catalan Socialist Party

ATTITUDE TOWARD ART Stole thousands of great works Subsidized thousands of dreadful works

NEVER MANAGED TO Beat the RAF Beat Jordi Pujol

WHY FEARED AND HATED Brutal police gave out beatings Lazy police gave out parking tickets

ARCHITECTURAL FEATS Built huge ugly Neoclassical stuff Built huge ugly postmodern stuff

FATE OF SAID FEATS Blown up by Allied bombs, 1945 To be blown up by demolition squad, c. 2020

ATTITUDE TOWARD AMERICA Hostile, violent Hostile, condescending

SPORTS APOTHEOSIS Tacky 1936 Berlin Olympics Very tacky 1992 Barcelona Olympics

WIFE Hot Swedish aristocracy babe Non-hot Catalan bourgeois non-babe

DRUG OF CHOICE Morphine Alcohol

Posted 16:31 by John

I don't know what the deal is; over the last couple of days, as the Allied offensive gathered speed, the Vanguardia was generally pretty reasonable. I guess they saved all their Yankee-hating bile for Saturday.

Right off, in the page two signed editorial, José Antich, the editor-in-chief, calls for a negotiated surrender of the Saddam regime, an immediate end to the fighting, and exile for Saddam. Mr. Antich points out that if we stopped fighting now some civilian lives would be saved.

Mr. Antich, exactly why, at this point, would we want to do that? I can think of three possibilities why Mr. Antich permits himself to live in a fantasy world in which the Anglo-Americans might even consider such a thing:

1) Mr. Antich is a Spaniard. Spaniards are historically very afraid of change, since every time the government has changed (until the Transition) in Spain it's been done with nasty violence and has resulted in a change for the worse, at least over the short and middle terms. Mr. Antich is projecting his fears of such turmoil happening again in his own society--remember, the last attempted coup in Spain was as recent as February 23, 1982, and the coupsters took over the Parliament and rolled the tanks through the streets of Valencia before giving up without bloodshed.

2) Mr. Antich just naturally detests the goddamn Yankees and cannot stand the idea of an American military victory; he knows that Spain will never win another military victory and that Catalonia's last chance ever was back in 1714. This lack of comparative prestige eats away at Mr. Antich's guts, and so he wishes to deny the Coalition said military victory by accusing us of bloodthirstiness should we not negotiate a peace now with Saddam. Said military victory, in that case, will be tainted in Mr. Antich's eyes and prose and "not really count".

3) Mr. Antich actually gives a shit about the poor bastards in Baghdad.

I figure we can discount motivation #3, leaving us with a combination of #1 and #2 as the answer here.

Plàcid Garcia-Planas is in Kuwait City, but he informs us on page 3 that "At nightfall (yesterday), the regime broadcast to the world--and to its own people--images of Saddam working a crowd in the streets of the residential neighborhood of Al Mansur, in Baghdad, with the smoke of the bombings in the background and within cannon shot of those who twenty years ago served him up the gunpowder on a tray: the United States Army...The Anglo-American command, meanwhile, continued yesterday announcing its "unstoppable" advance and the entry of troops into the Iraqi capital. With more dead, more wounded, and more prisoners...The truth is that the Anglo-American forces still have not found those arms of mass destruction that served as the excuse to launch the war." Plàcid, dude, 99% of Saddam's arms came from Russia, France, and China, in that order. The only thing of any importance we ever sold Saddam were some 60 "civilian" helicopters that were easily converted for military uses. Every other piece of weaponry he has came from the aforementioned Twisted Three. Please shut up the Big Lie that Saddam was once an American puppet and that he was created by the perfidious Yankees. And please mention that the Allies are doing everything they can to save civilian lives, and that Saddam's regime's conduct in the war has amply demonstrated that we are right in getting rid of him, in case any further proof of Saddam's evil were required.

On Page 4 Xavier Batalla reminds us that the Yanks and the perfidious British grabbed Iraq after World War I and held its oil until Saddam's boys nationalized the oil in 1972 and then signed contracts with "everybody non-Anglo". See, we're at war in order to grab the $57 billion in oil extraction contracts now in French, Russian, and Gulf Arab hands. Mr. Batalla reminds us that the French were promised Mosul under the secret Sykes-Picot agreement that divided up the (soon-to-be-formerly-Turkish) Middle East between Britain, France, and Italy way back in like 1915, and perfidious Albion grabbed it, thereby rooking France out of its fair share of the Iraqi oil. France didn't get its fair share of supplying Iraq with anything it had the money to buy, like nuclear reactors and Mirage jet fighters and, oh, yeah, oil equipment too, until Saddam took over, and now we're going to cheat them out of the commerce-with-a-dictator that is their right just like we cheated them out of Mosul, so rightfully theirs. Batalla's pieces often sound like they were written by the quai d'Orsay.

Here's a nice text from page 5, signed by "Staff and agencies". "Despite the pride of this millenarian people, which causes them to resist the invaders, the effect of the air raids by the powerful Anglo-American air forces is beginning to take effect among the citizens. The city has been without electricity for two days, and in the capital, the citizens--more cultured, more bourgeois, more comfortable than in the rural areas of the rest of the country--aren't as used to losing the basic elements of civic life. As if that were not enough, the so-called "smart bombs"--which in this war have missed their targets several times--have wounded, mutilated, and killed hundreds of civilians. The images of children without legs, without arms, like young Ali, are not easy to forget. They, the children, are the innocent victims of this campaign initiated to overthrow the Iraqi president." The staff and agencies then let us know that the water's been cut off for two days too and it's really hot and the air is nasty because of all the fires Saddam's troops set and that everybody is really suffering a lot. What agency did this crap come from? The Iraqi Propaganda Agency?

The Vangua is still printing Bobby Fisk's diatribes daily, which you can read somewhere else if you want to, but I love this bit from page 12: "Almost nobody here and now believes that the Americans can't open up a way to the capital if they decide to. After all, Napoleon managed to enter Moscow." Well, Bobby, you personally sent a dispatch a couple or three days ago in which you said there was no way they'd make it through the Iraqi defenses. For you readers, just scroll down a few days. And what exactly do Napoleon, Moscow, and Tchaikovsky's bloody 1812 Overture have to do with anything happening in the Middle East two centuries later?

France, Germany, and Russia have gotten together and proposed that the UN be in charge of postwar reconstruction. Yeah, right. The Big Three at the Vatican, Navarro Valls, Tauran, and Sodano, issued a communication saying they wanted the war to stop and that "the Iraqis themselves should be the ones who manage the reconstruction of their country." Hasn't the Vatican got anything better to do than prop up De Villepin and Fischer?

Some geniuses bombed the PP headquarters in the Galician cities of Pontevedra and Moraña and molotov-cocktailed the regional Fishing Department, of all things, in Santiago de Compostela.

Finally, check out EuroPundits for all kinds of good stuff by Arthur Craven of The Radical, Nelson Ascher, Madrid's own Jesús Gil of Ibidem, and, get this, a translation (by me) of an article by Remei Margarit, a local "psychologist and writer" who is just as dumb as Eulàlia Sole!

Posted 14:37 by John

As I'm sure everybody knows by now, the Allies are moving into Baghdad after defeating the Republican Guard to the south of the city. It's not all over yet, but it's getting a lot closer to the end. You have to figure that Saddam's units have all been hit hard by bombing, that they've all suffered losses, that they're running out of supplies, and they haven't got much left. You also have to figure that Saddam's henchmen are not going to go down easily, since they know the best thing that could happen to them is fall into American hands and then serve life in Marion with Noriega and the Unabomber. That's their best-case scenario now, and it's not too appealing. Their worst-case scenario involves a mob, a rope, and a lamppost, and it's even less appealing. So some very nasty things are going to happen in Baghdad very soon. I'm glad I'm not there. I think if I were I'd stay home and stay put. I figure that the chances of being impressed into military service if I stayed home are lower than the chances of something bad happening to my family and me if we hit the road. You have to assume they're not going to try to force the women into combat, especially not my 78-year-old mother-in-law, if they search the house. So we stay put, stay inside, lock the doors--we'd have stocked up on food and stuff--and wait for the Allies. And hope that no missiles go astray in the meantime. The chances of that are pretty low, since Baghdad's a big place and most people live well away from the areas that have been bombed so far. But let me tell you, if I were a Baghdadi right now, I'd be a lot happier if one of the things I had around the house was a gun in order to be able to go down fighting in case the Fedayeen wanted to hang me as a shirker, like the SS did to non-combatant men in Berlin.

Posted 20:51 by John

We are sad to report that Michael Kelly, The Atlantic Monthly's editor at large and former editor, was killed Thursday night in Iraq. The magazine will release a full statement shortly.

This is up on the Atlantic's site. It's the first I'd seen of it. I'm sure most of you have read Kelly's pieces; I certainly have read a lot of them. He was a good writer and reporter and he talked a lot of sense. It's a damn shame he's dead.

This is going to sound puerile, but Kelly's death sort of personalizes the war for me. I can't pretend to love every individual person in the world; that would be impossible. I sincerely hope that all the billions of people I don't know will have a chance to live and try to be happy, but it's hard to deal with people in the abstract, like, say, the number of people killed in the Yemeni civil war (5000-15,000) that they had a few years ago. Now, that's half the people in Leawood, Kansas. That's a lot of people. But I didn't know any of them and while I'm sorry they're dead, I can't say that that one particular horrible episode is keeping me awake at night.

But I know Michael Kelly. I've been reading his stuff for years. He's always been one of the guys from those middlebrow political magazines, you know, Gregg Easterbrook, Michael Kinsley, Andrew Sullivan, Robert Kaplan, Mark Steyn, whom I would read anything by, even if it was titled Save the Nuclear Drug-Free Manatees. I've probably read at least one Michael Kelly piece a month for I don't remember how long.

Well, that's something I won't be doing anymore. Now, I never met Kelly, and he never heard of me, of course. Still, though, celebrity deaths affect us because they change our individual lives. When John Belushi died I, selfishly, was devastated because it would mean no more funny John Belushi stuff. Same with John Lennon. Those guys made up part of my life, just like my friend Jim from across the alley and my grandma and my idiot cousin Robbie. (Robbie leads the world in getting himself somehow stuck without a car. Either it's broken-down out on the Interstate or he's run out of gas or he's been picked up by the cops again or it's been towed away or he got drunk and forgot where he left it. All this Robbie-vehicle mess has probably cost his parents ten thousand bucks.) Undoubtedly the Princess Diana frenzy was partly caused by her daily appearances in the national press, which denuded her psychologically to the degree that most folks probably knew her better than they did their own husbands or moms or kids. Losing her took a big chunk of their lives.

Now, of course, Michael Kelly did not occupy the same place in my heart that Princess Di occupied in the hearts of millions, but I'll never read any new stuff by him again. A small piece of my life is gone. My perspective on the war is different because I now know somebody who got killed. It makes me think of all the people who volunteered to go out and get shot at and maybe die. I hope they all come out all right, and I hope we don't kill any more innocent Iraqi people. I think the Anglo-American leaders, both political and military, have done an admirable job in limiting the number of dead innocents; this is the first time a blitzkrieg--and this drive on the enemy capital, bypassing surrounded enemy units and cities with armored attacks and total control of the air while infantry moves up behind and secures the rear areas, is pure blitzkrieg--has been fought with the conscious objective of minimizing casualties to innocents. I hope that our leaders will continue with this policy, and that they will choose the manner of taking Baghdad that will do the least damage to the civilians. (I'm no expert, but I vote we try to hold the Republican Guard out on the plain south of Baghdad if Saddam is dumb enough to keep throwing them at us and kill them there rather than within the city, which is exactly where we do not want to fight.) Let's don't kill anybody innocent on purpose, OK? We're trying our best not to, and I think we've done a very good job so far. But every single one of these people who are killed leaves a hole in other people's lives much bigger than the one Michael Kelly leaves in mine. Got to keep those holes in people's lives to a minimum, OK, guys?

Posted 12:36 by John

Here are a few excerpts from today's La Vanguardia:

"The testimony collected by this journalist (Sophie Shihab of Le Monde) seems straight out of Pentagon propaganda. Yet it is true. An old man states: 'The English don't shoot at us. The civilians are only in danger from those Fedayeen dogs, who shoot at the English from our houses.' A student says: 'Those Fedayeen idiots think they're going to stop the airplanes by burning oil. There hasn't been a revolt yet in Basra because we don't have any weapons.'...An ex-policeman says that two people who appeared dancing on a CNN broadcast when the Anglo-American troops entered Iraq were murdered shortly afterwards."--Plàcid Garcia-Planas, Kuwait City. Well, Plácid, thanks for the vote of confidence. Gee, couldn't it be that all of the alleged Pentagon propaganda IS ACTUALLY THE TRUTH? The student's comment is an excellent argument against gun control, by the way. The death of the two celebrating people who thought they'd been liberated from the rule of a "murder state" (much better than "rogue state", I think) may be one reason we're not hearing that much open sympathy for the Brits and Yanks from the Iraqi people. The Iraqis don't want to talk until it's all over and our journalists are wise not to identify any Iraqis who do so.

"The White House--and especially the Pentagon--insist on making this transfer (of power to a civilian Iraqi government) only after American economic and security interests--the oil, the reconstruction contracts, the functioning of a regime supervised by the CIA--are assured...Any day the American president pounds on the table, pulls his revolver out of his belt, and threatens Teheran and Damascus with being next on the "blacklist" if they collaborated under the table with Saddam's regime...Meanwhile the Anglo-American troops continue firing the missiles and the machine-gun bursts that will sow the seeds of hate and anger in the Middle East in the generations to come...Bush wants a "viceroy" wearing a New York Yankees cap."--the ineffable Rafael Ramos, London.

"Iraqi Defenses Appear Impenetrable"--headline on Robert Fisk's latest dispatch. Uh, Bobby, you're about 48 hours behind the times.

In Parliament yesterday Zap talked about the "horror" of the "illegal, unnecessary, and unjust war" and said the Allied plans had "completely failed". He added that the war is not "clean"--gee, Zap, if we wanted to make it dirty, we'd have nuked Baghdad years ago--and that there hasn't been a popular revolt against the Saddam regime. Therefore, Spain should withdraw from the Coalition. Aznar called Zap "dangerous" and "an isolationist" and reminded him that he'd supported the Gulf War in 1991, when women and children got killed too and the bombers actually took off from Spain, but the government in power in Spain then was Socialist. Gas called upon Aznar to resign. Aznar told him not to pass out any lectures in morality and that he, Gas, had never condemned Saddam's regime. He also reminded Gas that members of his party were taking part in the illegal and antidemocratic attacks on PP headquarters and offices around Spain.

Classy Spanish Politics Anecdote of the Week: The Socialist spokesman in the Valencia City Council suggested that Foreign Minister Ana Palacio, who was caught badly off balance by a question at a recent press conference and stumbled through a monumentally bad answer, was suffering from "mental complications due to her illness". Palacio recovered from cancer several years ago.

The real Jesús Gil is being investigated for disappearing 92 million euros while he was mayor of Marbella. Viva el Atleti!

Terenci Moix, the Catalan author, kicked off. Too bad, every man's death diminishes me and all, but Terenci never wrote anything worth reading as far as I can tell. He did love cats in real life, so I hope he's in cat heaven, but his stuff is just infumable, as they say around here.

I must be honest and admit that I am prejudiced against a certain kind of gay man, the kind that behaves in an exaggeratedly effeminate manner. Like Terenci Moix, whose real name was Ramón. What kind of guy would change his name from Ray to Terence? It just bugs me, not so much because it's "typical" of gays--most gays, of course, do not behave effeminately--but because it's so obviously a phony put-on. Look, dude, it's cool and all if you're gay, but don't camp it up, please. That just turns me off, and I'll bet a lot of straight people and a good few gay people agree with me. Trust me, guys, we may bug you and turn you off by talking about, like, stock car racing, but you bug us and turn us off by talking about, like, Marilyn Monroe. We need to arrive at a "no stock cars, no opera arias" agreement. I think we can all live with that.

Remei also has a problem with that kind of gay man; she believes they're parodying and making fun of women by copying stereotypical women's behavior badly. She admits this almost certainly isn't conscious on these men's part, but she still doesn't like it.

I remember, when I went to the University of Kansas in 84-87, living in Hashinger Hall, the fine-arts dorm. The joke at Hash was that most guys walking around campus who acted a little fruity were really straight, but if someone acted a little fruity AND lived at Hash, then you knew he was gay. I would bet twenty percent of the guys in the dorm were gay or bi, and there were a few lesbians. That was back before it was fashionable to be a lesbian, so these chicks were for real. Anyway, though, I come from the first generation that was brought up to think homosexuality is more-or-less normal, but in suburban Kansas City in the 80s you didn't see much of it. At the dorm we sure did, though, and had to adapt to it at the confusing age of 18. Now, I remember writing a paper for high school on the gay rights movement (remember looking through those damn Reader's Guides to Periodical Literature for hours on end?) and finding references in Time and Newsweek from the late 70s that still referred to homosexuality as abnormal and a mental disease.

I know you guys face discrimination that I don't. But give us straights a break. Those of us in our late 30s are the first bunch who have been taught that gay folks are OK just like the rest of us, and the lesson hasn't completely taken effect yet. There are a couple thousand years of Judeo-Christian tradition that we've had only about thirty years to get over, and I'll bet many of the people who are most anti-gay would prefer to see gays in the army than in the churches. The last redoubt of the hard-core anti-gays is found among elements of (by no means all of) the Christian Right, and they firmly believe that homosexual behavior is in itself immoral. That's a belief that is hard to change.

Anyway, back to star of stage, screen, and sociology Eulàlia Solé! Lali just wrote a boilerplate feminist novel that has recently been published, and they printed her photo in the paper. God, she's even uglier than she used to be. Anyway, here she goes.

We must ask ourselves why this war has generated so much repudiation. It isn't that other military conflicts leave people with human qualities indifferent, as those who have a bad conscience for supporting the attack on Iraq like to claim. What is happening is that this war is monumental for various reasons: it is a pre-announced war (so Lali, you'd have preferred a sneak attack?); international law has been violated through not obtaining the desired permission from the UN (what about those 17 UN resolutions that Iraq violated?), the Anglo-American troops are perpetrating aggression against a State that, although in the hands of a dictator like many others, is sovereign (wait, since many countries have dictatorships, does that mean we shouldn't try to overthrow one in particular, which is probably the worst in the world after North Korea? And so what if the Iraqi state is sovereign? It's not legitimate, that's for sure. And wasn't Germany a sovereign state when we attacked them back in 1941? Remember, we attacked the Germans, they didn't attack us. Yes, I know they declared war first, and they were sinking our ships, but on land we were the attackers. And what's this aggression? Saddam took over full power in 1979, attacked Iran in 1980, fought until 1988, attacked Kuwait in 1990, attacked the Kurds and Shiites during his whole reign, and provided aid and comfort for every terrorist group imaginable and its dog. That sounds like pure aggression to me), the Bush Administration has lost all credibility when it became known that it has auctioned off the reconstruction of flattened Iraq to companies belonging to his minions (so, Lali, you want us to get the port of Umm Qasr fixed so we can send in humanitarian aid or not? You want us to put out the fires Saddam's men set or not? Private companies do both things a lot better than armies do), and, a decisive factor, people are better informed than ever... (You mean that the Western media is permitting Iraq to broadcast its propaganda around the world, something that no other country has ever permitted during wartime).

Lali's solution, anyway, is for the Americans to be forced to withdraw by a UN resolution for a cease-fire and then a process of negotiation for Saddam's exile. Yeah, that's sure realistic there. She feels it is unjust that Blair, Bush, and Aznar will not be punished as war criminals responsible for the "massacre". Sorry, Lali, they won't, but Saddam and his thugs most certainly will be if the Iraqi people don't get hold of them first. I vote we let them string Saddam up themselves if they want to. He'd look lovely hanging off a lamppost.

Plagiarist Márius Serra's column has not been suspended while he is supposedly being investigated internally. It's in the paper today.

Barcelona beat Boy Qaddaffi's soccer team, 5-0. Gerard scored a hat trick. Qaddaffi's son played, badly, during most of the game. 20,000 people showed up. I didn't because it rained. The spectators at the match chanted, "No to the war" and "fervently applauded" Boy Qaddaffi when he left the pitch at the 79th minute. He was also roundly applauded when he took a very bad shot at the Barcelona goal. I wish it had gone in so we could accuse FC Barcelona of tanking a goal for an unspecified amount of cash. Gerard said after the game that he thinks there's some kind of anti-Barcelona conspiracy since they wore those damn peace T-shirts. Somebody's out to get them. See, when the splendid Barcelona fans tossed the pig head and the whiskey bottle and the mobile phones and the lighters and coins at Figo, the club was sanctioned by the Spanish Federation with having to close their stadium during two home games. They appealed and delayed and whatever and now the Federation is putting down its foot and saying, "Look, you are going to close down for two games and you are going to do it sometime this season." They're whining because if the punishment goes into effect now the key games against Real Sociedad and Deportivo will have to be played in some other stadium. Yep, there's a conspiracy against them because they're pacifists. That's why they're threatening to sue the Federation. Can the Federation kick them out of the league? I bet in the States a league can kick out a team that sues it. I've certainly never heard of a team suing any American league except for Al Davis's Oakland Raiders.

Posted 19:33 by John

What If the French Had Made...?

Star Wars:

PRINCESS LEIA:

Thanks to these secret plans, we can now launch a proton torpedo into the weak spot and blow up the Death Star!

JEAN-LUC SKYWALQUER:

Just a moment, ma chere. What about all the innocent Imperial Stormtroopers who might lose a limb, or even their lives? I propose we contact Darth Vader and strongly suggest that he disarm the Death Star and turn it into a GalactoDisney.

The Lord of the Rings:

GANDALF:

There's nothing else for it. Someone has to take the Ring into the midst of Mordor and cast it into the volcano so thit it might forever be destroyed, and that evil might perish!

FRODEAUX:

Isn't that a little bit dangerous?

GANDALF:

Perilous even unto death, yea, and beyond mere death.

FRODEAUX:

Merde to that!

High Noon:

TOWNSMAN (rushing into saloon):

Sheriff! The Clancy boys are ridin' into town and they're gunnin' for you!

GARY COUPEUR:

I'm sure there must be some non-conflictive process within the framework of international law whereby we can reach a fair and transparent agreement which will be beneficial to all participants.

The Godfather:

TOM HAGEN:

The movie guy won't give Johnny Fontaine the part.

VITEAUX COEURLYONI:

I'll make him an offer that he'll be willing to come to the table and negotiate about. Pass the Beaujolais.

Spartacus:

PROCONSUL SADDAMUS:

At last I have crushed you dirty seekers of freedom! Now it only remains to to tear out the rebel leader's entrails before his eyes! Tell me! Who is Spartacus? The others may go free (fingers crossed behind back), but Spartacus must die!

FRENCH SLAVE #1 (pointing):

He's Spartacus!

FRENCH SLAVE #2

Yeah, that guy's Spartacus! The one with the dimple in his chin!

CHORUS OF FRENCH SLAVES:

He's Spartacus! It's him! Kill him! Kill him!

The Magnificent Seven:

TOWNSMAN:

The bandit chief Saddamía is coming to raid our town! You hired guns are our only hope! You must save us!

YUL BRYNNEUR:

Wait, that Saddamía guy is the one we sold all the Remington Seventy-Sixes to last year, ain't he? He's a pretty tough hombre, that thar hombre.

STEVE MCREINE:

Yeah, I don't cotton much to takin' that critter on in anything like a fair fight. Let's git the hell out of Dodge.

OTHER FRENCH HIRED GUNS:

Vite! Vite! Let's head for the hills!

Posted 19:09 by John

UPDATE on the FC Barcelona story: It is NOT an April Fool's hoax. April Fool does not exist in Spain. The equivalent is December 28, "el día de los inocentes". The best inocentada I remember was a few years ago Marca led with the story that the Camp Nou had been condemned and was to be demolished because of aluminosis. (At the time some older buildings from the Fifties were being torn down because this dangerous construction technique had been used, which made it believble until you remembered what day it was. That one got me for at least a couple of hours.) Anyway, here's the link from El Mundo Deportivo.

Posted 17:43 by John

Well, we got slightly over 13,000 page views during March, more than 2000 more than in February. In case you were wondering, the websites that we've gotten the most hits from are, in order, InstaPundit (source of half our visitors), Andrew Sullivan, Bite the Wax Tadpole, Samizdata, Amiland, Ibidem, No Replacement for Displacement, Baltic Blog, EuroPundits, PejmanPundit, Cinderella Bloggerfeller, Travelling Shoes, Dr. Weevil, and Belligerent Bunny Blog. The most popular bits were, in order, the one on Susan Sontag, the one on the Goya film awards, the one on dumb stuff people believe, "You Know You're an Old European", the very recent one on the rioting in Barcelona, and the one on my, uh, television debut.

Posted 16:19 by John

I don't know whether Blogger is working or not. I don't think it is.

Posted 15:47 by John

Here's the hot news from Barcelona. Catalunya TV is announcing that American troops are in a Vietnam-type quagmire and that they're too young and inexperienced. At least that's what the guy on the ground in Kuwait City says, and I bet he's a real expert. All the school kids cut class today for peace. They did neato stuff like toss red paint on government buildings. Four of the punks who looted the Corte Ingles have been arrested because they were identified by video cameras. A whole bunch of middle-class squatter street thugs have been sentenced to between one and four years in jail for the riot they participated in several years ago on the occasion of the Oct. 12 celebration. Let's see if they actually serve any of it.

Catalnya TV is also reporting that there are more than 60 Iraqis living illegally in an improvised campsite in Ceuta who have applied for asylum in Spain. They have to prove they're in danger for political reasons back in Iraq in order to get asylum here. Some have been turned away already. One of them, who identified himself as Mohammed and would not show his face to the camera, said he was a lawyer in Iraq, that he had had problems with the government and the police, and that Saddam Hussein was bad for him and bad for his family. Gee, folks, I thought we were all demonstrating in favor of the Iraqi people. Well, here are some real Iraqis you can help. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and sponsor one of these guys? Put him up at your house while he's waiting to get his papers. Oh, wait, we only like Iraqis when they're a long way away, not when they're anywhere near here. Doctors without Borders are trying to do something for these people, reinforcing my conviction that they're the only one of the big leftist "NGOs" (= a euphemism for lobbying group) that is worth a damn.

Get this one. FC Barcelona, the club that covered itself in idiotarian glory when it appeared on the pitch the other day in "Barcelona for peace" T-shirts, is playing a friendly match tomorrow. In the Camp Nou. Against a Libyan team. Against the champion of the Libyan league. In fact, against the very Libyan team that Colonel Qaddaffi's son, Al Saadi Qaddaffi, both owns and allegedly plays for. In exchange for a fee of 300,000 euros.

Al Saadi is also the President of the Libyan Football Federation, a colonel in the Libyan Army, and the owner of 7.5 percent of Juventus. He has a seat on Juventus's board of directors. (There's another club I can't root for anymore.)

"At El Prat airport the Libyan expedition was received with bouquets and flowers and with the presence of two children, one wearing a Barcelona jersey and the other with the Arab team's shirt."--La Vanguardia. Even the Vangua is disgusted; the headline on the sports section is "Qaddaffi rents the Camp Nou: Libyan leader's son's team pays 300,000 euros to play Barcelona."

I can never support FC Barcelona ever again, no matter whether they invent a cure for cancer. Are they so desperate for money that they soil their jersey and defile their stadium by renting them out to any dictator with a few hundred thousand bucks? And they have the nerve to come out in favor of "peace". Hala Madrid. Fuerza Espanyol. Hell, even Viva el Atleti. And Mucho Betis.

Admission to tomorrow night's game is free, by the way. I just might show up and boo Barcelona.