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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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".

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.

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.

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

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!