This is very interesting. John Hawkins ran a poll among conservative bloggers in which they voted on the twenty worst figures of the twentieth century. Nazis were somewhat underrepresented, though Hitler and Stalin tied for first, of course; Chairman Mao came in third and Pol Pot fourth. I'd have definitely put Himmler very high on my list, and Reinhard Heydrich and Julius Streicher would have made it too. Hans Frank would be a good candidate.

The figure whose absence most surprised me was Leon Trotsky.

A case could be made for "Bomber" Harris and Curtis LeMay.

Hideki Tojo didn't make it.

Juan Domingo Peron should have; his actions were nasty enough, but one thing about, say, Lenin, is that he thought he was doing the right thing. He was monstrously wrong, of course. But Lenin himself was personally incorruptible and probably thought of himself as an extremely virtuous person. Peron, however, was low, vicious, corrupt, base, and vile, and he knew it. Kind of like Hermann Goering.

Franco didn't make it. I'm not too surprised. I personally would not put Franco on my "20 worst" list, though he of course goes on the bad side. Franco, again, certainly thought of himself as a virtuous patriot rather than a mass murderer.

The Rosenbergs did make it; I wouldn't have voted for them, since they were fairly minor figures in espionage. The Cambridge circle of Philby, MacLean, Burgess, Cairncross, etc. were much more significant traitors.

How about Robert Byrd, the corrupt Ku Klux Klansman? And what about Old Joe Kennedy? If half what they say about Old Joe is true, he probably belongs. How about Jew-baiter and iron-fisted dictator of his company, Henry Ford? Maybe we ought to run a poll of "20 Worst American Public Figures." Psychopathic murderer-types like Ted Bundy or Bonnie and Clyde don't make it, as they were just criminals who didn't affect anyone's lives but those of their poor victims.

Here's my list.

20. Joe McCarthy
19. Robert Byrd
18. Vito Marcantonio
17. Strom Thurmond
16. Margaret Sanger
15. Emma Goldman
14. Meir Kahane
13. Huey Newton
12. Huey Long
11. Jesse Jackson
10. Mayor Daley I
9. Gus Hall
8. William O'Dwyer / all those damn Mafia-connected politicians
7. William Randolph Hearst
6. Curtis LeMay
5. Bull Connor / Ross Barnett / all those damn segregationists
4. Joseph P. Kennedy
3. Henry Ford
2. Alger Hiss / All those damn traitors who sold out to the Soviets
1. Woodrow Wilson

I just put up a long post over on EuroPundits; it's a translation of an article by Fernando Onega from the Vangua about Aznar's successor as PP leader, Mariano Rajoy. The article is very positive in tone, and virtually takes for granted that Rajoy will be elected as the next Prime Minister in the March 2004 general elections.

Be prepared for some very dirty tricks in the upcoming string of elections. Artur Mas, Convergence and Union's candidate for Catalan Prime Minister, has already accused Socialist candidate Pasqual Maragall of suffering from delirium tremens; Maragall is VERY widely rumored to be an alcoholic. This hadn't been brought up in public by an opposing politician before, at least not so loudly.

The rumor already being spread about Rajoy is that he is gay; this is alluded to obliquely in Onega's article. Rajoy was, certainly, a bachelor until he became a Cabinet member. Now, as Onega says, his sentimental life is stable.

Now, my opinion is that it doesn't matter whether or not Rajoy is gay. That's not going to affect his job performance, and there's no reason to prefer a gay to a straight or vice versa for a political post.* But if Maragall is a drunk, that is going to affect his performance. I would not vote for someone I knew to be an alky.

*Well, Ignatius J. Reilly does believe that there are reasons to prefer gay political leaders to straight ones:

As I was wearing the soles of my desert boots down to a mere sliver of crepe rubber on the old flagstone banquettes of the French Quarter in my fevered attempt to wrest a living from an unthinking and uncaring society, I was hailed by a cherished old acquaintance (deviate). After a few minutes of conversation in which I established easily my moral superiority over this degenerate, I found myself pondering once more the crises of our times. My mentality, uncontrollable and wanton as always, whispered to me a scheme so maginficent and daring that I shrank from the very thought of what I was hearing. "Stop!" I cried imploringly to my god-like mind. "This is madness." But still I listened to the counsel of my brain. It was offering me the opportunity to Save the World Through Degeneracy. There on the worn stones of the Quarter I enlisted the aid of this wilted flower of a human in gathering his associates in foppery together behind a banner of brotherhood.

Our first step will be to elect one of their number to some very high office--the presidency, if Fortuna spins us kindly. Then they will infiltrate the military. As soldiers, they will all be so continually busy in fraternizing with one another, tailoring their uniforms to fit like sausage skins, inventing new and varied battle dress, giving cocktail parties, etc. that they will never have time for battle. The one whom we finally make Chief of Staff will want only to attend to his fashionable wardrobe, a wardrobe which, alternately, will permit him to be either Chief of Staff or debutante, as the desire strikes him. In seeing the success of their unified fellows here, perverts around the world will also band together to capture the military in their respective countries. In those reactionary countries in which the deviates seem to be having some trouble in gaining control, we will send aid to them as rebels to help them in toppling their governments. When we have at last overthrown all existing governments, the world will enjoy not war but global orgies conducted with the utmost protocol and the most truly international spirit, for these people do transcend simple national differences. Their minds are on one goal, they are truly united, they think as one.

None of the pederasts in power, of course, will be practical enough to know about such devices as bombs; these nuclear weapons would be rotting in their vaults somewhere. From time to time the Chief of Staff, the President, and so on, dressed in sequins and feathers, will entertain the leaders, i.e. the perverts, of all the other countries at balls and parties. Quarrels of any sort could be easily straightened out in the men's room of the redecorated United Nations. Ballets and Broadway musicals and entertainments of that sort will flourish everywhere and will probably make the common folk happier than did the grim, hostile, fascistic pronouncements of their former leaders.

Almost everyone else has had an opportunity to run the world. I cannot see why these people should not be given their chance. They have certainly been the underdog long enough. Their movement into power will be, in a sense, only a part of the global movement toward opportunity, justice, and equality for all. (For example, can you name one good, practicing transvestite in the Senate? No! These people have been without representation long enough. Their plight is a national, a global disgrace.)

Degeneracy, rather than signalling the downfall of a society, as it once did, will now signal peace for a troubled world. We must have new solutions to new problems.

I shall act as a sort of mentor and guide for the movement, my not inconsiderable knowledge of world history, economics, religion, and political strategy acting as a reservoir, as it were, from which these people can draw rules of operational procedure. Boethius himself played a somewhat similar role in degenerate Rome...

Spanish soccer: Barcelona beat Bilbao away, 0-1. Cocu headed in a free kick cross from Ronaldinho. Madrid won, too, and Beckham scored on another header. The event of the week, though, was streaker Mark Roberts running out on the field at the Madrid game, Beckham's debut in the Spanish First Division. This time he was advertising an Internet gambling site. For more on Mr. Streaker, check our post from a few days ago.

Don't forget to listen to my favorite radio station, KHYI in Dallas. They play hard Texas country mixed with western swing and a good variety of other country, from Bakersfield to bluegrass. Just go to their site and click on Listen Now. Their site explains the different shows they have, so you know what you're going to hear in advance. On weekend nights they play some ass-kickin' live shows, ranging from well-known artists (including the occasional Grammy winner) to local guys just coming up to Texas jazz. Mega-highly recommended, as good as a commercial radio station can get.

Our buddy Dennis Hollingsworth, whose website you might check out--it's on the blogroll over there--wants to know something about Mariano Rajoy, the next prime minister of Spain.

Well, OK, he hasn't been elected yet, that's not coming up until March 2004, but barring massive disaster he's going to win another absolute majority for the center-right People's Party because the competition is so pathetic. The PP is a well-oiled machine. Aznar announced that Rajoy was his choice as his successor and the entire party, including competitors for the top spot like economics genius Rodrigo Rato and hardball political player Eduardo Zaplana, has saluted, said "Yes, sir", and is already at work getting Rajoy elected as Aznar's successor.

That is professionalism, competence, and party discipline, exactly what the Socialists have shown us they so badly lack.

Rajoy is a Gallego but of the non-nationalist sort. He's not real good looking--has kind of a scraggly beard and wears glasses, sort of like yours truly. His ears are a lot bigger than mine, though, and he's got more white hair in the ol' beard. He is known to have a sense of humor, unlike his predecessor Aznar, and he is especially well-known as a negotiator and political operator. He's the PP's fireman, the guy they send to make a deal with whoever when a deal has to be made. He smokes huge cigars constantly. He is, as Willy Loman would say, well-liked. He's comparatively young, only 48, so if he gets in he might be there for a while.

He's been with the PP during his whole political career, going back to 1981 when he was elected to be a regional deputy to the Galician parliament and the PP was still called the AP.

He's been in the Cabinet since 1996 when Aznar got elected Prime Minister for the first time. He's been minister for Public Administration, Education and Culture, Interior (law enforcement), and Presidency (more or less Chief of Staff). [I had to look this up, of course.] Right now he's Minister for Presidency, First Vice-Prime Minister, and party spokesman. He was also campaign manager for the PP in both the 1996 and 2000 elections.

The general opinion floating around here in non-tinfoil hat wacko circles is, hey, good choice. Mariano Rajoy will be very goddamn hard to beat. Prediction right here, right now, is that in the March general elections he takes another absolute majority in Parliament.

To sum up: this guy is a pro.

Check out this archive with literally hundreds of links on nationalism. Its purpose is scholarly rather than inflammatory. The links range from high-level political theory analyses to organizations promoting atrocious pseudo-history and racism. Many of them are just plain fascinating, ranging from Dutch claims to have invented printing to Italian irridentism in Dalmatia to invented "Irish" names used by the diaspora in America to an exhaustive list of the nearly 100 "genocides" the Assyrians have suffered since 612 BC.

There is something in here to offend absolutely everybody, so check it out. You are likely to learn a great deal, a lot of which is probably wrong; you yourself must be the judge of the credibility of a linked source.

June Thomas has finished her very interesting series in Slate on the Basque country. Go read it if you haven't yet. Here's a paragraph I'm going to take exception to, though.

A recent study by Inaki Zabeleta found that 85 percent of articles about Basques in the U.S. press refer to terrorism, so it's not surprising that for most Americans, nothing says "Basque" more than Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom), the terror organization responsible for more than 800 deaths over the last 30 years. Of course, ETA didn't appear out of nowhere—the Spanish establishment imprisoned more than 8,000 Basques in the 20 years following Franco's death, torturing many of them while in custody.

Well, first, ETA was founded during the early '60s, so its existence has nothing to do with anybody's being arrested after 1975 when that old bastard kicked off. Now, it's possible to justify ETA's actions during the Franco dictatorship, which included the 1973 murder of Admiral Carrero Blanco, Franco's No. 2. However, after about 1960 Franco turned over all real power to the "technocrats" who administered the country competently for him, and really the only restrictions on freedom were those on speech and assembly--you couldn't criticize the government but you could do pretty much whatever else you wanted. Franco was still a dictator, though, and a few people were still executed for political reasons. You can make reasonable arguments that it is OK to use violence to overthrow a dictatorship, even a dictablanda like that of the late Franco years.

But after Franco's death, Spain went through a three-year transition-to-democracy-period, and in 1978, with the approval of the Constitution, Spain became a full-fledged democracy, including special rights for minority groups like the Basques and the Catalans.

There is absolutely NO justification for the use of violence against an elected representative democratic government, especially not one with such a liberal constitution as Spain's.

So the Spanish government, made up of lots of Basques (see Benegas, Txiki, and Damborenea, Ricardo) as well as people from all the rest of Spain, imprisoned 8000 Basques between 1975 and 1995. First, let's eliminate those arrested between '75 and '78, when Spain was still in transition and the government was not completely democratic yet. I bet that drops our number of Basque arrestees by plenty. Second, do you think the Spanish government was going around arresting Basques for shits and grins? I sure don't. I think they were arresting them for their connections with ETA. And, yes, it's true that a few ETA prisoners were tortured. A few of them--six or eight--were even killed by the anti-ETA GAL death squads the early-eighties SOCIALIST government set up. But ETA prisoners, as a rule, always claim they've been tortured. I don't buy the great majority of their claims any more than I buy the claims of torture in Guantanamo.

We've got a scoop! Television Espanola is reporting that they have learned that Mariano Rajoy will be Jose Maria Aznar's successor as the conservative People's Party candidate for Prime Minister of Spain. The official announcement will be Monday.

So we're going to have lots of electoral fun over the next few months here, with the Madrid regional Parliament elections on Oct. 26, the Catalan regional elections sometime in early November, the general elections in March 2004, and the Andalusian regionals sometime around then, possibly on the same day. Then we'll have the European Parliament elections sometime in later spring 2004. This is going to be great.

Predictions already: PP wins the Madrid region, Maragall and his Commie / Republican Left supporters win in Catalonia, ending 23 years of Convergence and Union government, the PP takes an absolute majority in the generals, the Andalucist Party will decide the Andalusian elections because there'll be a near-tie between the PP and the Leftist coalition, and nobody's going to vote in the Europeans since nobody gives a rat's patoot.

Yesterday El Periodico, Barcelona's working-class newspaper, printed a three-page "dialogue" between "actors" Carles Flavia and Pepe Rubianes. Here are a few of the highlights:

Flavia: ...Hey, listen, Pepe, you should have come to the Club (Barcelona de Natacion, where some of the events at the world Swimming championships were held). They insulted the American anthem!

Rubianes: I'll tell you something really kick ass (cojonudo) that I saw in Egypt, in a hotel in Cairo: the TV was on and I saw all the people watching and applauding. I thought there was a football game. No way. It was some scenes from Iraq, Yankee soldiers...And you know why they were applauding? They applauded every time an American got killed.

Flavia: Did they do the wave?

Rubianes: And they cheered...One day, when they killed three of them, I thought Cairo was going to explode...

Rubianes: ...What's happening in the world has me completely traumatized. I really mean it.

Flavia: You pick up a newspaper and it makes you bitter.

Rubianes: I never thought that humanity could reach such levels of barbarity and of moral and ethical misery. The Iraq war, Israel and Palestine, so much injustice that we're seeing and so much arrogance and so many lies. Today everything is OK, everything is justifiable. We've reached a terrible point of human evolution, above all because power is in the hands of a bunch of mental retards, morally handicapped, who always have the ace up their sleeves.

Flavia: We could have a very bad time.

Rubianes: They talk about terrorist groups, Al Qaeda and all that, and it turns out that it is the army of the poor. It's their defense against the rich. When I was a kid, my dream was to kill Franco. I didn't want to be an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted to kill Franco. I would have been thrilled to kill him when I was 18 or 20 years old. And, of course, I'm a terrorist. I'm very proud of having been one, although only mentally, because I've never killed anyone. Of course, later they tell you that innocent people die, but there's nobody innocent in this world. We're all guilty from birth.

Flavia: Original sin.

Rubianes: People defend themselves the way they can. State terrorism is as bad as these groups' terrorism. Isn't what Israel is doing in Palestine terrorism? Isn't what Bush is doing terrorism? You see this and your soul falls down to the floor. People are good. But the problem are those four sick people who govern, who live far away from the people's reality.

Flavia: All this is creating, in addition, a huge abyss between civilizations, a bestial hatred.

Just one comment, from the historian Stanley G. Payne:

(Andreu) Nin (leader of the semi-Trotskyist POUM in Catalonia during the '30s, killed by the Communists) was a sincere and courageous man who died an martyr to his cause. Yet it is well to remember where he stood on the question of revolutionary violence. There is no evidence that he did anything to limit the mass killings in Catalonia in 1936, and in 1922 he penned the following justification of the Bolshevist liquidation of the revolutionary extreme left in Russia:

"The Russian Communist Party is the only guarantee of the Revolution, and in the same manner as the Jacobins saw themselves obliged to guillotine the Hebertists, in spite of the fact that they represented a tendency to the left, in the same manner that we ourselves (in the anarchist CNT--Nin was none too stable in his affiliations) have eliminated those who constituted an obstacle to the realization of the objectives we pursued, our Russian comrades see themselves inevitably obliged implacably to smother any attempt which might break their power. It is not only their right but their duty. The health of the Revolution is the supreme law."

Like most of those who seek to justify revolutionary murder, Nin assumed that he was justifying the elimination of other people, not himself.

Source: The Spanish Revolution, p. 301.

Did you need any more evidence to make you believe that what they're calling the "Iraqi resistance" over here are a bunch of terrorist murdering sons-of-bitches? Here it is.

You know who's got a funny site is our regular contributor in the Comments section, Akaky. Check out Passing Parade. It's worth a read. I just wish he'd post more often, but he's somewhat more selective in his posting than we are. I mean, over here at Iberian Notes we just blather on off the top of our heads about whatever. Akaky doesn't post unless he's sure it's good.

Big news today in Spanish politics: For some reason the government funds something called the Center of Sociological Investigation, which is their equivalent of the Gallup Poll. Anyway, the most recent survey on which party Spaniards intend to vote for gives the PP a solid six-point advantage, showing that the mud the Socialists have been slinging (Iraq, the oil spill, the water plan, the education plan, the failed general strike, the problems with the high-speed train) is not sticking, while the circus the Socialists have put on in the Madrid regional Parliament has re-convinced a lot of people that the Socialists are unprofessional and incompetent and not fit to govern.

The stats: PP 41.2%, Socialists 35.2%, Communists 6.3%, Convergence and Union 3.8%, Galician National Bloc 1.5%, Basque Nationalists 1.2%. Aznar has promised to name his successor as PP candidate for Prime Minister within a month; the two big favorites are Rodrigo Rato and Mariano Rajoy. Jaime Mayor Oreja is their man in the Basque Country, Josep Pique is their guy in Catalonia, the incombustible Manuel Fraga is the man in Galicia, and Alberto Ruiz Gallardon is their leader in Madrid. These guys, except Pique, are all heavyweights. The Socialists have nobody comparable.

The Socialist reaction was to accuse the government of manipulating the statistics, of course. The PSOE is drifting; they stand for nothing except for being against Aznar and the PP. They have no program, no proposals, no plans, nada de nada. They are reduced to simply reacting to everything the PP government does.

Check out HispaLibertas, one of our favorite blogs. They were nice enough to link to us regarding the heat wave controversy, even though they disagree with us. Well, hell, this is just more evidence that us folks on the right aren't a conformist flock of sheep that don't think for ourselves, as our amigos on the left would have it.

They've picked up a hilarious story (in English) on a bunch of Ukrainian hoaxters-con men who sucked up subsidies and contributions from Western radical-left groups by pretending to be the representatives of a variety of Ukranian lefty groups struggling among themselves. These guys represented themselves to Commie groups as Commies, to Trot groups as Trots, to Green groups as Greens, and the like, and the money came rolling in. I've been laughing for the last ten minutes. I hope these dudes are on their way to Rio; I'm normally anti-fraud, of course, but this one is just too good.

I'm starting to feel like a sportsblogger, but it's August and there's not that much in the news except for Iraq and Tony Blair, who seems to have given a bravura performance during his testimony. This whole deal about the "45-minute" intelligence report has been blown massively out of proportion. There were thousands of facts, all damning to Saddam and his government, in the British dossier on Iraq that was released to the public. (I linked to it back in the day--just hit "search this site" if you want to find it again.) One of those facts turns out to probably have been wrong. One error does not a liar make. And as for David Kelly, I'm sorry he's dead, but if you're a government official and you go around leaking stuff to the media, your ass is going to be called on the carpet. If Kelly, who seems to me to have had the same problems I have (major depression, possibly bipolar, along with a couple or three personality disorders--trust me on this one, I've spent enough time institutionalized with really crazy people to be an authority on this subject) couldn't handle pressure, he should simply have avoided pressure situations for his own health. That's what you do if you're unstable.

So here's the sports.

In American Major League Baseball the payroll maximum is $117 million; if you exceed that, you have to pay a "luxury tax", so teams try to stay below that amount. Teams close to the limit are the Yankees, the Mets, Texas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Boston. The Yankees' total budget is something like $150 million. In baseball, the smallest payrolls are in the $20-40 million range, putting the smallest possible total budget at around $40m.

Here are this year's total budgets, in millions of euros, in the Spanish soccer First Division:

Real Madrid 293
FC Barcelona 163
Valencia 90
Deportivo de La Coruna 75
Atletico de Madrid 54
Betis of Seville 48
Celta de Vigo 42
Athletic de Bilbao 38
Mallorca 36
Real Sociedad of San Sebastian 35
Malaga 29
Villarreal 27
Espanyol of Barcelona 26
Sevilla 24
Racing de Santander 23
Valladolid 18
Zaragoza 18
Osasuna of Pamplona 13
Murcia 7
Albacete 4

Gee, who do you think is going to win? And can you predict which teams are almost certain to drop down to Second? They really ought to go to a 12 or 14-team First Division--who wants to see Madrid play Murcia?--but that ain't gonna happen. It's fascinating that American sports leagues are much more "socialist" and European leagues are more "capitalist"--e.g. the NFL's sharing out, equally, the TV money among all teams, or the fact that all the leagues are closed to new teams and that teams that perform badly don't drop in category. In baseball even the most pathetic team wins three of every ten games. If Albacete wins three games all season (out of 38) I'll let Baltasar Porcel, Chemical Lali, and Ballpark Nacho take over this blog.

June Thomas from Slate has continued with her week-long series of articles on the Basque Country. They're very good, and she does discuss ETA terrorism, though perhaps not as much as some of us would prefer. See, when most people in Spain think of the Basque Country, the first thing that comes to mind isn't "the food is great" or "the people are friendly" or "the coast is lovely" or "the countryside is pretty" or "the culture is unique". It's "ETA has killed more than 800 people and wounded thousands more."

One minor complaint: she doesn't like the Jeff Koons statue "Puppy" out in front of the Guggenheim museum. It is, simply, an enormous puppy made of a wire screen (I suppose) that is completely covered with flowers. I love it. It's a perfect living contrast to the metallic museum building. Sure, it's kitschy. It's also far superior to any of the works of "art" inside the museum except for the three small rooms of mediocre Picassos and Kandinskys and Klees and Grises and Mondrians that they stuck in seemingly as an afterthought. The rest of the place is filled with contemporary conceptual crap.

If you look carefully, near the giant puppy off to the left, there is a small bouquet of flowers left there every day. It's in homage to a Bilbao policeman who was killed on that spot on opening day of the museum by the ETA.

One problem with these huge new museums--Barcelona spent millions of dollars on an enormous white lump of a building that's called the MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporari de Barcelona?)--is that they don't have anything to put in them. There are only so many good works of art. The Macba, I believe, doesn't even have a permanent collection, though I wouldn't know because I've never been inside.

If you want art in Barcelona, go to the Romanesque / Gothic museum in the Palau Nacional on Montjuic, which is unique in the world, or the Museum of Modern Art in the Parque Ciutadela, full of 1860s-1920s works by Catalan artists, or the Thyssen collection up in Pedralbes (not nearly as impressive as the one in Madrid but well worth a visit) or the Miro Foundation, also on Montjuic (only if you like Joan Miro, of course; I don't, but if you do, this is THE place) or the Picasso Museum in a 16th century palace on Calle Montcada. The thing about the Picasso is that it's full of mediocre works that he did before he was famous and mediocre works that he did after he was famous, but all the works that actually made him famous are in New York or Paris. Also check out the galleries along Calle Petritxol; you might even want to buy something if you have some bucks.

Dumbshit thing I saw in Kansas City: We have an excellent art museum, the Nelson-Atkins, strong on American, Expressionist, and especially Oriental art. I suppose the pride of the collection are the Van Goghs. They have a Miro, though, and on the little sign next to the painting telling you the title and the artist, they identified Miro as French. Jesus Christ. Any professional art historian or curator ought to know that Joan Miro was from Montroig del Camp right here in Catalonia and that he lived for most of his life in Mallorca. Remei and I complained and they corrected it. But that's a really basic and just plain embarrassing, provincial mistake.

Anyway, though, go read Ms. Thomas's series.

Check out this hilarious article on the world's most famous streaker from ESPN Page 2. If you like sports, you really ought to keep up with Page 2, which never makes the mistake of taking sports too seriously. As Jim Bouton once said about '70s TV sports coverage, "They read off the scores like they were the Vietnam battle deaths."

Also, by the way, don't miss "Bend It Like Beckham". It's the best sports movie since "Breaking Away".

Here's a damn good story from the Weekly Standard on the Dems currently campaigning in Iowa. Boy, I sure hope Howard Dean actually wins the nomination. Bush will chew him up, spit him out, and leave the nasty mess all over the floor for Hillary to try to clean up sometime before 2008, which is when she's going to run. Forget Al Gore. He's done. Well-done. Charred on the outside without the slightest bit of pink inside. We ain't talkin' carpaccio here.

Also check out this lovely self-smearing Hillary stumbled into and the Wall Street Journal pointed out. (Via FrontPage.)

Here we go again with some gratuitous America-bashing from the Vangua! There was a workplace shooting in Chicago in which six people were killed, as you know. The murderer (who had been fired, probably for spending all his time in court rather than at work) had been arrested twelve times in the last four months for illegal possession of weapons, assault, and domestic violence, so it's clear we're talking about someone with a real stable personality here. About as stable as a giraffe on ice skates. What I want to know is why they didn't lock him up a long time ago. Anyway, check out these facts from the news story, which is not labeled either "Analysis" or "Opinion":

It is evident that the harshness and competitiveness of the American labor system, added to the fragile network of social assistance, contribute to the desperation of those people who lose their jobs, and this can cause violent reactions.

Gee, that's interesting. It looks to me like this guy was a violent criminal who was seriously mentally disturbed. I bet that was what caused his "violent reaction".

Another fascinating comment in the story was that, in our reporter's opinion, the TV news didn't give enough coverage to this mass murder--they merely interrupted regular programming for a special report, that's all--because workplace killings are so "habitual" in the United States. He was able to cite two cases from 1999 to back up his statement.

Now, that's how you can distinguish legitimate criticism from America-bashing, because in cases of America-bashing you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If the TV news had gone wild and played the story up huge, our reporter would have slammed the States for its superficial and sensationalistic media news reporting.

I also think it's interesting that our reporter didn't mention the well-known fact that Yankees are gun-crazy nutcases, at least in this particular story. This might be because a) the killer was Hispanic, and we all know that Hispanics aren't wackos like those Bible-belt shotgun-toting rednecks, b) he had obviously obtained his gun illegally, so you can't blame this one on the Second Amendment, and c) the guy's last name was Tapia, which is a surname of Catalan origin.

Here's my take on the story: Catalans are naturally inclined to extreme acts of violence, as is proven by the violent uprisings they carried out against a constitutional government in 1909 and 1919-23, and the mass violence that both sides dealt out in the 1936-39 Civil War, with thousands of civilian victims on both sides. The Catalans are, by nature, so dangerously violent that General Franco's 40-year repressive dictatorship was necessary to prevent even more acts of senseless killing. The fact that this murderer is of Catalan descent just proves my point.

Sports Update: Good God, the Royals have actually made a couple of smart deals to help them out down the stretch. They're just a game back of Chicago, and they've picked up Brian Anderson from the Indians, who is a competent No. 3 or so starting pitcher (ERA 3.71) and who beat the Rangers last night, and they got former Yankees All-Star outfielder Rondell White from the Padres for two lousy minor leaguers. White has the big bat that they need so badly. This will allow them to bench Ken Harvey, the Royals' worst regular player, move Raul Ibanez to first base, stick White in left field, and let Aaron Guiel play full-time in right. Guiel is on a hot streak, he's having what's clearly a career year, but you ride a guy who's playing as well as he is right now. Mike Sweeney and Carlos Beltran are back in the lineup. Kudos to General Manager Allard Baird, who's not nearly as big a moron as we all thought he was, and to Manager Tony Pena, who took an awful 2002 team and turned it into a pennant contender. Pena is clearly the American League Manager of the Year. And wait till next year, when they've got two hot pitching prospects (Gobble and Greinke) and another big outfield bat (DeJesus) ready to come up from Triple-A.

More Big Sports News: I have relented and am willing to give FC Barcelona another chance. It's hard to turn your back on a team that you've rooted for during fifteen years like I have for the Barca. They have done several things that are making me change my mind.

1) They got rid of obnoxious moron Joan Gaspart as club president and elected competent and well-behaved Joan Laporta.
2) They're getting rid of the Argentinian contingent who made so much noise talking radical leftist politics last season. Sorin, Bonano, and Riquelme are all gone. Saviola is staying, but he's the one who kept quiet.
3) They are accepting their punishment of a two-game closing of their stadium for the disgraceful pig-head throwing incident last year. No more whining.
4) They have announced that they will no longer tolerate the actions of their radical hooligans, the Boixos Nois. Until this season, not only did Barca allow them to raise hell in the stands, they let them in free and even gave them monetary subsidies. No more.
5) They hired much-respected Frank Rijkaard as coach and got rid of Milosevic-supporting Serbian Fascist Radomir Antic. Frank is the first black coach in Barca history and he was one of AC Milan's legendary Duch trio from the early '90s, along with Gullit and Van Basten, and he's a Cruyffist, too. He might be the first black coach ever in Spanish soccer, I don't know.
6) They didn't blow lots of money on crappy players this off-season--they used to be so arrogant that they figured they could just throw money around paying millions of euros for overrated players and they'd win anyway. This off-season they spent their big cash on Ronaldinho, who's worth the money, and some small cash on pedestrian players like a goalie and a couple of defensemen who are actually both competent and young.
7) They've been punished for their hubris with last year's sixth-place finish.
8) You've just got to hate Real Madrid and their high-dollar Beckham circus. Since nothing pisses off a Madrid fan more than Barcelona's success, I have to root for Barcelona by default.
9) I remember the early-nineties glory days with Bakero and Beguiristain and Koeman and Laudrup and Stoichkov and Eusebio and Zubi and Guardiola. That was a team you had to love. They had real class, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and Jackie Robinson class. Hating Barca, like I've been doing for the last nine months, is betraying the memory of the spirit that team had.

Oh, jeez. Here we go again. The Vangua publishes a section called "Cultura(s)" every Wednesday. Normally, it consists of an interview with someone nobody cares about, several reviews of books and art exhibitions that nobody is going to read or see, and an essay bashing America.

This week it's Jorge Semprun's turn. Semprun is an old Stalinist who has never been right about anything. OK, we'll give him his props: he fled Spain after the Civil War and went to France, where after a couple of years he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Buchenwald. He survived, as did many of those sent to Buchenwald and Dachau, because those were not Auschwitz or Treblinka-style death camps created for the killing of Jews and other racial undesirables, nor were they holding camps for those who would end up at a death camp, like Bergen-Belsen; they were political camps for anti-Nazis. The problem is that Semprun wasn't arrested for being a liberal or a democrat or a patriot; he was arrested for being a Communist, a Stalinist true believer, who followed Party orders at all times. Semprun also wrote the script for the movie La guerre est finie, which is what he'll be remembered for, and something like forty books.

In the debate about Europe: its future, its political formation, its ongoing expansion to ten new countries--a debate which is, by the way, logically permanent, since Old Europe is, above all, pluralism, critical reason, and democratic debate--in that discussion, new considerations have been introduced since the crisis opened up by the American war in Iraq.

A crisis which is neither the first nor the last in the Europe-United States alliance, as necessary and problematic since its beginnings. In this case, nevertheless, the unilateral and fundamentalist decision by President Bush's cronies to ignore all international legitimacy, basing all their strategy on the undeniable military power of the US, which nobody today in the universe can oppose, that arrogant unilateralism has multiplied the negative effects of the initial decision.

Unilateral? 15 of the 19 NATO countries supported the war, along with everybody else in Eastern Europe. Ignoring international legitimacy? We are currently occupying Iraq with the permission of a UN resolution passed 14-0 in the Security Council.

From the first moment, France and Germany were right, in the Security Council, when they opposed the American affirmations about Iraqi arms of mass destruction, maintaining the orientation toward a reinforced intervention of the United Nations inspectors in that country. It has already been demonstrated that the overblown danger of those weapons was a lie by the State, the most shameless, the most cynical, that world history has ever seen. And it is lamentable, not only from an ethical point of view, that such a disgusting and horrible lie--none of the dictatorships of the 20th century has ever dared to do so much to justify an imperial intervention, has been conceived, developed, and put into effect in a great democracy.

WHAT? Imperial intervention? Remember the Nazi-Soviet pact or the Nazi takeovers of neutral Denmark, Norway, Holland, or Belgium? How about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe or the crushing of the Hungarian revolution? Comparing the Anglo-American decision to permanently get rid of rogue states and terrorist gangs to any real imperialist power grabs is so stupid that it's, well, really stupid. And, by the way, no one in the Bush or Blair administrations told any lies at all, as the British investigation of the BBC is demonstrating.

Now, from this correct position, neither France nor Germany has been able--though the overwhelming principal responsibility lies with France--to develop and occupy a strategic position that would have permitted Old Europe to distance itself militarily from the US, maintaining, nevertheless, a political position in the coalition and in international responses toward the predictable and inevitable problems of the US in Iraq after its also inevitable and predictable rapid military victory.

If I'm reading this right, Semprun wants to have his cake--Old Europe decides what's going to happen, not the Americans--and eat it too--maintain Frog-Kraut presence in the Western coalition--while doing nothing to make that cake, such as, say, spending money on an army that can actually fight.

We should point out, among the most negative factors of the Franco-German strategy against Bush's fundamentalism, the circumstantial alliance which was established with Putin's Russia. That political regime, today, no matter how optimistic we are about its long-term future, is not worthy of an operative alliance with Old Europe, the mother of all democracies, of all freedoms, of all the universalist visions of history, which we should remind poor, primitive Donald Rumsfeld about.

Old Europe is the mother of all democracies? Check out this timeline: British Glorious Revolution 1688; US Revolution 1775; US Constitution 1787; French Revolution 1789; French Revolution dissolves into totalitarian dictatorship 1791; British Reform Bill 1832; British Dominions get self-government, peacefully, 1860s; House of Lords stripped of most power 1910; Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria become stable democracies 1947-1978. And Jorge Semprun the Stalinist is not fit to lick the soles of Donald Rumsfeld's boots. Mr. Rumsfeld is one of the statesmen who best understands that all "universalist visions of history"--i.e. Fascism and Communism, Socialism and nationalism--are extremely bad ideas.

Besides, that alliance, though it is ephemeral and opportunistic, necessarily causes suspicion and fear in the Central and eastern European countries that are preparing to join the EU. For Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, it is clear that Russia still provokes terror, not only for the fearful past of the Stalinist empire, the second nuclear power in the world, but also for its future.

Wait. I thought Semprun had just said that the US overthrow of Saddam was worse than anything the 20th century dictatorships did. Coherence and consistency is not his strong point. Nor does he remind us that he was a Stalinist activist and true believer until 1964 when La Pasionaria and Carrillo purged him from the Spanish Communist Party for Trotskyist tendencies. It's a little too late for you to start slamming Stalin, Jorge.

That's enough of this crap. Here's some more crap. This is from the movie review section. Beware any writing about movies that uses the words "film", "criticism", or "cinema". European movie sections review all American movies that are not patriotic pamphlets like "Independence Day" as courageous criticisms of the American system and way of life. Uh, guys, they're just movies.

From Quebec, in the heart of American civilization, Dennis Arcand prophesized in 1987 that we were about to witness the decline of the American empire; a few years later, Arcand certifies that with the live-on-TV collapse of the Twin Towers, the time of the barbarian invasions has arrived. That fable has a double meaning. On one hand, Armcand insists on reminding us that the political preponderance of the Impire has entered a crisis situation and terrorism is announcing the beginning of the sack (of Rome, I assume).

Nevertheless, the death of every civilization leads to darkness and obscurity. So, in the field of culture, illustrated values--humanism, in the wider sense of the term--have not ceased to succumb, replaced by the new barbaric values of technology. the intellectual who was formed through knowledge is rejected by a society that gives more importance to cellphones than to books. In these new times, culture too is condemned to an exodus.

Among the values in crisis is democracy. Among the most interesting fables about America that cinema will provide us in the upcoming season is the work of a Dane who has never set foot in the United States, "Dogville" by Lars von Trier. Similarly to what Berthold Brecht did in the Thirties, von Trier constructs a critical parable, with a structure similar to epic theater, about the splendor and the decadence of American civilization. As is habitual in Von Trier's cinema, the protagonist of "Dogville" is a saint--Nicole Kidman--exiled by her family and condemned to live in the heart of deepest America. The Danish cineast shows us a community with no moral, fearful for its own possessions, where the mad dogs do not hesitate to devour one another because they tolerate no differences. An America conceived in ambition in which intolerance eats away at its own structures. Another parable about America, "Elephant", directed by Gus Van Sant, has many points in common with Michael Moore and his "Bowling for Columbine". "Elephant" shows us a massacre in a high school, dissects the moment of the catastrophe, reflects on the impossibility of objectivising it, and warns us that the slightest detour toward monstruosity can turn out terrifying. In the middle of a sick civilization everything is unpredictable and adolescents, with no future, live in a state of perplexity.

Right. Whatever you say, dude. Note the similarity of the sentences I boldfaced and the Nazi criticisms of the US that I pointed out from the Nazi propaganda archive.