Believe me, I'm surrounded by Spaniards. I am one of them myself, you know. And I am unable to understand why some people prefer
Real Madrid over
Barcelona,
Siete Vidas over
Los Serrano (two spanish soaps), or, for that matter, burgers over a spanish omelette sandwich. Or a political party over another.
No problem. Here come the others to bring me out of abject stupidity. Spanish people have
voted the socialists over the ruling party (via
Sefarad) because we are a coward lot, and we expect the islamic terrorism to leave us alone while the rest of the free world, led by their natural leader, the americans, is bravely fighting against them; we have left
Osama win. Of course, the implication is that since our former leader (who didn't run int his election) supported the americans, we should continue supporting him.
Another old spanish saying goes "se cree el ladrón que todos son de su condición", "the burglar things that all are made of his same stuff". Maybe some other elections in some other countries are focused on a single issue, even if it is this one, and even if this has been so close. For instance, Andrew Sullivan, who is openly gay (I talked about that
here), might be interested in knowing that the outgoing party was not exactly keen on allowing any kind of same-sex union. And some people, of course, didn't like it. Almost eleven million people voted for the winning party, more than even when they had the absolute majority. You can imagine they will gather at least two or three reasons among them. Even four. Or maybe it was just in their guts. Some of them might even be legitimate reasons. You know, some of them even voted socialist in
other elections.
There are many ways of fighting terrorism. One of them might not just be invading a country because it has WMD, no, sorry, because it has links to Al Qaeda, no, sorry again, because he was a very bad boy. Spain is not going to release the more than 50 persons linked to Al Qaeda it has already arrested, or the ones just arrested, or any one it will arrest in the future. That is fighting against terrorism, isn't it?
Believe me again, those who know me can tell you that there's no lost love between me and the socialists. But believe me too, I don't like to be told what I have to do, or to be called a coward.
