Fuck this pisses me off! More frigging wreaths were layed when fucking Princess-looney-biscuit met her fate in a tunnel and yet when 9/11 happened it was global news for weeks and weeks and weeks with candlelit vigils round the world. Yet nearly 200 hundred Spanish people die and some fuckwit wants to condem the whole country already!
All I can say is Britain and Aus, duck now…you are next. And you better hope you don’t vote “wrong” cause Mr Nasty-Britches will be right their to call you on it.
Sorry, Coldie. For the record, it was “This idiot isn’t worth getting fucked up the ass; that can be fun.”
Oh Hail Disaster ! Democracy reared its ugly head and gave Aznar and Bush the finger ! Public opinion predominated against arrogant leadership ! Oh the horror ! Where next ?
Muad’dib sure hates democracy.
Now that could be usefil 
I think there’s a fair chance that that very scenario is what’s fueling the ire from the OP. Think of it. Doesn’t this mean that Bush’s press might keep on indicating he’ll be re-elected, but the electorate could actually hand him his ass on a plate anyway? Frightening thought for certain conservatives, wouldn’t you agree? I hope, I hope, I hope…
Usefill, useful. Same thing really. Bugger 
If the Democrats fielded a fetal puppy in a jar of formaldehyde I’d bet “dollars to donuts” that the majority of the world would back it to beat Bush.
I (shame on me) watched an very old repeat of Golden Girls today. There was a Bush joke. Did we really need the son?
We’ve already had Bali. And whilst of course Australia’s political stance has moved us up the list, we were on it anyway. It’s not a matter of have a certain stance and they’ll target you - everyone’s on their list.
I don’t resent being on the list. Everything that’s good about our society they hate. And I don’t resent moving up the list if there’s a point to it. Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan surely moved us up the list of targets, but that was fine: it was doing something about terrorism (poor old Afghanistan is likely to remain fucked anyway).
What I do resent is being moved up the list for nothing. The war in Iraq may have been part of the War Against Terrorism, but it had nothing to do with the war against terrorism. At best it was always going to be a distraction. At worst it was playing into the hands of JI and al Qaeda - providing grist to their ‘war on Islam mill’ and providing them with recruits, weapons and training grounds.
It’s hard to say whether Spanish voters resented being moved up the list for no good reason or whether they were pissed off by the government’s ham-fisted attempt to pretend that it wasn’t so. But either way it’s a message that says they won’t be bullshitted even in the face of fear.
Superb statement.
BTW, the whole ‘terror influences the electorate’ is true in the US too. If Bush hadn’t been able to leverage 9/11, then Iraq might (I say might) not have happened - thus all that extra recruitment to Al Qaeda wouldn’t have happened to aid Bin Laden’s ghastly campaign. Glass houses, stones, etc.
Not only that, but the fact that the attack occurred without warning strongly suggested from the outset that ETA was not involved, and ETA’s vehement denial only served further to implicate some other terrorist group.
ETA’s acts of terrorism, inexcusable as they are, have almost invariably been accompanied by prior warnings, and followed by explicit claims of responsibility. When ETA does something in Spain, it wants the rest of Spain to know who it was. Yet, despite having no evidence that this attack was the work of ETA, the PP immediately blamed the Basque group, and continued to blame it even after ETA’s denial.
I’m sure, given the amount of people who’ve already made the point, that i don’t need to post more evidence of the Spanish people’s opposition to their country’s involvement in Iraq, or of the heat that Aznar has been taking in Spain over the last year for his decisions in this area.
What really gets me about the OP, and about the other ignorant sheep like RexDart, is that they seem to have a three-year-old’s understanding of the way that polls, politics, and elections work. Instead of really thinking about the issue, all they do is berate the Spaniards for giving in to terrorism.
First of all, in a country like Spain, where voting is not compulsory, a shocking event just before an election can cause many more people to decide that they should vote. Indeed, on the day of the election the BBC ran an article saying the very same thing:
Note the last paragraph here, all you dipshits who are arguing that the election result is a victory for terrorism over democracy.
Higher voter turnout often means that election results can be affected, especially if one party’s supporters usually have higher rates of abstention, but decide to turn out in large numbers in response to a shocking event like the bombing. It doesn’t mean that overall public support for each party has changed very much, only that the public support is being reflected differently in the election itself. As one person interviewed in the article said:
Despite this, however, the article said that it wasn’t yet clear which party would benefit most from increased voter turnout. Everyone thought that any predicition at all was very difficult to make.
Some in that article predicted the turnout to be over 80%, but as it turned out, the figures didn’t quite get that high, if the figures given by Spanish newspaper El Mundo are accurate. According to the newspaper, voter turnout was 77.21%, or 25,846,620 people (including invalid and blank votes). This compares with 68.7% in the 2000 general election in Spain, according to ElectionResources. So, turnout was up about 8.5 percentage points, although it’s hard to know exactly how much of that to attribute to the recent bombings. As in many other countries, politics in Spain has been rather intense and heated over the past year or so, and it’s possible that turnout would have been higher even without last week’s bombing.
It’s rather interesting that people like the OP would see this increased turnout as evidence of the failure of democracy. Of course, it’s understandable if he’s an American–after all, this bastion of democracy hasn’t managed a turnout of over 60% since the 1968 presidential election. Source: Federal Election Commission
What’s also stupid about Muad’Dib et al. is their apparent ignorance of the fact that poll numbers can often change dramatically in the days leading up to an election, even in the absence of a terrorist attack. Furthermore, these polls often have margins of error that are greater than the percentage difference between the parties, and so are only ever rough guides. Finally, sometimes the polls can simply be flat-out wrong, for a variety of reasons, including that some people will say one thing to a pollster and do something else in the voting booth. According to that BBC article, even before the bombing the PP’s lead was only about 4.5%, a number small enough that margin for error could account for most of the lead.
Finally, even if the Spaniards’ voting was influenced by the bombing–so what? Are Spanish voters not allowed to take their own security into account when casting their ballot? Are they not allowed to decide that the benefit gained from assisting in Iraq (whatever benefit that may be) is outweighed by the cost of 200 dead and 1400 injured Madrileños? Americans often talk about the importance of national security; is this only deemed to be important if it’s American national security that we’re talking about?
That would indeed be interesting. The problem is (at least for me), I have no confidence in the leadership of Senator Kerry. Electing Mr. Kerry is sort of like filling a '76 Ford Pinto with New Car Smell.
Here’s an opinion question for you, presidebt, and anyone else who’d like to chime in: it’s an American character question, really. Let’s say on October 29, 2004, a terrorist bombing takes out the entire Chicago Loop, yielding thousands of casualties and deaths, and leaves a major US city virtually crippled. Would millions of Americans take to the streets? Do we have within us the ability to demand answers from our government?
I’d like to add to that if I may.
How would people react if after such a incident evidence was pointing to an internal McVeigh type bomber but the Admin seemed to be using the incident to push their agenda by insisting that it was Osama and his friends that was responsible despite the evidence to the contrary.
Would Bush supporters change their minds about their vote if the press brought attention to the cynical manipulations of the government?
On the contrary, if I were al Qaeda, I’d be rooting for Bush. He misallocated resources that should have been used to hunt Osama and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan to his war in Iraq. His policies have been a boon to that orgainzation.
I also consider your assertion that John Kerry is a friend of terrorists to be offensive in the extreme, on par with accusing Bush of being a Nazi. There should be a Godwin corrolary about calling your opponent a terrorist.
Maud’Dib I hope you realize that by slamming the Spaniards like this that you’ve virtually assured you will never see a baen, baef, and cheese burrito. Unless it is shoved up your ass of course.
Enjoy,
Steven
“French Troops ‘Almost Caught Bin Laden’”
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2652915
Yeah, those fucking French sure are losers, dicking around in the mountains of Afghanistan instead of really fighting terrorism in Iraq. :rolleyes:
I am so fucking sick of stupid fucks like you endangering me and endangering my country with your ignorance and stupidity. French soldiers are fucking laying their lives on the line for your sorry American ass and all you care about is waving your big dick around and chanting “USA #1, USA #1!” like this was a fucking football game instead of life or death.
Get this through your thick neanderthal skull. George W. Bush is WEAK ON TERRORISM. He’s a weakling and a fuck-up and he’s let AQ rearm and regroup while he’s been alienating our allies, weakening our military, bankrupting our treasury, and using 9-11 as his political fuck toy. The sooner he’s voted out of office, the safer this country will be.
An excellent point ! It certainly gives me pause to reconsider the justification of the Spaniard response. Thankyou !
Yes, I know it´s not allowed, but the bloody OP made me blew a gasket, a gasket, two O-rings and the goddamend boiler.
In the 3 or 4 years I´ve been reading the SDMB that is, by far, the most vile and disgusting thing I´ve seen, I can´t promise to hold my peace if I ever see something so monumentally repugnant, I just can hope it won´t happen again.
Having said that, I still stand for what I said, I stand for it and I meant each and every word. I´m a he-wouldn´t-kill-a-fly kind of person, but there are things I just won´t take without reaction, and it would be a very cold day in hell the day I won´t react to such execrable display of heartless drivel.
Muad’Dib, your display of ignorance is truly world-class. You have your head so far up your ass, you complete the circle twice - you must look like something MC Escher might have drawn if he’d taken LSD. You look at one event (the bombing) and an event that follows immediately after (the elections) and assume, blindly disregarding the entire history of Spanish public opinion on the war in Iraq, that post hoc ergo propter hoc - the second is the direct result of the first. As has been pointed out to you before, the majority of the population of Spain was opposed to the war and the occupation long before last week’s bombing. The attack didn’t change their minds on the subject; if anything it bolstered their opinion that Spain needed to pull out of Iraq and that it needed to happen ASAP. Which in turn gave people who opposed the war more confidence to go out and vote for the PSOE, which supported withdrawal; the predictions of increase in voter turnout speak to that. All in all, it’s pretty clear that the Spanish elections are the direct result of a living and healthy democratic process in which people have no compunctions about voting their consciences.
OTOH, what would have been cowardly is if PSOE supporters and those to their left in Spain, i.e. firm opponents of the war and occupation, had turned around and voted PP back into power in the hopes that continuing the war and occupation would somehow stop the attacks, when by all appearances the attacks came as a result thereof.
I honestly think the desire of Iraqis for the foreign armies of occupation to pull out is a legitimate one, and I applaud the Spanish voters for taking steps to voice their solidarity with that demand. Having said that, I certainly don’t condone, by any stretch of the imagination, the use of terrorist methods to achieve those demands.
RexDart, you fucking prick… Try educating yourself about international politics before opening your mouth. 25 million Spaniards knew why they were voting, since you obviously don’t, please don’t spew your ignorance in the ballots of my country. I prefer leadership disinclined to make stupid mistakes.
On the point of our allies in Europe–After 9-11, NATO sent planes to protect us. Cite.
Not to mention, during the immediate 48 hours following the attacks, Tony Blair was constantly on TV, reassuring the American people that we were not alone. With the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, two symbols of my country’s opulence and, yes, domination, in the world sphere, shattered, and a president I had no faith in, I was able to sleep better at night knowing other countries were circling the wagons around me. I’m sure the thousands of Americans stranded in Canada were grateful they didn’t have to go it alone, either. Despite Bush pissing off most of Europe before 9-11, our friends and allies were there for us.
You shithead.
It’s obvious to me you know absolutely nothing about Yugoslavian history and the Bosnian War. I have a Croatian co-worker who would be happy to educate you, since you’re too feeble to, say, read a book or article.
And Red China? Your shocking ignorance leaves me speechless on that one.
And Maud’Dib, admit that you’re really pissed that a terrorist attack didn’t influence Spanish politics the way you would have liked. People voted how they had planned to vote, and most didn’t change their minds even though a more hard-line party might be appealing following a vicious attack. There are a plethora of wonderful cites for you to pour through right here in this very thread.
I pray my government and my people might learn from the example of Spain and refuse to embrace terrorism as a way of influencing votes. But I don’t think that will happen.