Madrid

Here's one unintended byproduct of the Madrid bombings and the furious VRWC spinning that it has generated. We Irish are usually the reliable "excitable" and "emotional" occupants of The Islands when it comes to the stereotypes, especially sporting ones. But not any more, at least if Mark Steyn is to be believed. In his Daily Telegraph column (which is just the same Karl Rove approved garbage that he peddles everywhere else, except with a UK spell-check and some little local colour added), he says:

Europe's home-grown terrorism problems take place among notably static populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern Ireland to what HMG used to call an "acceptable level of violence".

That's right: bombs to the left of us, bombs to the right of us, but things don't get out of control, not like with the Arabs. Even the Basques are allowed into this select group of stoics, which certainly ups their Aznar-designated status from a few days ago of being mass murderers.

But more seriously, let's be clear on one thing: the PP lost the election because they lied about national security. Today's New York Times recounts the high level at which the lies were disseminated:

On Thursday, the day of the bombings, at Spain's insistence, the [UN] Security Council passed a resolution attributing responsibility to ETA.

Also on Thursday, Javier Solana, a Spaniard who is the European Union's top foreign policy official, gave television interviews in three languages saying it seemed certain that militant Basque separatists were responsible because the type of explosives and the tactics used were those of ETA. Mr. Solana made his remarks at the request of the Spanish government, one senior European official in Brussels said....

[Foreign Minister] Ms. Palacio sent directives to all Spanish embassies around the world urging her country's diplomats to stress the ETA connection, European officials said....
...
"We just sent what we knew," she said. "It would have been so stupid for us to manipulate. When the minister of the interior came out with additional information, we were as bewildered as everyone else."

All those hours sitting next to Colin Powell for the UN Iraq debates last year have clearly affected her sense of what she could get away with.