The No Meetings Line
People have been assuming that John McCain couldn’t possibly have been meaning to articulate a “no meetings with the Spanish prime minister” policy largely because that would be a crazy policy. But Ben Armbruster observes that George W. Bush appears to have an unofficial version of this policy in place. Spain is a democratic NATO ally and EU member, with troops in Afghanistan and the world’s eighth largest economy but the Bush administration has been pursuing a grudge against José Zapatero’s opposition to the Iraq War. Armbruster has all the details of Bush’s various senseless snubs, but suffice it to say that over the years the only Bush-Zapatero meeting has been at the April 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest when it was unavoidable. McCain, plausibly, was just making this into official policy.
Meanwhile, a reader suggests that Moxy Fruvous’ “King of Spain” may be relevant here:
Clearly the line “It’s laissez faire, I don’t even give a care” is the link between McCain’s odd new Spain policy and his unsound approach to financial regulation.
45 Responses to “The No Meetings Line”
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September 18th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
What kind of spineless appeaser would meet with our NATO allies without any kind of preconditions?
September 18th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Mildly OT
There’s an article up in the NYTimes quoting McCain saying that Obama didn’t know what to say about the AIG bailout. In light of McCain’s own quick about-face on the subject, I think that McCain is taking to heart Rove’s dictum about accusing your opponent of doing what you’re doing and ramping that up to an hour-by-hour basis. If McCain does something egregiously stupid, the next sound you hear from McCain will be an accusation that Obama has done just that. It’s uncanny.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
What about Galaxie 500’s King of Spain? Way better. Way, way better.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
So does this mean we are going to have to start calling white rice cooked in broth and tomatoes “Freedom Rice”?
September 18th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Oh, and the Galaxie 500 version of King of Spain is way more topical, as its about someone who’s sort of lost their mind and thinks they’re the King of Spain. Could be McCain’s theme song.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I’ve been trying to find the Arrested Development clip where everyone in the family confuses Portugal for a South American country…. it seemed silly when i first watched it.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Whywhywhywhy did you have to dredge the faint memory of Moxy Fruvous up from the dusty corners of my subconscious???
Dirty pool Mr Yglesias, dirty pool!
p.s. While Moxy Fruvous were an abomination, the work of one Mr. Jian Ghomeshi (the dark-skinned one) on CBC radio has been stellar.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
You won’t think this is so funny when bulls are being run through the streets and our cities are drowned in seasonal tomato-throwing contests.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Bush = REPUBLICAN
McCain = REPUBLICAN
McCain voted 90% WITH Bush. Therefore…
McCAIN = BUSH
Why is that so hard for so many Republicans to understand? Are they stupid or ignorant - or both? sheesh.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Link didn’t work.
http://www.expatica.com/es/articles/news/McCain-calls-for-end-to-_discrepancies-with-Spain_.html
September 18th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
So why then was McCain welcoming talks with Zapatero in April?
September 18th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
McCain’s spokesperson also stated today that, due to a 1990 “gas-face” incident directed at the candidate. Sen. McCain would issue no guarantees that he would invite Prime Minister Pete Nice to the White House, either.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
re: Arrested Development
We came to the show late, after our exasperated son bought us the complete series. The insanity of “Mother Boy XXX” needs to be seen to be believed. One of the high points in television, right up there with the crazed stuff from Sid Caesar.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Zapatero knows Bush Jr. hasn’t met with him since he took over from Aznar and pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. But like a true diplomatic leader, Zapatero confirms that he will work with the U.S., that there is an upcoming U.S. election (thus tempering Zapatero’s response), and that he applies this standard no matter who is elected and whether he receives meetings or not.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Off topic - but what the hell, you’ve all heard Matt’s McCain rants a million times already.
New is out that Paulson is arranging a resurrection of the RTC, the gov’t agency that oversaw the S & L bailout.
When the CEO of Wells Fargo heard the news he said “I feel like a kid in a candy store”. Dow is up over 400.
Tells you all you need to know about who’s going to benefit and who’s going to pay.
And watch Pelosi and Reid, those tireless defenders of the “little guy” go right along with the scheme.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Well,l if we’re goping to refer to applciable songs, the obvious choice is Hoyt Axton:
“Well I never been to Spain
But I kinda like the music
Say the ladies are insane there
And they sure know how to use it
They don’t abuse it
Never gonna lose it
I can’t refuse it, umm
“Well I never been to heaven
But I’ve been to Oklahoma
Woah they tell me I was born there
But I really don’t remember
In Oklahoma, not Arizona
What does it matter
What does it matter”
September 18th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Wow, if they’re resurrecting the RTC, maybe this is McCain’s special time, because then he can simply repeat his experiences in helping destroy a sector of our banking system a generation ago and charging the U.S. taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars to restructure the losses.
September 18th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Uh, I mentioned this in a previous thread. Bush liked Aznar, took it personally when Aznar’s successor lost the election, and has borne the grudge throughout his time in the White House.
When Bush called Zapatero after the Spanish general election this year, it was considered a major thawing of relations by the Spanish press. But the assumption has always been that once Bush has gone back to the pig farm, the next president, regardless of party, wouldn’t behave like a spoilt child. McCain had said as much.
September 18th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
#12 Pesto
Post of the Day. Literal LOLZ!!
cheers!
September 18th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I think at the debates or the next sit down interview someone needs to go through a list of the leaders of our allies and ask McCain who else he won’t meet with. Spain is in NATO, we are sworn to go to war in defense of their country but he won’t talk to them about trade?!?!? Well he talk to Merkel? What about the head of Turkey, they are pissed at the Kurds and therefore are suspicious of our Iraq adventures. Are we giving them the silent treatment too? We need to know what other allies we are treaty bound to sacrifice our lives for that McCain is unwilling to peak with. WTF!!
September 18th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
So Spain he’s not sure he’ll even meet with, but we’re all Georgians now? Sounds like he wants Georgia in NATO and Spain out, which is pretty insane.
September 18th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
McCain’s just keeping an eye out for when Spain invades Georgia.
September 18th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Can someone explain to me why W is still grudging Spain but has no problem chilling with Sarkozy on vacation?
Were Spain and France’s positions on Iraq remarkably difficult? Or are these personal grudges and not territorial ones? Like, Sarkozy gets a pass because he’s not Chirac? Even though he isn’t pro-Iraq invasion either?
September 18th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I just listened to the interview. It seemed to me that McCain was very tired and on autopilot. I don’t think he realized the reporter was talking about Spain (I’m a strong Obama supporter and not at all inclined to give McCain an undeserved break). It reminds me of what Arianna Huffington talked about at her site a while back. She said she felt that Obama was smart to take a week off to avoid exhaustion and that McCain would pay a price for not taking any time off. I think she was right.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Hugh: People are no longer talking about the original interview, but Scheuneman’s clarification that no, it wasn’t an error.
September 18th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Like I said, I was very tired and on autopilot and didn’t take the break Arianna told me to.
September 18th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Can someone explain to me why W is still grudging Spain but has no problem chilling with Sarkozy on vacation?
Close proximity to Carla Bruni?
Nah: it’s the personal grudge thing. You know how Nixon said of Barbara Bush, “she knows how to hate”? I think he inherited that.
September 18th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
you might be looking at this the wrong way.
Maybe zapatero for domestic political reasons doesn’t want to be seen meeting the head of state of a country that has legalised torture and whose military is busy slaughtering the civilians of iraq.
After all , over here in europe, the US president isn’t someone you want to be seen to be too close too.
September 18th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
OK so McCain actually believes something so ridiculous and crazy that it seems more plausible to assume he’s doubling down to avoid confessing to an embarrassing senior moment? I guess this is what people mean by “principled” but, damn.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
KB,
I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but it’s hardly accurate to say that our military is ‘busy slaughtering the civilians of Iraq’. The Iraqis are doing a pretty good job of slaughtering civilians themselves, it would seem. (Much of that, true, is because we destabilized the country).
Do you think that there would be any _less_ of a bloodbath if the United States Army were to pull out?
Zapatero is a fool who is doing his best to do what the Moors, the French and the Soviets were unable to do, break the power of the church in Spain.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Don’t forget the Anarchists! They tried too.
But, in any case, Hector has finally made the case, and my hat’s off to Zapatero. It’s about time, too.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
El Cid,
I’m certainly sympathetic to the argument that the Church had become corrupted by political and economic power in Spain- and that it had in large part (like so many institutions before it) decayed into an exploitative and decadent instution. In 1808 as much as in 1931, _someone_ needed to curb the power of the church and the traditional aristocracies. So I really wasn’t trying to imply that Al-Walid, Napoleon or Azaña were ‘bad people.’
Zapatero however is going well beyond curbing the power of the church as a political and economic institution. Spain is no longer ruled by clerics and their lay allies, and hasn’t been for three decades. He isn’t merely opposing the church on matters of how much land they can own, or how many taxes they can collect; he is taking on the basic identity of Spain as a Christian nation, and undermining one of the most ancient and essential Christian teachings about abortion. The church in Spain today sets down only the most modest and basic strictures about politics, that derive from the essence of natural reason. By denying them that right Zapatero is showing himself not just to be anti-clerical, or anti-Catholic, but in the deepest sense anti-Christian.
Like Napoleon, Al-Walid and Azaña, Zapatero wants to break the power of the church; but unlike them, he doesn’t have any alternative vision that he wants to take his place. No Caliphate, no Republic of Virtue, and no universal socialist brotherhood; nothing but the sterile garden-suburb hedonist utopia of the modern Western Europe. So you’ll pardon me if I don’t grant to Zapatero even the qualified respect that I would give to Napoleon. Zapatero is no Napoleon.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Hector, you’re a religious nut who thinks Christian institutions need to guide societies. I’m completely uninterested in these ridiculous arguments.
I have absolutely zero respect for any of the pseudo-moral and pseudo-intellectual arguments by anti-abortion nuts. I fundamentally do not share your assumptions and values in these affairs. I’m completely sick of religious nuts thinking their silly dogmas are the result of ‘natural reason’. I admire the peregrinos who make their way to Compostela, but as a journey, and not as any sort of religious symbol. Go tell someone else your silliness, or bore someone else with your nostalgia for the Crusades.
I whole-heartedly applaud not just Zapatero but all Spaniards trying to move Spain further out of the grip of Catholic dogma.
I am sorry you feel that to move a society forward out of idiocy requires an equal commitment to a replacement dogma, but I, like apparently many, many Spaniards would rather hash about on our own than depend on the dogmatic symbolisms and fake moralisms of a medievalist pile of nonsense.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
El Cid,
How’s that building a secular Eurotopia working out for you? It might work OK for about five years, actually….right up until the Islamists take over the collapsing shell of Spain. If left unchecked, your cultural decadence could pave the way for an Islamist takeover just as the cultural decadence of Rome paved the way for the Gothic invasion. The Goths are crossing the frontier even as we speek, but apparently you people would prefer to have your orgies than to train your sons and daughters in the arts of defence. Oh I forgot, many Spaniards don’t have sons or daughters in the first place.
I sincerely hope that natural resource shortages and a collapsing world economy put an end to modernity before modernity puts an end to human virtue.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Matt, kudos on the Moxy Fruvous reference. I hope you were lucky enough to see these hilarious Canadians in a live show before they broke up around the turn of the century.
September 19th, 2008 at 4:05 am
I fell sorry for Hector; how’s he going to feel when civilization doesn’t collapse?
Seriously, dude — five years? If you’re putting money on it, I’ll take some of that action.
September 19th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Hector: I take full responsibility for the coming Islamic takeover of Europe which you keep hallucinating.
By the way, it wasn’t the ‘cultural decadence’ of Rome which paved the way for the Goths — it was Rome’s complete unwillingness to anticipate that there ever might be anyone who would resist the Empire’s, well, imperialism.
There really were real people and real cultures beyond Rome’s borders, and the Roman-worshiping nitwits who saw only the budding Catholic Empire versus the hordes beyond are the reason for the mess.
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