No Más, No Más.

With the ouster of Spain's conservative and newly unpopular Popular Party this weekend, one leg of Bush's Axis of Badass has been amputated. Incoming Prime Minister Zapatero pledged to withdraw all Spanish troops by June unless the UN was brought in to run the show, saying, "The war has been a disaster [and] the occupation continues to be a disaster. It has only generated violence." Prepare yourself for the House bill requiring the Congressional cafeteria to rename the Spanish omelet to the Security omelet.

Atrios summarizes the right-wing reaction: "The people of Spain voted out the party which failed to protect them from a terrorist attack, and this proves they aren't serious about fighting terrorism." Get used to that argument; you're likely to hear it over and over after November 2nd. But Juan Cole has the most interesting observation so far:

I was struck by the comment of a Spaniard in Charles Sennot's Boston Globe piece on the Spanish elections. He quoted a voter who was disturbed by the way Aznar had manipulated information and public opinion, accusing him of lying about the threat posed by Iraq. He said that these tactics reminded him of the ones the dictator Franco used to use.

It reminded me that most of the publics in countries with fascist pasts--Spain, Germany, Italy--rejected the way the Iraq war was gotten up by Bush and his European partners. They sniffed something wrong with the manipulation that was clearly employed. They had been sensitized to such techniques by their suffering under fascism in the past.

And, it strikes me that the techniques that they minded so much are those of the Neoconservatives. What does that say about the latter? Maybe they don't deserve Leo Strauss as an intellectual ancestor. Maybe their real genealogy is rather more sordid.

Ouch.