Let me get out ahead of Goldberg on this.
McCain refused to say if he would meet with the President of Spain and thought that Spain was in Latin America because as a POW for five-and-a-half years he had crazy men shouting at him in foreign accents, thereby permanently damaging his ability to understand anything other than American English. And as far as geography goes, McCain spent five-and-a-half years studying the inside of a 5' x 5' cell. That's the geography he knows!
John McCain was a POW?
ReplyDelete1) Zapatero is the prime minister of Spain (a monarchy)
ReplyDelete2) if someone said 'Jose Luis Rodriguez...' in Spanish to me, a non-American English speaker, I'd have a hard enough time catching the name (I did, and I was looking out for it), which leads on to
3) I never heard specifically say Spain was a Latin American country, although he did seem a little awkward and confused talking about the two subjects. which the interviewer brought up together. I honestly cannot believe John McCain would not know that Spain is a European country.
in case you don't know, Zapatero is the Socialist leader that took Spain out of the 'coalition of the willing' following the Madrid train bombings (and subsequent socialist election victory). presumably that was what the interviewer was angling for McCain's reaction to.
I read the transcript of the interview, and the reporter at the outset said that they were talking about Spain. The PM's name, of course, obviously conjures up "Zapatista," but regardless of that, after repeated promptings, McCain never made the connection.
ReplyDeleteOn top of that, his stubborn insistence on refusing to commit with meeting to a national leader who is a member of NATO - arguably our most important military alliance - also speaks to a level of incoherence that is deeply troubling.
Isn't foreign policy supposed to be McCain's strong point?