Basically McCain *appears* to confuse Zapatero, the President of Spain, with Zapatista, a rebel group in Mexico. I can kind of understand that; certainly when I saw the name Zapatero it made me think of the rebel group, even though I couldn’t quite place the name. That may be a sign of getting older, but it’s a trivial one. But when he knows he’s going into an interview with a Spanish interviewer (whether Latina-American or European), and still can’t catch on when told that Zapatero is the President of Spain, in Europe? That’s just unsettling, whatever party the guy belongs to.

Bumped. This is a very important story.

(UPDATE: I now have the Spanish version of the interview cropped to the 1 minute 37 seconds in question. You can listen to it here, but it’s in Spanish.)

This isn’t funny. It’s actually quite serious. We may have the first evidence, on tape, that McCain’s age, or illness, or both are catching up with him and he’s losing his mental faculties.

Per a post on Josh Marshall’s site, I just listened to an interview John McCain did with a Spanish journalist recently. The interview is in English, but there’s a Spanish translator translating the tape into Spanish at the same time. So the English part is difficult to hear. I am however fluent in Spanish, and what Josh reports is exactly what the Spanish version shows.

Namely, that John McCain didn’t appear to know that Spain was in Europe, or that the leader of Spain was named Zapatero, even after he was told that Zapatero was the leader of Spain.

When asked about Spain and Zapatero, by a Spanish reporter for a Spanish newspaper, McCain responded about Mexico and Latin America. A reader suggested something that Josh had already considered, that perhaps McCain thought the reporter was talking about the Zapatistas in Mexico, the guerilla group. But that’s not possible as the reporter clearly said she was talking about Spain and Spain’s leader, Zapatero. She told McCain this twice. Let me tell you exactly what she asked McCain (per the translation):

“Senator, finally, let’s talk about Spain. If you’re elected president, would you invite President Zapatero to meet with you in the White House?”

McCain then gives this odd answer about America’s friends and America’s enemies. He also, oddly, talks about Mexico (why Mexico? The question was about Spain) and how he’d invite friendly leaders to the White House. She then asks him again, would that invitation include President Zapatero? He says again that he’d have to review relations first, blah blah. She then says again, “so you’d have to wait to see, so would you meet with him in the White House?” He again repeats his weird statement about friends and enemies. McCain also throws in, oddly, to the Spanish reporter, when she’s asking him about meeting the Spanish president, a line about the importance of our relationship with Latin America (this is now the second time he answered a question about meeting the president of Spain with an answer about Latin America). She then says to McCain one last time:

“Okay, but I’m talking about Europe – the president of Spain, would you meet with him?”

This time, there was no room for confusion. McCain then gives this very bizarre answer:

“I will meet with any leader who has the same principles and philosophy as us in terms of human rights, democracy, and freedom and I will stand up to those who do not.”

What does concern about human rights, democracy and freedom have to do with a prerequisite for meeting the president of Spain? Especially when you told the same paper 5 months ago that you’d be happy to meet with him.

McCain had no idea what was going on in the interview. She specifically told him, twice, that she was talking about Spain and the Spanish president. She’s a Spanish reporter with one of the largest, if not the largest, newspaper in Spain, El Pais. I know this paper, McCain certainly knows this paper (and it’s not like McCain’s staff didn’t tell him who he had the exclusive interview with for ten minutes). She made it clear she was asking about her own country and her own president and Mccain had no clue what she was talking about.

Either McCain had no idea what the woman was talking about when she said “Spain,” and then said “the President of Spain,” repeatedly, or McCain intentionally snubbed the country of Spain tonight for no apparent reason, which is very hard to believe, especially given his earlier interview in which he said he was fine meeting Zapatero. The interview is absolutely bizarre, especially in that it sounds like McCain wasn’t even lucid, it sounds like he simply doesn’t have complete control over his faculties anymore. And judging by the fact that just a few months ago McCain was fine with Zapatero, it sounds like McCain simply wasn’t quite all there any more during the interview. He got horribly confused and didn’t know what was going on.

This is just incredibly disturbing. And remember, this is hardly the first time in the last year that McCain has become confused about his signature issue, foreign affairs. It’s happened a lot in the past year, and it never happened before. There’s a pattern here, even if in polite company the media isn’t supposed to talk about. McCain is having trouble focusing and understanding what’s going on around him. He gets increasingly confused. And that’s just scary.

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Look at this, another Obama proxy calling average people ‘bitter’. Really, the Dems need to get in touch with… what? She’s a McCain supporter? Ah, never mind.

“The people out, you know, who are the rednecks or whoever, are bitter.” – McCain surrogate Her Royal Highness Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, CNN, 9/17/08

Ah yes, nothing shows that John McCain understands the plight of working Americans like a woman with a royal title and $100 million referring to American voters as “rednecks” in the middle of an economic crisis. I’m thinking Her Royal Highness is about to join Carly Fiorina in a secret undisclosed location for the rest of the campaign.

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The really scary part is that we’re *still* making the same mistake.

Before 9/11, the Bush administration’s national security focus was on missile defense, not terrorism. In fact, on 9/11, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was set to deliver a speech that focused “largely on missile defense.” Writing at the Huffington Post, Joe Cirincione — president of the Ploughshares Fund — recalls this quote from Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) on Sept. 10, 2001, warning against the Bush administration’s approach:

We will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship, or the belly of a plane, or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.

Cirincione writes, “If George Bush had listened to Joe Biden instead of Donald Rumsfeld, the history of the past seven years would have been very different. We might have prevented 9/11.”

I want to know when John McCain is going to apologize to the women of American for calling Hillary Clinton a pig. That’s the question every reporter needs to ask McCain now. Why did McCain call Hillary Clinton a pig.

Then again, John McCain is familiar with sexism. He once joked that Chelsea Clinton was “ugly.” (I guess kids aren’t so off-limits after all to McCain.) Then there’s the time that McCain joked about a woman being raped and enjoying it so much she wanted to be raped again. So yes, let’s have a debate about John McCain and sexism. I hope every reporter is going to be asking McCain about why sexist jokes about other people’s kids are okay, and why jokes about rape are okay. Since McCain is now so big on women.

Oh, one more thing. Can you still be America’s greatest defender of women if you cheat on your first wife and call your second wife the c-word?

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“A McCain-Palin ad has FactCheck.org calling Obama’s attacks on Palin “absolutely false” and “misleading.” That’s what we said, but it wasn’t about Obama.”

The McCain campaign is lying? Well I for one am shocked.

So now John McCain is lying about what independent watchdogs have said, or haven’t said, about Barack Obama. McCain just put out an ad claiming that FactCheck.org called Obama’s attacks on Palin “completely false”…”misleading.” Only problem? FactCheck.org said that quote about someone else, not Obama, and in fact, FactCheck.org says Obama’s criticisms of Palin have been accurate. So, John McCain lied, again, to the American people. (CBS caught McCain lying in the same ad about Katie Couric, claiming that she as well criticized Obama – she didn’t.) And he’s going to keep lying until the media stars asking him the larger questions, like what all these lies say about John McCain, the man he’s become, the loss of his maverick image, has McCain reached a point of utter desperation, has Karl Rove totally taken over McCain’s campaign, and is McCain any longer in charge of his campaign? We’ve all known John McCain for decades. So who is this guy running for president in his name? That’s the question the media should be asking. What happened to John McCain?

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We have always been at war with Oceania…

Actually I agree with McCain (what he said, that is, not what Romney says he meant). In fact it’s ridiculous to think otherwise, unless the compact’s authors allowed for all future developments.

Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) walked into a bipartisan wave of condemnation in Colorado when he told the Pueblo Chieftain that the 1922 Colorado River compact, which governs the allocation of the river’s water among seven states, “needs to be renegotiated over time”:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt the major, major issue is water and can be as important as oil. So the compact that is in effect, obviously, needs to be renegotiated over time amongst the interested parties,” McCain said while on his way to the Aspen Institute. “I think that there’s a movement amongst the governors to try, if not, quote, renegotiate, certainly adjust to the new realities of high growth, of greater demands on a scarcer resource.”

Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO) called the compact “sacrosanct,” adding that opening it up “would only happen over my dead body.” Senate candidate and former U.S. Rep. Bob Schaffer (R-CO) agreed, telling the Grand Junction Sentinel, “Over my cold, dead, political carcass.” The Denver Post editorialized that McCain “displayed a disturbing ignorance of the realities of the West’s scarce water resources.”

Now, one of McCain’s top surrogates, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is claiming that McCain didn’t mean what he said. Romney told 9News that McCain “has no interest in reopening the compact“:

“Senator McCain has no interest in reopening the compact,” Romney said. “Senator McCain believes as I do that a compact that’s been worked out between the governors and between the states is the right way to go. States are the ones who build these kinds of understandings. The federal government shouldn’t meddle in that compact.

Salazar’s Press Secretary Matt Lee-Ashley responded to Romney’s comments: “Either Senator McCain is so out of touch with Western water issues that he needs the former Massachusetts governor to defend him, or he really has some interest in overhauling the law of the river that has been in place since 1922. Both scenarios are troubling.”

ProgressNowAction has a petition telling McCain to keep his hands off Colorado’s water.

Digg It!

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Being strict I wouldn’t count this as lying. But it’s symptomatic of the McCain campaign’s recognition that her experience is so thin as to be transparent on so many issues. That’s a criticism that can be levelled at Obama, so maybe he should try lying…I mean embellishing – apparently it’s a legitimate tactic.

Good grief, she lies repeatedly about everything. Then again, considering how flimsy her resume is, this is no surprise. Hey, I looked at China from the border in Laos so does that count as a visit to China? I changed planes at the airport in Seoul, so maybe that also counts as a visit according to Palin. I took a bus through Zambia for thirty minutes after rafting down the Zambezi River. Does that bus trip count as “on the ground experience” in Zambia? Does flying over Greenland count? I could see it from the plane window, after all.

Following her selection last month as John McCain’s running mate, aides said Palin had traveled to Ireland, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq to meet with members of the Alaska National Guard. During that trip she was said to have visited a “military outpost” inside Iraq. The campaign has since repeated that Palin’s foreign travel included an excursion into the Iraq battle zone.

But in response to queries about the details of her trip, campaign aides and National Guard officials in Alaska said by telephone yesterday that she did not venture beyond the Kuwait-Iraq border when she visited Khabari Alawazem Crossing, also known as “K-Crossing,” on July 25, 2007.

Asked to clarify where she traveled in Iraq, Palin’s spokeswoman, Maria Comella, confirmed that “She visited a military outpost on the other side of the Kuwait-Iraq border.”

It was the second such clarification in as many weeks of the itinerary of what Palin has called “the trip of a lifetime.” Earlier, the campaign acknowledged that Palin made only a refueling stop in Ireland.

She took a few steps over the border to an outpost and thinks that was a battle zone? Does McCain honesty think this is valid experience for a v.p. candidate? Is he serious when he repeats the “she can see Russia” line? Even with that line, she has never even said that she personally saw Russia, only that it’s possible. What new lie are we going to discover next? When is the media going to quit calling her lies “clarifications” or “stretching the truth” or providing other excuses. A lie is a lie and Palin-McCain can’t stop themselves from lying.

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Obama has been criticized for something similar, so I guess this is more evidence that there’s not much to choose between the two sides.

They are on the verge of some serious trouble. I have a real sense that the media is fed up with the serial lies coming from the McCain campaign. The thing is, they’re lying because they think the media are patsies and will simply regurgitate whatever lie McCain gives them. And once upon a time, that might have been true. But McCain has now pushed the lies far beyond the exaggerations and half-truths of normal politics. This is new territory McCain has entered, and the media may finally be fed up with it. It’s going to be very interesting to see if Americans care or not about a man who would rather lose his honor than lose an election.

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It’s true about student nurses.

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Surely the best thing a Republican could do for telecoms is get out of the way, and I don’t think the US govt could even understand that idea in relation to telecoms.

Not kidding. That techno-wizard John McCain doesn’t really use technology. No, he just creates it:

Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

The McCain campaign has become so craven, so deranged, that no lie is beyond the pale.

When you think of the great minds in technological advancement, McCain is now right after Gates and Jobs. Can’t you just imagine McCain trying to decide which features to include on his new invention?