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For some reason, Glenn Kessler and Ed O'Keefe won't say up front what is really going on--that John McCain found himself, for some reason, at sea and that Randy Scheunemann, for some reason, would rather insult a NATO ally than admit that John McCain found himself at sea.
Can't anybody play this game? Can't Kessler and O'Keefe tell it straigh? Can't McCain and Scheunemann do foreign policy?
McCain Slights Spanish Prime Minister: Republican presidential nominee John McCain suggested this week that he would continue President Bush's policy of having cool relations with the government of Spain, despite having made starkly contrasting statements to the Spanish press earlier this year saying he looked forward to normalized relations with the NATO ally.... McCain seemed to lump Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero in the same category as the anti-American leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba....
McCain has suggested that as president he would seek to repair relations that have been badly frayed in Europe during Bush's tenure. In an early-April interview with a reporter from Spanish newspaper El Pais, McCain said, "This is the moment to leave behind discrepancies with Spain.... I would like for [President Zapatero] to visit the United States. I am very interested not only in normalizing relations with Spain but in obtaining good and productive relations with the goal of addressing many issues and challenges that we have to confront together."
The reporter for the Miami radio station seemed surprised that McCain, after discussing anti-American antagonists in Latin South America, acted so coolly to the idea of meeting with Zapatero.... "I can assure you I will establish closer relations with our friends and I will stand up to those who want to do harm to the United States of America."... "I'm talking about the president of Spain," she noted. Given this fourth opportunity to extend an olive branch, McCain stuck to his guns: "I'm willing to meet with any leader who is dedicated to the same principles and philosophy that we are for human rights, democracy and freedom and I will stand up to those who are not." That McCain would lump Zapatero in with such Latin American bad guys as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez comes as a surprise....
So, was McCain purposely trying to diss the Spanish leader? Questions about whether McCain forgot which country Zapatero leads, got confused about Spain's geographic relationship to Latin America, or confused Zapatero with the Zapatista rebels from Mexico have exploded on blogs since reports of the interview first surfaced. McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Sheunemann said McCain's answer was intentional.... Asked to explain McCain's apparent shift in tone and position since April, Scheunemann gave almost no ground.
"In this week's interview, Senator McCain did not rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero, a NATO ally," he said in an e-mail. "If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance. He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America's adversaries. It's called keeping your options open, unlike Senator Obama, who has publicly committed to meeting some of the world's worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office."...
Yoly Cuello, the reporter who interviewed McCain, said she repeatedly asked McCain about Spain because "he didn't want to answer my question." "I think he was just trying not to answer the question, I think he understood" who Zapatero is and where he's from, Cuello said. She conducted the phone interview on Tuesday when McCain was campaigning in Miami and it aired Wednesday on Union Radio's 74 Spanish-language radio affiliates nationwide and on its stations in Colombia, Mexico and Spain...
Nobody has any business voting for John McCain. Nobody has any business arguing that John McCain is qualified to be president. Nobody.
