10 November 2007

Spain's King to Venezuela's dictator: why don't you shut up?

One thing Spain's good at is at being utterly unPC. Take bullfight for instance. While the whole word condemns this tradition for its alleged cruelty, Spaniards feel very proud about it and couldn't care less about what the world thinks.

Now Chavez, who everyone and its sister thinks it's the embodiment of a pariah, keeps insulting people, that is when he's not ordering his thugs to shoot at unarmed foes. Though it seems that Spain's King Juan Carlos just had enough of the Venezuelan caudillo at the Ibero American Summit in Chile and told him to shut up, while the paratrooper kept interrupting erstwhile ally premier Rodriguez Zapatero.

But the icing on the proverbial cake has to be the intervention of Carlos Lage, representative of Iberoamerica longest ruling dictator, who had the gall to tell democratically elected officials, unlike himself, that legitimacy was not gained solely through the ballot but by the conduct in the exercise of power. Honestly this is the sort of stuff that proves that reality is more surreal than fiction.

In the meanwhile one can only hope that more and more democratic leaders adopted the King's language towards insolent tinpot dictators.