MemeMachineGo!

Right-wing spin:

In March of this year, al Qaeda turned the Spanish election on its head with its railroad bombing and defeated the favored candidate from the party of pro-Iraq war President Jose Maria Aznar and elected an anti-war socialist instead. […]

Bush’s surrogates should bring to America the message that the terrorists would be overjoyed to see the end of his presidency.

During the Cold War, American politicians regularly used to campaign as the candidate the Russians wanted to lose. Bush’s people should begin to speak of the message a Kerry election and a Bush defeat would send to the terrorists. The Spanish example is worth citing.

It is obvious that Osama and his allies all want Bush out. It might profit Bush’s supporters (though not the president himself) to point out this obvious fact to the American people.

A take on the Spanish example from those well-known left-wing extremists at the Cato Institute.

According to the conservative conventional wisdom, Spanish voters, in an appalling act of cowardice, reacted to the terrorist bombings in Madrid by ousting the party that had loyally supported the Bush administration’s war on terror, and especially the war in Iraq.

Such an interpretation profoundly misreads the election results. […]

The outcome of Spain’s election was a referendum on Iraq policy, not policy toward Al Qaeda. Allegations of appeasement are a despicable slur against a population that has already suffered grievously.

Everyone in the blogosphere linked to Homeland Security studying how the elections could be delayed in the event of a terrorist attack, leading to speculation that Bush could be the first president to have been elected for neither of his terms.

Now, if the terrorists want Bush out, and a terrorist attack would delay the election, potentially keeping Bush in, then just exactly who would benefit from a terrorist attack prior to the election?

Actual Al-Qaeda statement:

Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation. Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected.

And speaking of subverting democracy, go read Billmon on the End of the Third Republic.