IF YOU READ David Sharrock's article I pointed to yesterday, you are ready now to go and read this article on Time magazine by a quite clueless reporter, and then this interview to no less clueless Zapatero.

When you're done, read what Juan Hervada has to say:

To promote Socialism in 2004 isn’t easy. To talk about "citizen's socialism" when one is the prime minister of a democratic country somewhere in Western Europe, takes a man like José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The man that thinks that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a free, stable and sovereign country.

Indeed, reading his interview with Time Magazine felt like following Alice to the other side of the mirror, but, at the same time, I also had that particular emotion one has when confronted with something deserving a place in the Guiness Book of Records. I have read many interviews of politicians and I though I had already seen all that there was to see in terms of evasive rhetoric, answering on the side and beyond, and populist opportunism. Well, no, I hadn’t.

TIME's James Graff asked him: YOU'VE CALLED ON ALL COALITION GOVERNMENTS TO WITHDRAW THEIR FORCES FROM IRAQ, AS SPAIN DID IN APRIL. DOES THAT MEAN YOU'RE WILLING TO ACCEPT A FUNDAMENTALIST SHI'ITE REGIME THERE OR ETHNIC CIVIL WAR?

Mr. Zapatero “answered”: "The one question we have to ask is this: Are things any better in Iraq after one-and-a-half years of occupation? The answer is, no. There's a spiral of violence and death. We have two options: close our eyes or face that reality. Now Iraq needs to recover its freedom, stability and sovereignty as soon as possible."

Notice that he won’t say whether he’s willing to accept a fundamentalist regime in Iraq. Nor thinks he appropriate to say if he feels comfortable with an ethnic civil war there. No. He wants Iraq to recover “its freedom, stability and sovereignity”.

That stupendous ensemble of vacant rhetoric call for an exegesis.

Which he provides, and boy it ain't pretty. Read the whole thing.