Everybody likes to feel exceptional. I’m reading a collection of articles by Spanish authors who keep exclaiming, “Our government lied to us back in 2004! In what other country is this even possible?!?”
Well, actually, in any country. Hell, I know a place where people were led to believe that 9/11 had something to do with Iraq. And that led to an endless war, compared to which the pathetic little lie of your government blaming the Basques for an Al Qaeda bombing is really small fry. Especially since your government fell a few days after proffering this lie.
Hey, show me a country where a government doesn’t lie, and then we’ll talk about being exceptional. But don’t nominate business as usual for the title of The Most Aggrieved Citizens Ever.
Clarissa's Blog 
People in Poland kind of assume that Polish politicians are uniquely awful and worse than politicians in “a normal country” and don’t necessarily know how to react when I say that from my persepctive they’re about average (the average is of course…. awful but they’re not more awful than other countries).
One weird pattern I’ve noticed is that politicians often have speech… problems. This was most clearly seen in the US election in 2000 where one candidate could hardly put a coherent sentence together and the other had only two speeds (deadly dull monotone and yelling at the top of his lungs).
I think it was Tony Blair was always using double descriptors (It’s a tragedy and an very unfortunate occurrence, I’m very happy and pleased etc) and wasn’t it Aznar who always repeated what he said tree times, he said everything three times, he repeated it three. times.)
Clinton is probably above average in speaking abilities (when she’s not coughing a lung up or fainting) but Trump hardly speaks in sentences at all. He throws out some random sentence fragments and lets his audience put them together.
In other news, what’s up with Catalonia? I would have thought that the continuing government turmoil would be a good time for stealth independence but I’m starting to wonder if they really want that or they’re just talking but will not cross that actual threshhold (not least because a majority probably doesn’t want it, the independistes are mostly a very vocal minority that bullies everyone else into silence.
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