Oh, my, that was an entertaining week.

Study after study shows that negative campaigning and attack ads work - they nestle in the minds of some voters, and the ones that don't like them tend to wish ill on both candidates' houses. But what happens when candidate attacks are received by one side's supporters with cheers, and the other's with gut-busting laughter?

Incoming Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero really is a Socialist, or at lesst a Member Of The Party (some socialist--his economic policies are as Euro-friendly as anyone's), so all that right-wing talk show name-calling can actually be factual this time. He earned their wrath almost as soon as his winning votes were tallied by helpfully piped up in response to the White House demand that John Kerry name names.

Kerry, you see, let slip the observation that some of the world's elected leaders were rooting for him to win; the roster is actually about as long as the United Nations' membership rolls, but howls of Republican outrage erupted anyway. This, mind you, from the same party whose exalted neocon father, Ronald Reagan, not only courted foreign support as a candidate but actually cut a secret deal with the Iranians in his bid to unseat incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980. The Iranians, remember, were then fresh off their conversion to an Islamic theocracy, and were not only sponsoring terrorism around the world, but had help Americans hostage in Tehran for over a year. By the standards Reagan set, Kerry shouldn't just be citing foreign support-he ought to be cutting a deal with Al-Qaeda.

That, essentially, is what Republicans are accusing Zapatero of doing. Spanish voters ousted the ruling Popular Party only days after a devastating terror attack in Madrid, but those were critical days, and voters in Spain, far from following Al-Qaeda's will, responded in exactly the way more Americans should have responded when 9-11 struck and our leaders tried to make political hay out of it.

In Spain's case, the government insisted on its state-owned media for days--until the evidence to the contrary simply became too overwhelming--that the Madrid bombings were the work of Basque separatists. They claimed the evidence was irrefutable, even though an Islamic group with ties to Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, Basque separatists denied it, and there was no history of the Basque fighters striking on this large a scale. The government's "proof" was that the bombers used explosives of the same type used in Basque bombings. But the ETA (the Basque group most often associated with terrorist bombings) had stopped using those types of explosives a couple of decades ago, when the government put stricter controls on their use in the construction industry. That left foreign groups as the prime suspects--and Spain's visible support of George Bush's Iraq invasion as a prime motive for the bombings.

There's plenty of evidence that Al-Qaeda wanted these bombings to result in a change of Madrid's government and the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, but voters in Spain weren't responding to Al-Qaeda's will. Neither were they simply hoping to avoid future bombings by getting out of Iraq. They punished a government that not only defied last year's massive popular opposition to the Iraq invasion, but responded to a deadly bombing this year by lying about its origins for political purposes.

What is more instructive is what the Spanish--who survived a 20th century civil war and 40 years of fascist rule, so they have some perspectives we don't regarding political violence in their midst--did not do. They didn't blindly rally around their flag; they didn't unquestioningly accept the word of their leaders; they didn't allow the issues of the bombers' identity, methods, and motives to pass without further inspection. They reacted thusly in a matter of days. Here in the US, the Bush Administration is still invoking "9-11" as though it should be some sort of free pass whenever its actions are questioned--and, amazingly, still stonewalling on any sort of meaningful 9-11 investigation.

Unlike us, the Spanish, bless them, didn't let their leaders get away with something like that. But then, neither would most countries' citizens, which is why so many of their leaders do, in fact, want Bush gone. It's not just that those leaders have found the Dubya regime arrogant, abrasive, and (at its top) ignorant beyond all belief. It's also that they're responding to the sensibilities of their own people, who, according to polls, overwhelmingly want Bush gone in most every country in the world. (My favorite is Jordan, where an astonishing 96% prefer Kerry over Bush. Kim Il Jong himself couldn't get those sorts of numbers.) Given that decisions in Washington affect the daily lives of most every person on the planet, it's a shame these folks don't have a vote. We'll have to be their proxies.

Which brings us back to those attack ads, and the sad reality that the most expensive political race in the history of the world is going to be dumping huge vats of televised mud on each of us before this is through. The Bush team's fondest hope is that we'll turn the channel off. Don't. The only sensible response is to treat this stuff the way the Spaniards treated their bombing: ask about the attackers' identity, their methods (slick advertising), and what the record really shows.

And when the lying gets really bad--as it already has in the first of the Bush ads--imagine it all being superimposed with a laugh track. And then vote the bastards out. And do it with a very clear message that if John Kerry tries the same things, we'll get rid of him, too. Just like they did in Spain.