Spain since Franco not so much the Thrall of the CIA

  So many of the things our Puppet Masters do are so outrageous, so blatantly in no one's interest but theirs, that when their horrible little farces come unraveled, as Spain did when their puppet-creature Franco died, they seem to lose their grip, and not to know quite what to make of loose cannons like Juan Carlos and his screwball king-in-parliament democracy and his nut-case anti-fascist (in Catholic Spain!) prime minister Zapatero.  They do their best (or worst--their good being evil) naturally.  As, for example, when the Basque separatists, ETA, bombed the trains in Madrid four years ago, they quickly induced their CIA-Muslim thralls (the same ones that, for a notorious other example, with the Bush government's complicity and connivance, did 9/11) to take the fall for it. For the Spanish government this had the irresistible attraction of neutralizing the effect of Basque terrorism by simply denying that that's what it was--and who knows what other threats and cajolery the CIA employed to foist this particular subversion of justice on the Spanish judiciary?  In any case, it has, sort of, worked; but not like in the good (bad) old days under Franco, when anybody who dared question an official government position would have been tortured to death. Nowadays, the "rumor" that it was, after all, ETA  that bombed the trains has a nasty way of transpiring, no matter what the government says.  And now, in the recent heated debate between the Conservative candidate and the Socialist prime minister currently in power, another tiny felure lente et sure:  The Conservative said, "The economy has slowed in the four years of your government."  And Zapatero replied, "But, of course, that's not the fault of our government.  The economic slowdown is due to the unwarranted interference and manipulation of the government of the United States of America."