>Beside the point, anyway. I fully expected this to devolve into "what is this 'Left' of which you speak?" and I wasn't disappointed.

Nor was I dissapointed in your failure to provide any evidence that "the left" as a whole thought what you claim they thought. You're capable of quite good arguments, Tom, but you have a tendency to create strawman posts where based on some isolated examples, or just on your own supposed memory, you make a blanket charge that "the left believed" something stupid.

In this case, no, I'm not OK that Islamic extremists influenced an election through terror. I will agree with you that there are some leftists who *were* ok with that, not OK with the terror per se, but who cited it as a reason why countries shouldn't have sided with Bush. Attacking that view would have been reasonable, but even so their argument acknowledges that the timing of the attack was connected to the election. So I'm not sure what your point was other than to claim "the left" believed something stupid that few, if any of them actually did believe.

As for the empirical question, there is no doubt the attack influenced the election, though *why* it did is a more interesting question. I know of at least one forthcoming journal article where after crunching the polling numbers, the authors find a roughly even split between voters who changed their intention due to fear of future terror or punishing the govt for supporting Bush, vs those who changed their votes due to anger at the Spanish govt's mishandling of the attack, in particular their knee-jerk attempt to blame ETA (those voters didn't necessarily vote for the socialists instead, but stayed home in disgust). I haven't read the draft but their data seemed good when I saw them present it at a conference recently.