Juan Carlos vs Hugo Chávez

Hugo Chávez is one of those left wingers who a sane left-winger should actually dislike. He's like Galloway - just because you're attacking a dictatorial half-wit who is bent on taking the country they've managed to get themselves elected to lead in some deranged direction, it doesn't mean that you're not also a deranged half-wit etc. etc.

So it's not a surprise to see that plenty of the centre-left have been delighted with the response of Juan Carlos I of Spain, who became so fed up of Chávez interrupting he told him - in very blunt terms - to shut up.

Chávez, who likes to bang on about how he was democratically elected, was interrupting the democratically elected José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero - leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party - who was defending his predecessor and political opponent José María Aznar from Chávez's rants that he was a socialist. Juan Carlos, who one would imagine knows what a fascist is, having previously managed to trick a bunch of them into enabling him to turn Spain from a fascist state to a parliamentary democracy, was having none of this.

Chavez is boasting how he has been democratically elected with 63% support to justify his being rude. But both Zapatero and Aznar were democratically elected, and in November 2005, Juan Carlos received a 77.5% approval rating in a newspaper poll. So he's basically shown himself up as the sort of arrogant tit that right wingers must love to be able to point at and say "See? That's what lefties are like!".