Does John McCain know that Zapatero is the Spanish prime minister, and that Spain is in Europe?

    You'll have to decide for yourself whether the painful interview below, which John McCain gave yesterday to a Spanish journalist in Florida, really does seem to indicate that he didn't know that Jose Luis Zapatero is the prime minister of Spain, and that he perhaps even thinks Spain might be in Latin America. (The relevant bit starts at around 2m58s.) Josh Marshall, who's pushing this story hardest, seems to think that's possible McCain is that confused. At the very least, McCain's odd insistence on answering a question about whether he'd invite Zapatero to visit the White House by talking only about Mexico suggests he might have thought the topic under discussion was Mexico's Zapatista movement. McCain's foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann, meanwhile, claims McCain's refusal to confirm that he'd meet with Zapatero was deliberate. (It's true that there's no love lost between Zapatero and the Bush administration, but McCain has said he'll patch up relationships of this sort, damaged by Iraq.)

Listen to the Interview Below

    So, to clarify matters for McCain: Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is the lefty prime minister of Spain. The Zapatistas are armed revolutionaries who have declared war on the government of Mexico. Zippy is an irascible non-human character in the children's TV series Rainbow, and Captain Zep was the star of an awesome 1980s British children's sci-fi drama. Franco Zeffirelli is a celebrated Italian film director who I once pretended to know the first thing about in order not to look stupid in a conversation in a restaurant.

    By the way, this must be a truly depressing day for our friends at Spain For McCain. We can assume they're not Zapatero fans, but still: their hero isn't even sure where their country is located? How dispiriting.

    UPDATE: I'm taken to task in comments for calling Zapatero the prime minister (his official Spanish title translates as "president", but everyone calls him "prime minister" in English because he's the head of a parliamentary system), for calling the Zapatistas "armed revolutionaries" (yes, there's much more to the situation than that), and far more crucially for leaving Frank Zappa off the list, which was inexcusable.