Ronald McBush?

So, the question for voters this year is this: Is John McCain as dim a bulb as George W. Bush or is he in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease like Ronald Reagan, or perhaps some charming combination of both? Hilzoy has some observations about McFuddled's inability to recognize the Prime Minister of Spain:

In any case, however, this is a big gaffe. It's not like Bush's not knowing who the head of Pakistan was in 2000. In that case, Bush was asked a surprise question. In this case, McCain was being interviewed by Spanish media. If he wasn't briefed on Spain, including the name of its Prime Minister, before he sat down for that interview, then he has completely incompetent staff, who should be fired on the spot. (Avoiding mistakes like this is part of what they're paid for.) If he was briefed on that, then it's not just that he forgot, in the sense of not being able to recall the name when asked. That happens sometimes, but it's not what happened here. Here, he didn't recognize the name when someone else said it.

In my experience, that's a lot harder to do, if you know the name to start with, especially if you're in a context in which that person might be brought up in conversation. -- It sometimes happens to me that I fail to place someone when they appear in a completely unexpected context: when one of my students (in Baltimore) appears at the wedding of an old family friend (in Boston), for instance. But, again, this is not a context in which mentioning the Prime Minister of Spain is in any way unexpected.

UPDATE: Barbara O'Brien is having a great time with this, beginning with the title of her post. Be sure and check out her graphic. A couple of great headlines she found:

Time, The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly on McCain

The Guardian, Barack's Back (sub-head, "McCain's Spain brain-pain")