The full horror of 11-M, as the conservative Spanish press is now dubbing the train attacks, only hit me when in the midst of remembering small details about Atocha - the silly indoor rainforest, the security guys checking out travelling girls, the endless cafecitos sipped by anonymous businessmen - I realized that the only equivalent in the US would be the PATH trains exploding underneath Penn Station. If this was the work of Al-Qaeda, not ETA, as both the method and the timing of the attack would seem to indicate, then perhaps the center-right government that wins tomorrow's elections will have to labor under the cloud of having initially and consciously misinformed the populace about the source and meaning of the bombing, and will not become, as Charles Kupchan suggests in Salon.com, a kind of pale euro-version of Bush's America, with right-wing politics and xenophobic distrust elevated to patriotic imperatives.