I’m really starting to like this guy. Günter Grass has now become so predictably “bad” that he’s good.

This week provided yet more proof that the 85-year-old has jumped the shark. In a Wednesday appearance with this year’s SPD candidate for chancellor, Peer Steinbrück, Grass took it upon himself to blast Chancellor Angela Merkel and, in a verbal assault not without irony, to criticize her past as a member of the East German youth organization FDJ, the Communist Party’s version of the Boy and Girl Scouts.

In condemning Merkel for “tarnishing our relations with our neighbors in an extremely short amount of time” by virtue of the course she has pursued in the euro crisis, Grass said that her approach is a product of her political upbringing. “During her time in the FDJ, she learned conformity and opportunism. Under (former Chancellor Helmut) Kohl, she learned how to wield power.”

“Günter Grass, of all people, a man who kept his own membership in the SS silent for decades, is now criticizing Angela Merkel’s past in East Germany? That is nothing but an embarrassment.”

PS: Speaking of German heros, Edward Snowden is becoming more heroic here in Germany with every passing day.

„Das ist schon heldenhaft, sich gegen solche Organisationen aufzulehnen.”