Sigmar Gabriel, the head of the German Social Democratic Party and possible candidate for Chancellor of Germany, finally decided to break with that long and rather tiring SPD tradition of calling dissenters Nazis and tried out something new and refreshingly different instead; labelling the state of Israel an “Apartheid-Regime” on his Facebook page.
And to give the whole thing a little more umpf, he decided to publish this while visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories. Now he gets to pretend to defend his comparison of Israel to a racist state live and in color, right there before those terrible racists themselves (the Israelis, not the Palestinians). I tell ya, you got to have instinct in this business. Go SPD!
“I was just in Hebron. That is a lawless territory there for Palestinians. This is an apartheid regime, for which there is no justification.”
Caught up in the manic media feeding frenzy during the filming of a rare baby rabbit born without ears in a zoo at a place called Limbach-Oberfrohna somewhere in the wilds of eastern Germany, an overzealous news team cameraman stepped out of line and then on to the defenseless near-celebrity, bringing what would have surely been a far too short career to an even more untimely end.
“He was immediately dead. He didn’t suffer. It was a direct hit. No one could have foreseen this. Everyone here is upset. The cameraman is distraught,” a shocked and stuttering zoo spokesman said again and again and again.
At least he never saw it coming. Or heard it coming, either.
Warum es ohne Ohren auf die Welt kam, ist noch nicht endgültig geklärt. Womöglich handelt es sich um einen genetischen Defekt. “Es kann aber auch sein, dass die Mutter dem Kaninchen die Ohren abgeknabbert hat.”
Together we are strong. Let’s turn into a pack of wulffs and kick him when he’s down (OK, wulffs, I mean wolves, don’t kick). Then we’ll kick him when he’s down and out. And then we’ll even kick him when he’s out (just out).
A Grand Tattoo? I thought there for a second that those soldiers were going to turn around, put him up against a wall and shoot him.
There is also a row over the music as President Wulff has requested four pieces, instead of the usual three.
Germans everywhere were stunned after outgoing, laugh-a-minute Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko caused an undiplomatic uproar by telling Germany’s foreign minister Guido Westerwelle that it is “better to be a dictator than gay.”
“What does he mean, gay?” several of the shocked Germans asked simultaneously.
“Are you kidding?” another German said. “I had absolutely no idea that Guido Westerwelle was one of those.”
“Guido? Gay?” one enraged bystander said. “Why I’ll show that tater dicked dick tater a slur or two. Take that faggity assed hat of yours off and come over here and fight like a man!”
I got your “aye me buckos” for you right here. Even the best-run running joke gets old after a while (or in this case the worst-run).
It turns out that too much transparancy leads to too much transparancy after all. That is: Finally being able to see that if you want to accomplish something in life (or even in politics, yuk), you’re going to have to work really, really, really hard for it.
Top pirate wench Marina Weisband quit first due to “health reasons” (she was clearly sick and tired of all this adolescent nonsense). Swashbuckling chairman of the Berlin pirate pack himself Gerhard Anger quit not long after that due to “the immense pressure” of having to actually get up every morning to go to work.
Like, life in the Internet was never like this. You can stick this reality bite crap back up to where the sun don’t shine, dude. A party “in tune with the Berlin vibe” is still a party. And every party has to come to an end sometime.
At least that’s what the Germans will tell you if you ask them, which of course nobody is.
OK, we’re actually talking about EADS here. “The German government is deeply concerned by the concentration and centralisation of research and development competencies in the headquarters in Toulouse, which have to a large degree led to the current imbalance,” a pissed off big-time German politician has lamented.
So much for Franco-German understanding (yet again). And if it were up to the Germans, they would even see to it that EADS ensure “equal numbers of French and German nationals occupy positions in the top five leadership levels,” although how you would equally distribute five people is unclear to me (government can do this kind of stuff, you know).
But none of this will lead to anything, folks. I can tell you that right now. The Airbus Chief Executive and designated EADS boss isn’t about to let any pigheaded German government official tell him what to do. His name is Thomas Enders and he’s a pigheaded German himself.
EADS was formed in 2000 from French, German and Spanish assets as a counterweight to U.S. aerospace and defense giants.
I call it Hurt Feelings Burnout Syndrome (HFBS). With an emphasis on the BS. Oh man, I had to laugh out loud while reading the latest on the poor, misunderstood German front.
It appears that many German intellectuals are very concerned about how their European neighbors think of them (Germany) these days. Needless to say, it isn’t very highly at all. And some have come to the stunning conclusion that they are so disliked at the moment because, now get this, they are so big and strong. Imagine that.
Germany is the USA of Europe – only with a different history.
You don’t need to puzzle for very long about the question of why so much Nazi name-calling is going on at the moment: For the first time since 1945, Germany has appeared in full strength again. Not because anybody wanted it, but because the European debt crisis has made the most economically powerful country the most politically powerful one, as well. Germany is now intervening in the internal affairs of others in a big way.
Slowly but surely, the country is taking over a role for Europe that the USA has played for the rest of the world for so long, as being the country that uses (and sometimes misuses) its power, the country that is to blame for everything, the country that is supposed to save everything and is reviled for the way it does it. What has America not been accused of? The CIA has always been behind everything and American imperialism has always been the motivation.
How moving. Or something. And the rest of the story? Now folks are calling Germans Nazis again (as if they had ever stopped). Boo-hoo-hoo already. Come on, Germany. Wake up and smell the coffee. You’re the big kid on the block. Run with it. Enjoy. It comes with the turf.
And in a related story (I find), it turns out that Germans are also now “burning out” like flies (it’s hard to carry on when nobody likes you, I guess). This imaginary disease (yet another American import – are we having irony yet?) is currently running rampant among Germany’s workforce, with nearly 1 out of 10 sick days in Germany in 2010 being attributed to it (tendency rising). Another connection to US-Amerika? Oh my God. No wonder so many Germans are getting sick. Please note: The high-brow daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung questioned why burnout was being written so much about in Germany, while in France, which is economically a lot worse off, “it’s hardly a preoccupation at all.”
Remember: HFBS is incurable, but there are many effective treatments. One of them is shutting the #!?#! up.
Man braucht wirklich nicht lange an der Frage rumzurätseln, warum die Nazi-Vergleiche im Moment so oft gezogen werden: Zum ersten Mal seit 1945 tritt Deutschland wieder mit voller Macht auf, nicht weil man das gewollt hätte, sondern weil die europäische Schuldenkrise das ökonomisch stärkste auch zum politisch mächtigsten Land gemacht hat. Deutschland greift nun tief ein in die inneren Angelegenheiten Dritter.
Allmählich bekommt das Land für Europa eine ähnliche Funktion, wie sie die USA lange Zeit für die ganze Welt hatten. Als jene Macht, die ihre Kraft gebrauchte, manchmal missbrauchte, die an allem schuld war, die alles retten sollte und sich dafür beschimpfen lassen musste, wie sie es tat. Was wurde den Amerikanern nicht alles Übles angedichtet, immer steckte die CIA hinter allem Bösen, stets wurden die Amerikaner des Imperialismus geziehen.
PS: I hate to admit it, Germany, but I guess we’ve got more in common than we would like to admit (thanks for the idea, Old Phat Stu).
Now that the command center for NATO’s missile shield program will be based here in Germany, it’s time for the German Left (that’s the middle of the road here, by the way) to start telling us why this is an awful bad horrible idea.
My guess is that that we will find out that there are actually no such things as rogue states like Iran (only morally challenged ones), that a missle shield like this is absolutely positively technically impossible to implement, and that putting one into operation (even though it is absolutely positively technically impossible to implement) would hurt Russia’s feelings.
There’s not much happening on the Peace Front either these days, you see. And spring is just around the corner. And folks do get easily bored, you know?
The United States insists that the missile shield aims to counter missile threats from Iran, but Russia has voiced concerns that it would target its own strategic deterrent.
The title reads: Greeks and Italians Work Harder Than Americans.
One common reaction to the European debt crisis has been to blame the victim: If only those Greeks/Italians would work harder, like us Americans/Germans, then they wouldn’t be in this pickle, the thinking goes.
Except it’s not, how do you say, true: Greeks and Italians actually work more than Americans and Germans.
And when they’re not doing that they’re hurting each other’s feelings – by calling each another too European. Yikes. Talk about hitting below the belt (but somebody’s got to do it).
It’s a scandal or something. And I’m shocked, I guess (I really thought they would have more powerful stuff than this). But some of these are pretty good, actually:
“Obama wants to turn the US into a European welfare state.”
“I don’t believe in Europe. I believe in America.”
“I don’t think Europe is working in Europe. I know it won’t work here.”
“You want to see America after the Obama administration is through, just read up on Greece.”
“Obama has a European social democratic vision.”
“American elites are guided by their desire to emulate the European elites. As a result, anti-religious values and principles are coming to dominate the academic, news media and judicial class in America.”
“The president said he wants to fundamentally transform America. I kind of like America. I’m not looking for it to be fundamentally transformed into something else. I don’t want it to become like Europe.”
Recently, RC Hammond, the spokesman for Newt Gingrich’s campaign, commented on Mitt Romney’s alleged support for a value added tax. “The fact that he’s willing to look at European Socialism shows just how far out of the conservative mainstream he is.”
