McDonald’s has startled Putin “understander” everywhere across Germany by announcing that it has shut down three of its franchise fast food joints in Crimea.

Damn. These are clearly the most effective Western sanctions yet. And could lead to war or something.

In the days of the cold war, the Soviet Union and East Germany infiltrated their spies into the Bundestag, the federal bureaucracy, and even the chancellor’s (Willy Brandt’s) inner circle. The Federal Republic of Germany was Russia’s most spectacular espionage success, made possible by the common lineage of German communists and the Social Democrats (SPD), who alternated in power with rival Christian Democrats throughout the postwar era.

A quarter century after the end of the cold war, the German social democrats are still providing ideological cover for the Russian Bear along with their cast-out brethren – the ex-communists of Die Linke party. These prominent German Putin-Empathizers (from Versteher or, literally “understander” in German) serve as Putin’s first line of defense against meaningful European sanctions for the Anschluss of Crimea.

PS: Speaking of closing shop, “Wetten, das..?” ITSELF has been cancelled on German TV itself. In Germany itself. Holy guacamole! What’s the German equivalent for Americana anyway?

I bet the ZDF might have been prepared to cancel the show in Crimea, too. If it were aired there, I mean. But it isn’t so they won’t.

Der Aufwand der Show stünde nicht mehr im Verhältnis zur Resonanz der Zuschauer.