This is your weekly reminder that just because the Europeans do wounded vanity, umbrage, and virtue-signaling lectures so much better than we do doesn’t necessarily mean that what is issuing forth from their sanctimonious streusel holes matches what their barely restrained authoritarian instincts are doing in actuality.
One of the best ways to highlight the dual nature of their conflicted existence is to pick some of the subjects that constitute their favorite defensive posturing. A couple that are really getting worn out in tussles against the Americans are ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy.’ These are often used interchangeably, or, even better, when they combine them for what Europeans perceive as a coup de grâce argument-ender.
This is all well and good posturing in the Never Never Land of diplomatic sword crossing for public effect. But in the trenches, streets, and homes of regular citizens, mayhap things look a little different than the rosy, beatific picture of pastoral freedoms and hives of honey-laden democracy painted by the Brussels Brahmins from their castles.
A prime example has surfaced.
I’ve often written of the skeletal, scarecrowish, bespectacled creature who clings with bony fingers to visions of wielding outsized international influence even as he reigns over the meltdown of his own once prosperous and mighty economy as Chancellor of Germany. From the very beginning, from the day after his election, in fact, I dubbed the risible Friedrich Merz ‘Master of the Old Magoo‘ in reference to his chameleon-like ability to change his colors – and dump his promises – at a moment’s notice.
This conscience-free, unscrupulous, ethically unconcerned style of governance has not gone unnoticed or is much appreciated by Germans themselves, and imagine that. It’s kind of like being a dewy-eyed Spanberger or Mamdani voter right about now, only Germany is more of a police state trying to deal with it.
Did I say that?
*checks notes*
Why, yes. Yes, I did.
Hellbound and Down 