Maggie's Farm

My grandfather in Oklahoma lived in town and farmed in the countryside for most of his life. Only during the Depression did he live at the farm, in an attempt to cut expenses.

On more than one occasion in the last year, Obama has pushed Europe to spend more, and Merkel has replied that would be bad policy. Danke schoen, Frau Merkel!

We in the US have our share of corrupt politicians, but Gerhard Schröder, now shilling for Gazprom, is also corrupt. But most likely we have a larger share of corrupt politicians.

There is often a hidden moral corruption in German politics when Germans denounce the Amis. More often than not, there is a Nazi -or the like- under the bed. Gunter Grass is one example.

Back in 2002, former Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin gratuitously compared George Bush to “Adolf Nazi,” and called the US justice system lousy. Her Nazi father, Hans Gmelin, was Standartenführer in German occupied Slovakia where Herta was born during WW2. In his position as assistant to German “ambassador” Hanns Ludin, Gmelin helped facilitate the Holocaust, and served three years in prison as a consequence.That was a decidedly less onerous consequence than the Jewish citizens of Slovakia suffered when Hans Gmelin facilitated their transport to the camps.
Puts Herta’s gratuitous criticisms of the US in a different context, does it not? Such as: “In an attempt to expiate my guilt feelings over my father’s conduct in WW2, I will attempt to show that the Americans are as bad as the Nazis.” Herta, I would much prefer that you come to terms with your father’s wartime conduct- you are NOT responsible for how your father behaved when you were an infant- so that you would stop dumping on the Americans.

Another example is German criticism of the death penalty in the US. It turns out that the the abolition of the death penalty in Germany did not have pristine origins.
But the actual history of the German death penalty ban casts this claim in a different light. Article 102 was in fact the brainchild of a right-wing politician who sympathized with convicted Nazi war criminals -- and sought to prevent their execution by British and American occupation authorities. Far from intending to repudiate the barbarism of Hitler, the author of Article 102 wanted to make a statement about the supposed excesses of Allied victors' justice.
Read more at the link.

That being said, the US would be better off it if were to follow Germany’s fiscal prudence, play more polka music, eat more sauerkraut, and listen to more Bach.