German minister blames hurricane on U.S. policy

Fuck you, Germany. I've heard enough garbage like this. I expect fetid rubbish like this from Aljazeera, but not from a country we saved. Bush will take his lumps for a slow disaster response, and he'll take them from Americans like me, not cowardly dumbasses who think they've an idea of how the world should be run just 60 years after they almost destroyed it.

From Der Spiegel:

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Apparently the Americans had it coming: "The American president has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina -- in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures -- can visit on his country." Who wrote this? None other than Jürgen Trittin, Germany's minister of the environment.

At a moment when the dead on the Gulf Coast are still being counted, the German minister of the environment could think of nothing better to do than -- in an essay published Tuesday in the center-left daily Frankfurter Rundschau -- to blame the US itself for the catastrophe. The piece is 493 words long, and not a single one of them is wasted to express any sort of sympathy for the victims of the storm. The worst of it is that Trittin isn't alone with his cold, malicious tenor. The coverage from much of the German media tends in the same direction: If Bush had only listened to Uncle Trittin and signed the Kyoto Protocol, then this never would have happened.

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This consistutes an international diplomatic incident of the highest order. Trittin isn't an also-ran who has become bitter about losing some election or his hair. He's a top-level government official. I expect Bush to acknowledge that Germany's attitude will immediately worsen relations.

Germany and much of world is advocating that the U.S. leave Iraq. Well, perhaps we should have left Germany immediately after we crushed Hitler. Or perhaps we should have done to Germany what Germany advocated we do in Iraq -- simply keep the dictator hemmed in within his own borders via no-fly zones, forever allowed to wreak havoc and bloodshed on the entire population while earning a tidy sum in illegal trading.

The .5% of me that still has a positive attitude toward the world wants to believe that Trittin and the German media don't reflect the views of the German populace at large -- that Katrina is Bush's fault and the fault of U.S. policies. Yet, I now have a very dim view of Germans. Fortunately, my fellow Americans feel the same way.