Being one of those pesky foreigners (worse still, being one of those Germans who just don’t want to go to war any longer) has a bunch of advantages. You’re viewing things in a different way. In a sense, it’s easier to see through things - at least through things in other countries. I bet I have no clue about all the crap going on in Germany because I’m so used to it. But as I live in the US I’m mainly dealing with all things American now, and, frankly, it’s quite amazing.
Take that “State of the Union” speech last night. The president enters the room and there’s applause. From everybody. How can that be? Doesn’t the US have an opposition? When the German Chancellor (or any other leader of any other democratic country I know of) gives a speech like that the opposition doesn’t applaud. Quite on the contrary. So that’s weird to me. And then they have the camera which shows Bush jr *below* what seems to be his waist level. So Bush jr looks really big. That’s just some cheap manipulation.
Anyway. So Bush jr. gives this speech - which I duly didn’t watch coz that’s the thing to do I learned. It suffices to read the main points the next day and, no surprise, no surprise, there’s nothing new in it. Well, you have that in any country I suppose. But there are some funny bits to the whole thing. For example, Bush jr continued claiming all those really weird things - like that really bad math about how “on the average” all the people get so much money back (hey, if Bill Gates is in the same room as me that makes me a billionary - on the average), and about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda (for which we haven’t seen and - let me predict - will not see any solid evidence). And what does the press do? They just keep buying it. It’s like watching a commercial where they tell you all that stuff which obviously isn’t true at all but if they repeat it often enough you (literally) buy it.
And the longer Bush jr is president, the more efforts are made to explain that he’s not really dumb or stupid - as if we all didn’t know how to spot somebody who’s dumb. So the latest explanation - courtesy of the New York Times - is that Bush is just “anti-intellectual” or not interested in details. Well that might well be but with those kinds of qualifications they wouldn’t let you run a kindergarten here, right? And the New York Times isn’t worried or rather *very* worried?