Should Poland and France Re-Instate The Draft?

The Con

This bit from James Taranto’s Wall Street Journal column ‘The Best of the Web’ caught my eye.  The passage revolves around a statement from Josef Braml, the German Council on Foreign Relations US expert on the President and checks and balances inherent in the US political system.

“Foreign policy expert Josef Braml, who analyzes the U.S. for the German Council on Foreign Relations, said many Germans give Obama too much of the blame because they don’t understand the limits of his powers.

“There’s a lack of understanding both of how the system of checks and balances works–or doesn’t work any longer–and a lack of understanding of how big the socio-economic problems in the United States are, which cause the gridlock,” Braml said in a telephone call from Greece, where he was on vacation.”

So the problem isn’t that Obama is weak or out of touch with Americans but that he is constrained by a system of checks and balances. If only the top executive had fewer limits on his power! And we all remember how well that worked out for the Germans.

Although I still laugh every time I read the above statement, I do find it hard to take seriously.  A German analyst for the Council on Foreign Relations saying our political system is broken and what we really need is a benevolent dictator.  It smacks of both stupidity and the stuff conspiracy theorists pass around when discussing the CFR.  In truth this guy Bramel probably has a book coming out and his PR lackey got him to say something outrageous for sales to skyrocket in Berlin.

Then I saw this article on The Altantic.com

It was widely noted during the contretemps over the novelist Gunter Grass’s recent effusions about Israel being a threat to world peace that a divide emerged in Germany. On the one side were the intellectual and political elites that condemned his comments. On the other side was the public, which tended to sympathize with Grass and complain about a “cudgel” being wielded to silence debate about the German past.

Now, Germany is taking a new step toward what is often called “normalization.” The state of Bavaria has announced that in 2015 it will publish Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which first appeared in 1925. A second volume was issued in 1926. The book was written in Landsberg prison, where Hitler was incarcerated after his failed putsch in 1923.

Hitler, you could say, was made in Bavaria. He left Austria and served in the Reichwehr rather than the Austrian army, which he was officially obliged to join. After World War I, Hitler began his rise in Bavaria, where he launched the Beer Hall putsch and where he was fawned over by a number of local aristocrats, including the Bechsteins, who helped finance him and the Nazi Party. Bavaria was a hotbed of right-wing movements in the postwar era, which Hitler welded into the Nazi party. His talent, which no one had accomplished in Germany, was to unify the various splinter groups into a mighty organization. Munich itself was known as the “Haupstadt der Bewegung”–capital of the movement. So Bavaria has much to contemplate and rue when it looks back at the past.

And according to Der Spiegel, this new edition of Mein Kampf will have an edition annotated specifically for children.

The state is also planning a version for schools, with notes that are easy for young people to understand. “The expiration of the copyright in three years’ time could lead to more young people reading ‘Mein Kampf’,” Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder said on Tuesday, announcing the decision to publish a school version. Hitler’s book still had something “mystical” attached to it, he said, explaining its attraction to young people. The notes on the text would outline “the global catastrophe that this dangerous way of thinking led to,” Söder said.

So, the various Germans in the Teutonic power structure think the US should trash Constitution and is re-printing an ‘official’ edition of Mein Kampf, a book any German citizen can buy online through Amazon, Barnes and Noble or on the second hand market.  And said ‘official’ edition will also be published in a special noted edition for the Deutsche Kinder so they can easily understand Hitler’s ideas.

Add in the EU is very close to going down in flames due to the horrible economy.  And who is attempting holding that union together?  Germany.

Quick note to the French and the Poles: re-institute the draft.