Germany Tries To Explain History To Vice President Butthair

What a great first overseas trip for American Reichsleiter — excuse us, American Vice President — JD Vance, the feral ignoramus the American people in their wisdom have chosen to put one 78-year-old heartbeat away from the world’s most powerful office. Well, second-most, next to whatever office Elon Musk occupies in the White House.

We wrote the other day about Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany last week, when he excoriated European leaders for not listening to the Trump Nazis and white nationalists in their midst, while also whining that he had for going on a decade had to listen to the grating voice of Greta Thunberg and her crusade to try and keep Earth habitable for his children and geez, chicks, always going on about something or other, am I right, fellas? Do the dishes, keep the planet from becoming an airless void incapable of sustaining life, nag nag nag.

The speech drew a rebuke from Germany’s defense minister, engendered a lot of stunned talk at whatever cocktail parties were being held around Munich, and oh yeah, went a long way towards upending the post-World War II era of liberal democracy. It was a nice 80 years! Or at least a relatively nuclear-holocaust-free 80 years, which we personally appreciated. (And now European leaders are spending their Monday holding an emergency summit on confronting a future without an ally called “America.”)

American Vice President Terrified Of Teenage Girl

Vance followed up his idiot-bull-in-a-china-shop routine by snubbing a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the elected leader of the country, in favor of a get-together with Alice Weidel, leader of the neo-Nazi-adjacent Alternative for Germany party (AfD). In his own speech on Saturday, Scholz basically told the young whippersnapper to fuck all the way off, though he said it much more diplomatically.

Here’s a little flavor from The New York Times:

Mr. Scholz said the AfD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau, which Mr. Vance visited on Friday. The chancellor said Germany “would not accept” suggestions from outsiders about how to run its democracy — or directives to work with such a party.

“That is not done, certainly not among friends and allies,” Mr. Scholz said.

Scholz also told his audience that the concept of “never again” and the AfD are not compatible, and that “this ‘never again’ is the historical mission that Germany as a free democracy must and wants to continue to live up to every day. Never again fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.”

Our big boy vice president probably missed that, as we doubt he reads such a liberal rag as the Times. Or maybe he’s read it but didn’t understand it, and someone on his staff could explain it to him using small words.

Elsewhere in the Times, one of its reporters ran down some facts that Vance missed. Such as that while the AfD is sitting at about 20 percent in the polls for this week’s parliamentary elections, no other party in Germany will consider forming a coalition with it for reasons that are obvious to everyone except current American leadership:

German intelligence agencies have classified parts of the AfD as extremist. Members have been arrested in connection with multiple plots to overthrow the government. […]

Decades of German law and political practice have revolved around the belief that to prevent another Hitler from coming to power, the government must ban hate speech and shun political parties deemed extreme.

This way of thinking upsets Vance, who thinks of far-right voters as simply disaffected voices that people should listen to. That we have perhaps listened to them, found them to be a bunch of unappeasable bigoted shitheads whose views are harmful to a democratic society, and understand shunning them is also an exercise in free speech apparently never occurred to him.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to defend Vance’s horseshit on “Face the Nation,” which he beamed into from somewhere overseas in what looked like a hostage video. We could say that, considering how much of what little dignity he ever had Rubio has surrendered to be a part of the Trump administration, that might be exactly what this video is. Then we remembered that no one forced him to take the job, and he could be back in Florida right now making entirely too much money helping real estate developers pave over what’s left of the Everglades. So fuck him.

“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan summarized Vance’s week and then asked Rubio what the vice president had accomplished “other than irritating our allies,” which is about as confrontational a question as we might have ever heard Brennan ask.

Rubio replied:

“Why would our allies or anybody be irritated by free speech and by someone giving their opinion? We are, after all, democracies. The Munich Security Conference is largely a conference of democracies in which one of the things that we cherish and value is the ability to speak freely and provide your opinions.

“And so, I think if anyone’s angry about his words, they don’t have to agree with him, but to be angry about it, I think actually makes his point.

But see, Li’l Marco, that’s part of free speech. Vance is allowed to offer his opinion that Germany isn’t listening enough to the residual Nazi wing of its society, and Germans are allowed to respond with, Holy hell, you malformed Cabbage Patch Kid, is your brain a lump of coal slurry? There are several million reasons you might have heard about why Germany has laws against hate speech and has banned political parties deemed too extreme. You just visited Dachau the other day, did you get the mistaken impression it was some sort of day spa, or that we keep it around as a monument to German ingenuity? What is wrong with you, you overgrown tree sloth?

Typical conservatives, they want all the benefits of free speech for themselves without the unavoidable fact that people might get pretty pissed at what they are saying.

What we would tell Rubio is that other nations might get less irritated if Vance speaks to them in a less condescending and more diplomatic manner, but then we remembered that he’s the nation’s chief diplomat now and we wouldn’t want to imply that a one-legged syphilitic orangutan has a better grasp on how to do the job than he does. But if we did imply that, he can’t get irritated! We’re all in a democracy here, and we’re allowed to provide our opinions.

Brennan also tried to explain to Rubio that Vance was standing in a country that had once weaponized free speech “to conduct a genocide.” Therefore, maybe there was some context for German speech laws and reactions that both men were forgetting about.

Rubio, naturally, answered in a way reminding everyone that he used to play football and probably got hit in the head a lot:

“Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities and they hated those that they- they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition.”

Holy hell, man, read a book. Do you think the Nazis sprung up fully formed at Germany’s founding? Of course they weaponized free speech to enable their rise to power. If the Weimar Republic had not allowed at least some free speech and freedom of association, the Nazi Party might never have gotten off the ground! Hitler would not have been able to come out of prison after the Beer Hall Putsch — which took place in Munich, no less — and picked up exactly where he had left off! He would not have been allowed to publish Mein Kampf! The Nazis used the levers of democracy to take power, and then ended it so Hitler could rule as a dictator.

Also the idea that there was “no opposition” in Nazi Germany, good Lord. You don’t even have to read a book, you can just go to Wikipedia for a pretty definitive list of ways Hitler’s opponents tried to take him out after he took power.

Oh we forgot, Wikipedia is woke now.

It’s good to know insulting people is still okay, though, because Rubio and Vance and the rest of the creatures in the White House of Dr. Moreau are giving us nonstop reasons to do it.

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