ConWatch: Week 1,801

Does Germany have a constitution yet?

The Bupkes would like to start off this week’s ConWatch with an apology about last week’s ConWatch, which compared Germany to the United States. This was wrong to do to the United States and we are sorry.

The United States at least has the good sense not to belong to treaties and institutions it has no intent on upholding or complying with. Like the Rome Statute. Because your troops can’t commit war crimes if you aren’t party to the agreement that punishes war crimes.

If the United States does find itself part of something it would like to undermine — say, the WHO, the Paris accord, or the Iran nuclear deal — it shows some respect and bows out. Doing so means you can then revert to the values you say you stand for, and those values can be anything you want them to be because you, and not some supranational framework above you, are the ones who said what they are and no one can tell you otherwise.

This is liberation in its truest expression.

Germany might be the land of the Übermensch, but only the United States is God. And not the bushy-bearded docile one of the New Testament, but the burning-bush moody one from a version earlier. I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it. Just ask Noah, the doms and subs of Sodom and Gomorrah, and almost everyone in or fleeing from Egypt — first-born males especially.

In contemporary, but no less biblical, proportions, if there is a comparison to draw with the United States, it is Hungary. Everyone’s favorite liberal internationalist just did. Even though Anne Applebaum can’t understand how her brand of anticommunism dovetails with Viktor Orbán’s, and she acknowledges that “Hungary is about as different from the US as it is possible to be,” it’s enough that she still has a “sense of foreboding” no matter she might remain clueless as to why.

The foreboding she may have missed was Orbán’s invitation to host international fugitive and sounds-just-like-us Benjamin Netanyahu. Much to our relief, like the United States, he showed the moral consistency of taking the state visit as an opportunity to relinquish support of the court that designated Bibi a fugitive in the first place. So now Israel’s prime minister has a safe space in Washington, Moscow, and Budapest.

Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for much less.

Germany would like to add Berlin to that list. Unfortunately, as much as it wants to be like Hungary, it also wants to pretend it is better than it, which actually makes it worse. Last we checked, Hungary hasn’t deported any EU citizens as Germany is about to do.

Say what you want about the conservative-nationalism of Hungary, at least it’s an ethos. Germany, meanwhile, is becoming a curbside card hustler of constitutionality, as it elevates extrajudicial Staatsräson above rule of law.

Now you see it, now you don’t. That’s how you put the con in ConWatch.