Germany: Why No One Pays Attention to Them

With rhetoric like this, Germany's vice president of the Bundestag, Antje Vollmer, would fit in perfectly with the Democratic Party in the U.S. The latest allegation from the land of wienerschnitzel is that the US government wanted to reduce the influence of the pope because of his opposition to the war in Iraq, so it concocted the pedophilia scandal.

First, in Sept. 2002, then-Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin compared George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler. Then came Andreas von Buelow, the former federal education and research minister whose 2003 conspiracy theory alleging the CIA and Israeli intelligence were responsible for the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington made for a best-selling book. Now Vollmer comes along, implying that the US government chose to draw attention to the Catholic pedophilia scandal not because of the crimes in and of themselves, but because Washington wanted to weaken the pope.

Germany should just stick with what it knows: beer, bratwurst and unemployment.