This is Helmut Kohl again. Just to refresh your memory: he was Chancellor in Germany for about a hundred years (well, sixteen) and lost his fifth bid for the post in 1998, which made us all laugh like Nelson from the Simpsons (HA, ha). Now he's back in the news, being forced to reveal that he's been financing his political party for decades with illegal campaign contribuitons, bribe money from big companies, and money laundering schemes (all totalling probably a hundred million Marks). Kohl is out there doing his best Nixon impression: acting all shocked that anyone would deny him, the practically deified Chancellor of German Re-unification, the right to have run his government however he pleased. Well, he admits, some formalities of law may have been overlooked, but such trivialites cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a Helmut Kohl. Damn, that's dreist!
Elsewhere in Kohl's party (sort of the Republicans of Germany) there's a bumbling frenzy going on that rivals the Three Stooges. These people are not so dreist, which gives us hope that the party will not disintegrate leaving a gaping hole on the right for the really scary political parties.
And on that note... let's welcome Austria to the show. This little Alpine nation has now decided that it would like to be eschewed by all other contemporary democracies! E.U., schmE. U., they're saying, for they have just established a new government coalition including the right-wing FPÖ party headed by a little dark-haired Austrian racist, Jörg Haider. Haider leads a sort of creepy "Austria First" movement: he wants to reduce immigration to zero, fully rejects the idea of Eropean Union expansion, and thinks that Hitler's economic programs we're just peachy (he had to resign a while back for that one). In a recent interview, he said that he supports the idea of compensatory payments being made to survivors of Nazi forced labor camps, but would also like to see the countries that held Austrian prisoners of war compensate those soldiers. "I really don't see why we should recognize that forced labor requires compensation and then at the same time not do anything for our Austrians." Ok, dude, that's officially dreist.
What have we learned from all this? Well, the German-speaking world is going to hell in a handbasket. And we, at a minimum, have expanded our vocabulary. Dreist. Look it up! Use it! Wear it out!
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![[Helmut Kohl]](../images/backpages/Kohl2.jpg)
This is Helmut Kohl again. Just to refresh your memory: he was Chancellor in Germany for about a hundred years (well, sixteen) and lost his fifth bid for the post in 1998, which made us all laugh like Nelson from the Simpsons (HA, ha). Now he's back in the news, being forced to reveal that he's been financing his political party for decades with illegal campaign contribuitons, bribe money from big companies, and money laundering schemes (all totalling probably a hundred million Marks). Kohl is out there doing his best Nixon impression: acting all shocked that anyone would deny him, the practically deified Chancellor of German Re-unification, the right to have run his government however he pleased. Well, he admits, some formalities of law may have been overlooked, but such trivialites cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a Helmut Kohl. Damn, that's dreist!
![[Haider]](../images/backpages/haider.jpg)
And on that note... let's welcome Austria to the show. This little Alpine nation has now decided that it would like to be eschewed by all other contemporary democracies! E.U., schmE. U., they're saying, for they have just established a new government coalition including the right-wing FPÖ party headed by a little dark-haired Austrian racist, Jörg Haider. Haider leads a sort of creepy "Austria First" movement: he wants to reduce immigration to zero, fully rejects the idea of Eropean Union expansion, and thinks that Hitler's economic programs we're just peachy (he had to resign a while back for that one). In a recent interview, he said that he supports the idea of compensatory payments being made to survivors of Nazi forced labor camps, but would also like to see the countries that held Austrian prisoners of war compensate those soldiers. "I really don't see why we should recognize that forced labor requires compensation and then at the same time not do anything for our Austrians." Ok, dude, that's officially dreist.