Angela Merkel, the chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the largest opposition party, has written an article for the Washington Post: Schroeder Doesn’t Speak for All Germans. As a citizen of former East-Germany she has as much claim to being a “New European” as any Pole or Czech and never had much time for (West-) Germany’s political establishment. The Schroeder government reacted to the article by accusing her of embarrassing Germany by publicly sucking up to America, or at the very least of taking domestic disputes overseas, basically washing dirty linen in public. In my opinion it is obvious who really embarrassed Germany by his behavior and I myself do not hesitate to let my views on domestic German affairs be known at blogs which are mostly read by Americans. I’m as patriotic as the next fellow, but I won’t defend the indefensible and from a certain point on I have to make my disgust known. As I see it the disagreement over the war on Iraq isn’t really one between nations like Germany and America anyway, rather a left-right policy dispute, one more reason to let my voice as a German conservative be heard here.