What Double Standard?

Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens points to the apparent double standard employed by the European political elite in the Wolfowitz-Riza case:

A Tale of Two Scandals
"Full confidence" for an EU official despite a romp on a nude beach with an employee.
BY BRET STEPHENS Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Imagine that a top civil servant at a major multinational institution arranges a job for a fortysomething female colleague that comes with a $45,000 raise and brings her yearly salary to about $190,000, tax free. Now imagine that the couple has been photographed at a nudist beach--him wearing nothing but a baseball cap.

The latest sordid twist in l'affaire Wolfowitz? Not at all. This is the story of Günter Verheugen, first vice president of the European Commission in Brussels. In its contrasts and similarities with the "scandal" now absorbing the World Bank and its president, it offers timely instruction on the nature and power of modern bureaucracies.

In April, Mr. Verheugen, a former German parliamentarian for the Social Democrats, appointed economist Petra Erler as his chief of staff. In August, the couple was spotted au naturel on a Baltic shore. Mr. Verheugen--who also has a wife--has dismissed allegations of impropriety as "pure slander" and asked the German newsweekly Der Spiegel whether "two adults [can't] do as they wish in their private lives?"

In fact, they can't: The EU Commission's Code of Conduct, which he helped draft, observes that "in their official and private lives Commissioners should behave in a manner that is in keeping with the dignity of their office. Ruling out all risks of a conflict of interest helps guarantee their independence."

Don't think, however, that the commissioner is out on his ear: German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier defends him as "an irreplaceable Brussels heavyweight," while Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso says Mr. Verheugen has his "full confidence." That's more support than Mr. Wolfowitz will ever get from his European friends, who are clucking noisily about the need for the World Bank to preserve its "credibility" and for its president to be "beyond reproach." (It's also more than he's getting from the Bush administration, which is offering token words of support while quietly shopping former Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani as a potential successor.)

Heidi Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's left-wing minister for economic cooperation and development, has been on the forefront of calls for the resignation of Paul Wolfowitz. It is interesting to note Wieczorek-Zeul's behavior in the Verheugen-Erler case. Not only did she not call for Verheugen's resignation - on the contrary, in her role as deputy chairwoman of Germany's social democratic party (SPD) she actively supported Verheugen, as this report proves ("SPD Leadership Supports Verheugen").

Can we please have a listing of articles in the German media exposing Wieczorek-Zeul's double standard? Or that of other German politicians? Google News Germany is rather mum on the subject.

Surprise, surprise...

Comments

[Atlantiksegler]

You are leaving out the important detail that Verheugen only received "full confidence" after he threatened to show the photographies...

[FranzisM]

Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the only minister from the Schröder cabinet who remained on her post after Merkel was voted in.

The Zentralrat der Juden demanded her resignation after her slander of Israel´s self-defense against HizbAllah terrorism last year.

But unlike Günther Oettinger, the conservative Baden-Württemberg governor who tried to whitewash Hans Filbinger´s Nazi war crimes, she was not forced to chose between renouncing her comment or resigning from her post.

/collecting double standards

[Pamela]

With the possible exception of Scooter Libby, I have never seen such a blatant case of a person being framed. Oh, yeah, add the Duke lacrosse guys.

Wolfowitz recused himself from anything to do with Riza's professional status when he came on board. The ethics committee vetted the whole thing - twice.

Set up

The utter moral corruption of the EU is nowhere more evident than the case of Hans-Martin Tillack, the journalist who documented corruption at OLAF.

He has suffered police raids

The Daily Telegraph’s European correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard quotes Tillack: »The police said I was lucky I wasn’t in Burma or central Africa, where journalists get the real treatment«.

EU, bastion of liberty and human rights.

[FranzisM]

And another double standard, this time by Javier Solana.

Burma was renamed to "Myanmar" by an illegitimate regime.

Persia was renamed to "Iran" by an illegitimate regime.

The EU has relations with Burma/Myanmar.

The EU has relations with Iran.

In one case, a country renaming by an illegitimate regime is not recognised, in the other one it is.

[FranzisM]

And then there´s one of the worst double standards in the world, if not the worst one already.

Europe is only spying against itself.

America is also spying against its allies.

I have always held this truth to be self-evident, that a civilisation in which hopeful individuals cannot freely move, socialise, talk, and click around on the internet without government entities watching is incapable to defend itself against the Islamic agenda.

[alpoehi]

I would like to point at two articles recently published on SPIEGEL ONLINE:

- Yassin Musharbash yells: "Yankee, don't go home" and asks the US not to leave Iraq now: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,479607,00.html

- "The Role of the Media in the Trans-Atlantic Relationship" by Gregor Peter Schmitz and Gerhard Spörl. They claim Anti-Europeanism is as much a problem in the US as vice versa: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,478884,00.html

[WhatDoIKnow]

The second article, "The Role of the Media in the Trans-Atlantic Relationship" is probably supposed to be a serious and balanced analysis. Well...it's anything but that... It's just another piece of crap posing as honest journalism. Explaining what's ridiculous about it is like explaining calculus to someone who just starting learning arithmetics. It would an extremely difficult task, with an unknown outcome. Therefore I am sincerely sorry for anyone who appreciates that article.

[FranzisM]

The Augstein/Bertelsmann article is not all that difficult to explain. It´s a concentrate of the daily fast food these media conglomerates serve to the common man, only for this presentation enriched to a panoply like a cold buffet - so many noshes of everything that came across the newsdesks in the recent years, but no coherent idea that could be agreed or disagreed with.

Which pretty much sums up the role of the media in the transatlantic relationship - create so much noise that any honest discourse opening is spoiled.