Cockburn hates to brag, but you heard it here first. The Telegraph is now reporting that Joe Biden, having glock-blocked Britain’s Ben Wallace as secretary-general of NATO, is now pushing for the German Ursula von der Leyen. What makes Ursula qualified to lead the defense of the West? Well, she was German defense minister between 2013 and 2019 and what a marvelous job she did…
In 2015, German troops were so ill-equipped that they had to use broomsticks instead of machine guns for a NATO exercise.It also emerged that German rifles wouldn’t shoot straight in temperatures above 86°F. Boom!
By 2019, the Bundeswehr’s ammunition stocks were reportedly so low that they would run out after two or three days of fighting. Bang!
The same year, German soldiers used mobile phones on another exercise because the didn’t have encrypted communication devices. Thanks in part to Ursula’s leadership, Bundeswehr soldiers still lack modern radios, night-vision equipment, body armor, radio-integrated helmets, combat boots and even thermal underwear and water-proof clothing. Pow!
In February 2021, the Dutch MEP Derk Jan Eppink called for von der Leyen to stand down from her fairly disastrous spell as president of the European Commission. “I did not vote for your candidacy for president of the European Commission because I knew of your past as a minister of defense in Germany,” he said. “You have run away but I will say it anyway, you are to be blamed.”
Von der Leyen’s entire career is in fact an amazing tale of ascent through failure. She is the EU equivalent of an eighteenth century aristocrat, a princess-ling whose father was one of Germany’s first EU civil servants and nearly became chancellor. She was awarded a medical doctorate in Hanover in 1991. In 2015, however, it was alleged that nearly half the pages of her dissertation contained plagiarized material.
But every time she messed up in Germany, her ally Angela Merkel, or the magic ladder of the EU, would float in again to give her another leg up. She was eventually reverse-fired into the role of president of the European Commission, where she of course failed and failed at managing the Covid response.
But Ursula is a master of the image-based politicking of our age. A mother of seven, and always well power-dressed, she conveys the kind of individual brand that speaks deeply to identity obsessed world leaders, such as Joe and his wife Jill Biden. Cockburn hears that the first lady, the power beneath the Oval Office, has pushed her husband to appoint a woman sec-gen to NATO — because, well, sexism. And so… enter Ursula. Oh well, it’s not as if she would be taking over the defense of the west as a major land war is taking place in Eastern Europe, is it?
As British Conservative MP Bob Seely puts it: “It’s the best news Putin’s had since the coup.”
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK site.
