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| Europe |
| Powell hollers at Fischer for Herta's stoopid remarks... |
| 2002-09-20 |
| U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called his German counterpart Joschka Fischer Friday, September 20, 2002, to express Washington's "outrage" over reported comments, now denied, by a senior German Minister that compared President George W. Bush's methods to those of Adolf Hitler. "What the hell are you boneheads THINKING?" "The secretary called Foreign Minister Fischer this morning to express outrage with the statements that were reported," deputy State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP). "Or were you thinking?" He did not elaborate on the conversation and declined to comment on German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin's flatus denial that she had said Bush's tactics on Iraq were similar to Hitler's. "I never said that! What I really meant was, uhhhh... something else." A senior U.S. official told AFP that Washington "said all we intend to" on the matter, noting that White House spokesman Ari Fleischer twice described Daeubler-Gmelin's reported remarks as "outrageous and inexplicable." "Wanna hear it again?" Earlier Friday in Berlin, Daeubler-Gmelin denied having made the comments, reported by a German regional newspaper Thursday, September 19, and said she would never try to harm German-U.S. relations. "No, no! U.S.-German relations are very important to me. Not as important as having my cat's teeth cleaned, of course, but important..." Grilled by reporters for more than an hour, the Minister admitted using the words "Adolf" and "Nazi" but said the newspaper misquoted her. "The videotape was wrong, too..." Daeubler-Gmelin said she used the words in a discussion about using war as a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from domestic problems, but that she clearly explained after the remark that she had not intended to compare Bush with a "criminal." "Of course not. I intended to paint him as a criminal in his own right..." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #1 Not only is this stupid, it is factually incorrect. Hitler never used a war to divert attention from domestic problems(neither does Bush, by the way).He had the support of a VAST MAJORITY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE well before the war.How soon they forget... |
| Posted by: El Id 2002-09-20 20:02:29 |