[Redmen4ever]

Typical intellectual hatred of conservative, middle-class type people. They just can't understand that Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and, now, Angela Merkel succeed.

In the case of Merkel, a Ph.D. physicist who has mastered the political process, they call her an "idiot." I guess anybody who disagrees with a liberal must be an idiot. Yet how can these idiots do so well in politics (among other places).

The article is grudgingly admiring. I suppose, in the end, you have to recognize that anybody who can rise to become head of government of a nation as large and important as Germany has to have something going for her.

[rovenstinez]

Does she like George W.?

[Apercu]

Angela Merkel will be underestimated severely and succeed as did Mrs. Thatcher, Golda Meir, Ronaldus Maximus & GW Bush because she also has what all liberals are incapable of having or understanding and that is COMMON SENSE.

[RoadTest]

Hoooooooooorrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Archidamus]

"Unless she suffers some completely unexpected disaster, she will in two weeks' time become the most powerful politician in Europe by winning the German general election."

That would be welcome news indeed.

[kublia khan]

Who's that i see fading into irrelavance, is that Mr. Chirac fading...fading...fading. No more shroeder to stand with you, Blair treats you like a side show and well you know what we think of you but the FC police wwon't let me say it.

[Wilhelm Tell]

"So I went to look at Mrs Merkel. On Wednesday I saw her speak in Karlsruhe, in south-west Germany, and on Thursday I watched her in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. On neither occasion did she look in the slightest bit lost. She looked and sounded like a woman who knows far better than her patronising male critics how Germany can be restored to health."

"Mrs Merkel has enjoyed the great advantage during her meteoric ascent of being grotesquely under-estimated."

I must be reading a different article than the one people are complaining about. If anything, the article makes Merkel's critics sound like sexist cads. She is tough and honest and just may be the German version of Margaret Thatcher.

[manwiththehands]

Can she fix my Audi?

[Archidamus]

"The Germans do not want to be ruled by a wit.

They are fed up with Mr Schröder's shameless attempts to charm himself out of trouble, and are ready to be governed by someone of substance, who dares to tell them the truth. In Mrs Merkel, the awkward-looking daughter of an East German clergyman, they appear to have found just such a person."

She sounds like a huge improvement over the present red/green gang.

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

She really is the best we can hope for in the present policital environment in Germany, and the CDU/CSU are the closest thing they have to grown-ups among the realistic choices.

Let's all pray that the German people are granted sufficient sense to vote for her party and make her Chancellor, and that nothing happens between now and the election that would allow Schroeder to play the anti-American card and turn things around.

The Germans seem to love to buy into any kind of "the little guy is always getting shafted" demagoguery, which naturally plays into the hands of the reds and the greens, when it is the leftwing politicians who actually are doing the shafting to the little guy.

[dennisw]

[Savage Beast]

"Mrs Merkel's election speeches are...concerned with the dreadful economic record of Gerhard Schröder"

"unlike the present German government, she would not countenance the admission of Turkey to the European Union."

"The Germans...are fed up with...Schröder's shameless attempts to charm himself out of trouble, and are ready to be governed by someone of substance, who dares to tell them the truth. In Mrs Merkel, the awkward-looking daughter of an East German clergyman, they appear to have found just such a person."

"Schröder...can be expected to accuse her of being an American stooge. He won re-election in 2002 by appealing to German anti-Americanism"

Maybe our prayers have been answered, and the German people are going to wake up in time to save themselves.

[Quinotto]

A clever Berlin journalist resorted to similarly sexist language: "She looks like a janitor in a Romanian village. She is completely common and undistinguished, she's fat and boring.

Right, as if the German men are all Adonis. Second of all, I wonder if the "clever Berlin journalist" ever been to Romania and actually see the women there. Clearly not otherwise he would have abstained from making such a stupid comment.

Her name is Alexandra Lara and she is a Romanian who won the famous German beauty show "Wahl's Woman of the Year" in 2004.

[Savage Beast]

When Leftists call people idiots, they're projecting.

[headsonpikes]

"Abhorred by intellectuals", presumably because she is rational and intelligent.