Once upon a time, long, long ago, scandals had consequences even in the West, at least sometimes. In the ancient US of 1974, Richard ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon had to go because of Watergate, which, unlike Russiagate, was real, if hardly sensational by our standards today.

Even in the late 1990s, early post-unification Germany, the career of a giant like Helmut ‘chancellor of unification’ Kohl took a lethal hit from a rather boring affair turning on creative accounting in party finances. Indeed, biased media hype and liberal pearl-clutching was the whole brouhaha’s real essence. Without it, Angela Merkel might never have been able to knife her old benefactor Kohl in the back, and Gerhard Schroeder might not have become chancellor.

Now the West has devolved further. Our political elites in the US and EU have learned not to care, and more importantly, they have learned how to make us not care, or at least not enough. The worst political scandal of recent US history is the oddly inexplicable career of Jeffrey Epstein, convicted pedophile criminal and suspected intelligence operative as well as intimate friend of, it seems, most of the American establishment (in a thoroughly ‘bipartisan’ manner with vile favors to all). Its fall-out should already have profoundly changed America’s domestic and foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. And yet, it probably never will.

In NATO-EU Europe, things are at least equally dismal, as is appropriate for what is really just the most masochistic backyard of the American empire. There, the single worst scandal is what has happened to the Nord Stream pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic. Built at a cost of around $20 billion to bring inexpensive gas from Russia to Germany and the EU as a whole, in September 2022, they were mostly destroyed by sabotage.

That was the worst act of eco-terrorism in European history. Especially, with Russia and China now........

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