This follows yesterday's news, here is Germany's state-owned Deutsche-Welle:
Germany updates: Chancellor Merz 'skeptical' of AfD ban
From eugyppius: a plague chronicle, May 15:
The previously secret dossier assembled by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution leaked on Tuesday. It is unbelievably retarded.
In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well.” Today – a mere seventy-two hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.
Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush their long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “… to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained.” So espionage, much secret, wow.
The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly, somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD are. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of unceasing democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.
The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the roll-out – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.
The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.
The second thing they’ve realised, is that it is an abomination. The vast majority of material that the BfV have collected is not even suspect. It is a lot of off-colour jokes, memes, but also just banal nothing statements – thousands and thousands and thousands of them, arranged under various hysterical subject headings. Nothing in here is remotely strong enough to support the case for banning the AfD and a lot of it is also very bizarre in terms of argument. Not only have the prospects of an AfD ban all but evaporated, but I think it’s even likely the party will succeed in their present lawsuit and that the administrative court in Cologne will throw out the “right-wing extremist” label.
All works must be judged against their purpose.
This particular document has two purposes. Strictly speaking, it exists to support and defend the upgrade of the AfD to “confirmed right-wing extremist” status. It is hard to assess whether the dossier is successful on this front, because “confirmed right-wing extremism” is a label that the BfV have just pulled out of their asses. It is not a legal thing, and ultimately administrative courts will have to decide whether the dubious evidence assembled here supports the new classification....
....MUCH MORE
Between this from the BfV and the thing* that Christopher Steele put together for Hillary Clinton and the American state security organs (it was used as a pretext for opening and pursuing investigations), it's almost as though someone wants to tarnish the fine old word 'dossier.'
*The "Steele Dossier" was publish on January 10, 2017.
As we wrote on January 13, 2017:
MoreJust as importantly, after reading the schlocky, amateur, borderline retarded "35 pages" thing, how could anyone ever again justify paying Orbis Business Intelligence actual money for anything they produce?If some blogger can see through that worthless piece of garbage anybody could, including the pundits and journos who pushed that crap for five years. Which means they just decided to pervert the truth they knew and lie to their readers and clients.
It's enough to make you think they are nothing but a bunch lying perverts.
Last seen in May 2021's "UPDATED—What The Hell Is This? The New York Times Gets Around To Calling Out The Steele Dossier...."
Huh, it appears that we also used the word "retarded," I had forgotten that.
