A NATION AS POWERFUL AS GERMANY NOW IS SHOULD NOT BE POKED WITH SHARP POINTED STICKS!

Berlin -- You have to wonder how much more the German public will take of the country’s ongoing humiliation by the United States and its extensive program of secretly spying on what nominally is one of America’s most reliable allies.

The latest scandal involves the discovery of a CIA mole working in the highest reaches of Germany’s Defense Ministry. This exposé follows, by less than a week, the arrest of another US spy in Germany’s own intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtsdienst (BND).

Yesterday, the German government ordered the expulsion of the CIA station chief in Berlin because of the discovery of the two active spies. It was the first such expulsion of a CIA station chief by a US ally in memory, but even so, the action appears to be largely symbolic, and designed to appease public anger domestically, not to actually impact spying within Germany by the US. The German government, after all, didn’t even blow the station chief’s identity -- an act of professional courtesy that in this case was totally inappropriate to the offense.

The German people must be left wondering why the German government, almost like an abused child who is old enough to strike back, puts up with this kind of embarrassment at the hands of the US government. Experts have warned Germans in a Spiegel article that national security in the US has at this point become a kind of "state religion." That's a statement which should send a shudder down the spine of any German familiar with the country’s recent history.

Germany, after all, has a powerful economy -- one that, driven as it is by a strong manufacturing sector and a solid trade surplus, including with the US, in many ways is much stronger than the US economy. Germany has no need to worry about any risk of US trade sanctions, the way most countries do that consider trying to stand up to the US. Nor does Germany need to rely on the US military for protection. The country faces no threat from any direction and has quietly built up a powerful military with the capability to manufacture their own hardware. Panzers today roll around on the streets of Germany's cities proudly and openly. They even carry the 'Iron Cross' badging.

So why, one has to ask, would such a powerful country put up with the crap that the US is doing here, which even includes tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone (as disclosed in documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden), or paying spies to rat out the inner workings of a Bundestag intelligence committee?

It's certainly motive enough to break totally free of post-world war constraints and declare a new reich. The rest of the world really needs to worry about how sensible it is to piss the German people off this way. If we haven't learned by now the danger we just simply never will.