While Americans have been obsessing lately about Charlie Sheen and his live-in porn film stars, Germany has been consumed by improprieties over a doctoral thesis.<\/p>\n
All the German talk shows, the front pages of the country\u2019s newspapers and magazines, its political pundits and comedians, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets or to the pages of Facebook, have had a field day indulging in very German-style hand-wringing and paroxysms of self-loathing over the moral, political and social ramifications of the case.<\/p>\n
A German author, Peter Schneider, even gravely linked the whole mess to Bill Clinton\u2019s impeachment drama, since they both entailed what he called \u201cthe same question of honesty.\u201d\u009d Leave it to a German intellectual to discern a deep connection between an American president dissembling about oral sex with an intern in the Oval Office and a doctoral student at Bayreuth University cribbing passages in a 475-page dissertation about contrasting constitutional developments.<\/p>\n