Surprise! In American journalism, Sunday’s election in Germany was portrayed as an inevitable and well-deserved triumph for Angela Merkel. After all, didn’t she more or less singlehandedly set out to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants after the disaster in Fukushima, Japan? And didn’t she generously hold out the welcome mat to 1 million “refugees” supposedly from Syria, many of whom were actually economic refugees from Bangladesh, Yemen, Mali, and multiple points in between?

For many journalists, these were admirable decisions, though taken with minimal or no consultation with either German parliamentarians or state governments or with the European Union. Left out of the laudatory notices was the fact that shutting down Germany’s nuclear power plants has meant increasing its carbon dioxide emissions (including from U.S.-produced coal) and that the “refugees” allowed inside Germany have produced very many violent crimes while contributing very little economically.