Obama—no more the apple of Europe’s eye

The U.S. president gave a snotty lecture to the Europeans about their debt crisis, urging them to act faster and spend more, and various German newspapers are letting him have it. Der Spiegel has a collection of quotes that would make Obama cringe, if he had the sensibility for that.

Thus the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

Dark clouds have gathered over the American president. The gloomy state of the economy is putting a dampener on Obama’s future prospects. The optimism of the past is gone, replaced by a cheap search for a scapegoat.

Obama thinks he has found one. He blames the Europeans for reacting too late to the debt crisis. We Europeans are apparently taking on too little new debt to get out of the crisis. But we are already feeling the wonderful effects of borrowing too much money.

This and other editorials angrily attack Obama for trying to foist on Europe the very thing he is trying to foist on the U.S.—ever increased borrowing and debt to spend the problem away. Thus the financial daily Handelsblatt writes:

That’s not how friends talk to each other. That applies particularly to friends who have themselves failed to get a handle on their own, self-made crisis. Barack Obama governs a country where, despite billions in state aid, the economy is stagnating, companies refuse to invest despite calls for patriotism, and which gets embroiled in one political trench war after another … Now this country is dispensing advice, suggestions and finger-pointing.

These are suggestions that have already failed to work in the US: Money is supposed to save Europe—quickly and in the largest quantities possible. U.S. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner has been trying for more than two-and-a-half years to suffocate his crisis with money. But aside from the lack of success, the collateral damage is immense. It manifests itself in a loss of government credibility, a loss of trust in the currency and the paralysis of any sort of dynamism—because the crushing debt mountain is robbing the famously optimistic Americans of their confidence.

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Sophia A. writes:

“The U.S. president gave a snotty lecture to the Europeans about their debt crisis.”

Perfect! Love it!!

“Snotty lecture” captures the essence of the man in its entirety.

I’ve always thought that Obama was the essence of snottiness, and for the life of me cannot understand why his speech-making skills are so lauded. Yes, I know: the media lionizes him because because becausee … even so, Obama the Great Communicator is truly the epitome of empty media bloviating. It’s an entirely fictitious phenomenon. No there there.

This goes beyond the well-established practice of journalists making up junk, such as Jackie Kennedy being “beautiful.” She was certainly an attractive lady, and could be striking when photographed and made up properly. She had superb taste in clothing and a good clothes-horse figure. None of this made her fact truly beautiful.

But journalists need something to talk about, so Jackie Kennedy was “beautiful.” OK, I can live with that.

I cannot live with Obama being called a great communicator. He’s not. Never has been, never will be.

LA replies:

Jackie Kennedy in late ’50s and early ’60s was, maybe not conventionally beautiful, but a vision.

Indian living in the West writes:

During the Gulf of Mexico crisis, there were many British businessmen I met in India who felt very disappointed with Obama and his constant anti-British rhetoric by trying to string up BP as a uniquely evil company. The fact, of course, is that BP did not do anything that the other oil majors (including American oil majors) do not do while drilling in deep water. The British thought that Obama found it convenient to invoke anti-British sentiment to deflect any criticism of his own handling of this crisis. Also, it for the first time raised the spectre of Obama’s anti-British hatred that some in the British press had alluded to—to an otherwise mushy liberal country that was delirious at Obama’s victory.

The Germans are now going through a similar process of reassessment of the man they had ridiculously raised to the level of a demi-god.

It is a crisis that has become too convoluted for minds far brighter than Obama to comprehend. For instance, did you know that the Federal Reserve has lent $16 Trillion (that’s not a typo) to U.S. and European banks to keep them afloat since 2008? Obama may not be totally unjustified in feeling that the Europeans are a bunch of ingrates who snub him openly while freely taking printed dollars from Uncle Ben at the Federal Reserve.

The extremes that Obama and his administration are willing to go to in order to ensure his re-election are simply astonishing.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 29, 2011 09:20 AM | Send