Europeans go sour on Obama, even as he strives to make America more like Europe

I feel the cover of the latest National Review is right-on. The Democrats feel the economic crisis is an "opportunity" to replace capitalism with their vision of something else. The San Francisco Democrats are rejoicing, because it's their vision that's leading the Democrat party now. They've maintained that we need to become like Europe, and now Obama and the Democrat majority in congress will deliver that to them.

The actual Europeans, though, aren't all that thrilled. Here is an interesting article by Mark Steyn in this issue of National Review. It starts of with an amusing commentary about the shabby way British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was treated on his official visit to the White House.

I actually don't see THAT as such a big deal, for two reasons. Britain hasn't been such a great ally in recent years; and Brown is disliked at home, even in his own party, and about to become toast anyway. More interesting is what comes later in the article, about Europe generally:

The Great Destabilization

[...] The other week Der Spiegel ran a piece called “Why Obamania Isn’t the Answer,” which might more usefully have been published before the Obamessiah held his big Berlin rally. Written by some bigshot with the German Council on Foreign Relations and illustrated by the old four-color hopey-changey posters all scratched up and worn out, the essay conceded that Europe had embraced Obama as a “European American.” Very true. The president is the most European American ever to sit in the Oval Office. And, because of that, he doesn’t need any actual European Europeans getting in the way — just as, at his big victory-night rally in Chicago, the first megastar president didn’t need any megastar megastars from Hollywood clogging up the joint: Movie stars who wanted to fly in were told by his minders that he didn’t want any other celebrities deflecting attention from him. Same with world leaders. If it’s any consolation to Gordon Brown, he’s just not that into any of you.

What Mr. Brown and the rest of the world want is for America, the engine of the global economy, to pull the rest of them out of the quicksand — which isn’t unreasonable. Even though a big chunk of the subprime/securitization/credit-bubble axis originated in the United States and got exported round the planet, the reality is that almost every one of America’s trading partners will wind up getting far harder hit.

And that was before Obama made clear that for him the economy takes a very distant back seat to the massive expansion of government for which it provides cover. That’s why he’s indifferent to the plummeting Dow. The president has made a strategic calculation that, to advance his plans for socialized health care, “green energy,” and a big-government state, it’s to his advantage for things to get worse. And, if things go from bad to worse in America, overseas they’ll go from worse to total societal collapse. We’ve already seen changes of government in Iceland and Latvia, rioting in Greece and Bulgaria. The great destabilization is starting on the fringes of Europe and working its way to the Continent’s center.

We’re seeing not just the first contraction in the global economy since 1945, but also the first crisis of globalization. This was the system America and the other leading economies encouraged everybody else to grab a piece of. But whatever piece you grabbed — exports in Taiwan, services in Ireland, construction in Spain, oligarchic industrial-scale kleptomania in Russia — it’s all crumbling. Ireland and Italy are nation-state versions of Bank of America and General Motors. In Eastern Europe, the countries way out on the end of the globalization chain can’t take a lot of heat without widespread unrest. [...]

I've written recently about the freaky economics of Europe as their meltdown is unfolding. European governments are bracing for riots and Obama Euphoria has soured quickly, as Europeans realize Obama has no interest in supporting them with things like Missile Defense (even though we ought to be pursuing it for reasons of our own). It's a rich irony; because Obama wants to make our country like theirs (big socialized nanny-state government), we no longer have money to spend on their defenses anymore.

During our 2008 election campaign, the Europeans kept insisting that we MUST elect Obama, and that we wouldn't because we were racist. Now that we've done it, they don't like it. Too freak'n bad. They got what they said they wanted, and now they can kiss our President's ass.

Europe's support of Obama was never sincere. They were projecting their own racism onto us. They assumed we would NOT vote him in, and therefore, they supported him, so they could call us racist when he lost. What a surprise they got. I'd gloat about it more, except that our President is taking us down the same economic path as Europe, with, I fear, the same consequences.

The European Union relies on anti-Americanism as a primary justification for their Union's existence; since the end of the Cold War, they have been positioning themselves as the alternative to American power, and have been fostering anti-American sentiment as a cement to unite the European Union and hold it together. They need the American "Threat". Therefore, their plan is to kick us, no matter what we do. And of course still assume that we'll bail them out whenever they get into trouble.

Now they want us to pull their economic wagon out of the mud for them, but it isn't going to happen, because we're using their economic model and going into the mud with them. I hardly know whether to laugh or cry.


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