Europeans liking Obama less, too
Don’t get too excited about reports that Europe is starting to like Obama less. Europeans have become more disappointed in Obama over time, it’s true—but that’s because he’s not been leftist enough.
There’s just no pleasing some people.
Just go and read the Spiegel article. It’s full of howlers. At the risk of tooting my own horn here’s a link to a comment I made on an Althouse post where it was brought up by a commenter.
One example (it’s hard to pick just one):
“[Tea Party] supporters represent dark clichés of a vapid America, one in which there are plenty of people who would have no objection to many a modern book being burned. The novels of Jonathan Franzen, author of “Freedom” and “The Corrections,” could certainly be part of that list.”
The only people with a recent history and advocacy of book burning weren’t born here, is all I can say. No book has ever been burned at a Tea Party. Nor has any such act ever even been contemplated.
Plus the article ends with these lines:
“But would their candidate Mitt Romney, the mysterious, filthy rich Mormon, be the better president? Most certainly not.”
Ignore any public opinion from Germany. The Germans get their news from sources like Spiegel and like-minded TV news pundits. They, in turn, get their news from NYT, etc. Furthermore, the romantic utopian side of German schizophrenia comes out when foreign policy or Obama are mentioned.
All ∅bama needs to do to get on the Europeans’ good side is to hand over a trillion dollars for EU bailouts, with the guarantee that more money will be forthcoming on an “as needs” basis.
I understand that the authorization of drone attacks by Obama is one of his most unpopular policies to Europeans.
It’s about the only thing he’s done that I like and it’s actually a continuation of G. W. Bush’s policies. Plus the attacks on Pakistan territory wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t have bases in Afghanistan – another Bush authorized accomplishment.
“All Obama needs to do to get on the Europeans’ good side is to hand over a trillion dollars for EU bailouts, with the guarantee that more money will be forthcoming on an “as needs” basis.”
And guarantee that we will defend them with our blood and money if the Russians get rambunctious again.
How many electoral votes does Europe have? None? Move along, nothing to see here.
“[Tea Party] supporters represent dark clichés of a vapid America, one in which there are plenty of people who would have no objection to many a modern book being burned.
Remind me again, which country was it that went in for book burning in recent history?
All Germans have lost the right to criticize anyone for real or (especially) imagined human rights abuses for the next thousand years. Until the Thousand Year Reich would have expired, they should STFU.
But would their candidate Mitt Romney, the mysterious, filthy rich Mormon
Romney is mysterious, but Obama is an open book? WTF? People in Witness Protection are more forthcoming about their past than Obama has been.
kcom quoting Del Spiegel:
Del Spiegel certainly thought that filthy rich John Kerry would have made a better President than George W. Bush. John Kerry, who married money, while Mitt Romney made money the old fashioned way- he earned it.
kcom, good rejoinders at the Althouse link.
Dring the 2008 Presidential campaign, the left-wing German newspaper Die Tageszeitung referred to the White House as Uncle Barack’s Cabin, with the obvious reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This was a left-wing pro-Obama German newspaper. Imagine the PC ruckus in the US if a wingnut referred the the White House as “Uncle Barack’s Cabin.”
It shows the German left is rather tone-deaf when it comes the the Amis.
Occam’s,
Michael Moore’s book on Bush sold more copies in Germany than in the US. Few have heard of oil for food. They think the UN is great. What more can I say?
Re Spiegel’s leftism, we tend to forget that, starting even before Marx, Germany has had a strong far left contingent that was kept under wraps by authoritarian governments. For example, IIRC, Bavaria established a Soviet government after WWI that was forcibly suppressed by the Weimar Republic, and the Spartacists attempted to do the same in Berlin.
Similarly, in the inter-war period, the KPD routinely broke up meetings of political opponents and terrorized them in running street battles. In fact, the SA was established to provide security for NSDAP meetings, and to battle the KPD in the streets.
Hitler rose to power primarily because he and his party were seen as the only force that could effectively fight the communists (literally). Leftists today cite industrialists’ support for the Nazis as evidence of the industrialists’ perfidy, but that support was reluctant and offered largely because the alternative was the communists (who made only too clear that they planned to follow the Russian model chapter and verse, whereas one could hope that Nazi rhetorical excesses were just that).
God save us from having to make that sort of Hobson’s choice.
But Germany probably hasn’t so much turned left, its leftism is just more apparent now.
What say you, expat? Off base, or no?
“All Germans have lost the right to criticize anyone for real or (especially) imagined human rights abuses for the next thousand years. Until the Thousand Year Reich would have expired, they should STFU.”
I’m half German but I agree with that completely.
I’m watching a BBC series on NetFlix about Auschwitz…how it evolved from a small operation mostly for Polish POWs to the full blown horror it became.
German bureaucrats, engineers, and architects sat around in meetings discussing how to improve the process of murdering human beings with no more feeling than I had as a chemical engineer sitting in meetings discussing how to optimize the operation of a styrene/ethyl benzene distillation tower.
“All Germans have lost the right to criticize anyone for real or (especially) imagined human rights abuses for the next thousand years. Until the Thousand Year Reich would have expired, they should STFU.”
Do You Remember Herta Dé¤ubler-Gmelin? Surely you remember good old Herta, the former German Justice Minister who in 2002 compared President George W. Bush to “Adolf Nazi” and who gratuitously called the U.S. justice system “lousy?” Turns out her attorney father had an interesting role in administering justice: rounding up trains to send Slovakian Jews to the death camps.
I suspect that many Germans who get into “human rights” tizzies against the Amis are trying to displace guilt they feel over their forefathers’ horrendous acts. Message to Herta: you are not responsible for what your father did. So please stop dumping your guilt on us Amis.
I knew a fair number of Germans in Latin America , either as fellow tourists or as co-workers- most of them before unification. All impressed me as making good efforts to come to terms with Germany’s actions in WW2. None of them dumped on the Amis, like Harridan Herta or others do today.
Claire Berlinski wrote an excellent book about European political morality called Menace in Europe. After making an excellent argument that Europe is a moral sh*thole where anti-Americanism and antisemitism reign she chose a name for the last chapter that sumed up her thesis nicely “To Hell with Europe”.
It’s an excellent read, strongly recommend, especially the part where she asks the reader to try guess which statements are from Goebbels and which are from a contemporary German musician.
“All Germans have lost the right to criticize anyone for real or (especially) imagined human rights abuses for the next thousand years. Until the Thousand Year Reich would have expired, they should STFU.”
By the same token, Greeks who call Germans “Nazis” for refusing to keep shoveling billions of Euros down the Greek financial abyss, should also STFU.
The mild-mannered Kentucky senator really tore into Obama today. CSPAN carried it. Here’s an excerpt:
“This is a dangerous, radical administration,” said McConnell.
“I’m going to lay out a long litany of abuses pursued by the Obama Administration and its allies against its political opponents,” McConnell said. “It’s reminiscent of the Nixon administration. It’s much more pervasive than Clinton. They have their enemies list.”
McConnell is incensed over the Obama Administration’s use of government and nongovernmental resources to target its political enemies.
“They’ve used the IRS, the FEC, the FCC, the SEC, their allies in the Obama campaign to go after people who disagree with them. The Obama campaign has rifled through the divorce records of a major donor to an opposing super PAC. The government itself is intimidating donors. Appointees at the IRS and other agencies are pursuing similar efforts to ferret out who is contributing to outside groups critical of the Administration so that they can scare them off the playing field and shut them up.”
More here, with the video of the speech itself. Worth every minute: McConnell recounts a list of shocking abuses of power by BO and company. Please pass it on.
http://aei.org/events/2012/06/15/growing-threats-to-our-first-amendment-rights/
They are Europeans, soooooooo much smarter than we, and clearly MUST be right. Right idiots.
Europe’s most valuable export is whatever it is that makes some Americans take them seriously.
I think it was Buckley who observed that, absent lush resorts on the Med coast, nobody goes to Europe to see anything later than the mid-nineteenth century except the cemeteries of their own dead, dead of European politics.