Tea Time with Barack Obama

Barack Obama celebrates his 50th birthday today. He himself humbly admits that he has gone a bit gray since his election in Nov. 2008. If things continue as they have the last few weeks, the American president will have a full head of gray hair by the next election in 15 months.

For a month, the United States trembled before the possibility that the country may not be able to pay its loans or its employees, lacking an agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling. The very esoteric debate, which surrounds a problem created from scratch by an activist minority grouped in with the tea party, is the result of a legislative peculiarity, which was voted in during World War I and never repealed.

Taken hostage, Obama had to renounce all of his principles for a so-called compromise with a Republican-dominated House of Representatives, which was itself incapable of controlling its radical wing. The political crisis, which just ended in the American capital, demonstrates the danger posed to a country when people will vote in favor of just anyone under just any pretext.

The tea party has brought the world to the brink of a new financial crisis for purely partisan and ideological reasons. Even the Chinese have greeted the end of the episode with relief: The world simply did not need such an upheaval.

Even at a superficial glance, the agreement does not hold water. Americans have shown themselves to be strongly allergic to all taxation, the country is coming out of the recession badly, and it still needs a public intervention.

At this point, almost 46 million Americans receive food stamps from the government, irrefutable proof of the economy’s horrible state. But the coming years will see deep cuts in social policies, education, health, support for the elderly and, lo and behold, the armed forces.

Where the last point is concerned, I’ll believe it when I see it, because the advocates of budgetary restrictions and the partisans of a national defense — which, according to them, is worthy of protecting the sole global superpower — come from the same circles.

The Republicans will have to cope with their own contradictions, but there is a line in the sand that they dare not cross: In the United States, national security still takes precedence over everything else.

The tea party example reveals all of the harmful effects of an unbridled vote in favor of incompetent anarchists supported by an equally irresponsible media. A considerable number of Americans view Washington as the birthplace of original sin and of all its negative consequences.

The tea party fanatics, the extremists of a Republican group that is already quite reactionary in itself, have succeeded in imposing their priorities on the public.

Don’t laugh; it could happen to us, with our Quebec habit of electing officials according to the mood of the moment. For example, Stephen Harper’s Conservative administration wants to reduce acts of public power to a strict minimum, whatever the cost.

A good number of trouble-making reformists have jumped ship in recent years, but the party has maintained its philosophy before the fusion of the Reform and the old Conservative Parties.

If government heads have scrapped all inflammatory language about the economy — in contrast to their usual habit in the public record — you still have to keep an eye on them.

After all, these people like to watch ultra-partisan American networks like Fox News, like Harper himself, as he has already admitted. That could give them unhealthy ideas.