The Hypocritical Messiah

America bestowed a brutal financial crisis and unending debt on the rest the world, lost its AAA credit rating and now its political parties are in eternal deadlock. But that doesn’t stop Barack Obama from declaring that Europe is the global bad guy. This says a great deal — but not about greatness.

Admittedly, what the Europeans have been doing for months to solve their currency crisis can only be called one thing: amateurism. Cackling amateurs strut around on stage and succeed only in writing a new act to their Greek tragedy every day. This results in eruptions in stock markets that point first toward heaven and the next day toward hell. Policies that promote trust and attainable crisis management look a lot different than this.

Of course that deserves criticism, even from Barack Obama. But, please! Not as clumsy and hypocritical as his has recently been. “[T]hey’re trying to take responsible actions, but those actions haven’t been quite as quick as they need to be,” Obama patronizingly said of his trans-Atlantic partners, adding, “In Europe … you know, they have not fully healed from the crisis back in 2007 and never fully dealt with all the challenges that their banking system faced. … It’s now being compounded by what’s happening in Greece. So they’re going through a financial crisis that is scaring the world.”

Aside from the fact that the Lehman disaster Obama may have been referring to happened in 2008 and not 2007, there’s much to be said about his complaint. But that this politician (of all people) — whose nation, with its gambling casino mentality, caused the worst financial crisis in decades and even lost its AAA credit rating — dares to wag his finger like some know-it-all, comes off as strange. Barely a year before the presidential election, the most powerful man in the world takes orders from the arch-conservative tea party movement and has to resort to angry populism.

And Obama, again of all people, complains about delays and drawn-out discussions looking for a solution to the crisis. He would have every right, at least morally, to do so if the United States provided a great contrasting example of how it had — at the risk of repeating myself — learned a great lesson from the Lehman disaster, solved its deep-seated problems with broad political consensus and then gone on to launch a recovery. But that’s not the example we got.

The reforms necessary to curb future risks in the financial world haven’t been as sharp as one would hope. A long-term solution needs to be found for the struggling mortgage banks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that the final chapter may be written on the billions of dollars that they received in loans. The Federal Reserve already bought $2.3 billion in government treasury bonds in an attempt to jump-start the economy, but with no resounding success thus far.

The United States is caught up in a debt crisis. In terms of economic performance, the U.S.’ debt level is a few percentage points higher than that of the entire eurozone. All indications point to the fact that the warning shot fired by the Standard & Poor’s ratings agency, which lowered the U.S. credit rating, did little to rouse it from its slumber. There’s little doubt that confusion is rampant in Europe, with the proposed goals and their effectiveness deserving of much criticism. And the Americans? The Obama administration and the opposition are deadlocked in an endless fight over budget cuts and preserving tax breaks for the wealthy.

Pointing the Finger at Europe

With presidential elections looming, they treat the world to a bizarre and frightening mini-war. It’s not a question of a constitutionally based debt limit similar to the one in Germany. The nation governed by the hypocritical messiah, Barack Obama, is light years distant from that example.

Standard & Poor’s made it clear to America’s fighting cocks how much confidence it had in them: little to none. “The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.”

Obama’s act is as transparent as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s sudden flight from nuclear power. The U.S. president has well-founded fears about another possible recession and is trying to put the blame on Europe so that his re-election won’t be threatened. It also makes it easier for him to sell his $447 billion stimulus program.

When Standard & Poor’s took away America’s AAA credit rating, no European politician dared — and rightly so — to point the finger at Obama, because Europe isn’t in a position to do so at present. Europe isn’t in a position to criticize even the Indebted States of America. It’s too bad that Obama lacks the greatness to refrain from criticizing and blaming his European partners. Amateurs may be in charge in Europe, but at least they know they’re living in glass houses.