Behold the European confusion (tip to Instapundit):
These days, and to varying degrees, the governments of France, Britain and Germany regard Mr. Obama as a problem. No longer expressed only in private, the notion represents a decline in the reflexive acceptance and respect that had cushioned European attitudes about his historic presidency.
In Germany, Die Welt, a consistently pro-American newspaper, regretted things were now at a point where it appeared the U.S. was trying to confirm every prejudice against it. This was happening, the paper's publisher wrote in a front-page editorial last month, "under an American president who was once longed for in Europe like the Messiah, and whom Old Europeans finally saw as one—a president who didn't arrive wearing Texas cowboy boots, and instead tucked his copy of Kant under his pillow. But that was fiction."
Yeah. Sucks to actually get what you desperately wanted.
I'd enjoy their worries and say to heck with them--enjoy what you wanted--but NATO Europe is an asset to secure as much as it is an ally to work with. A bit of schadenfreude is a luxury we can ill afford. We can't set aside a century of foreign policy that seeks to prevent Europe from having their immense resources under the control of a hostile power.
And we do have friends in Europe who we shouldn't abandon even if "Europe" as a theoretical monolithic entity cannot be our friend.
To be fair, Europe isn't really getting what they wanted. What they wanted with a Kant-carrying President Obama was an America willing to use its power for European goals rather than for American goals. While the Libya War may have gotten European hopes up, that desire has proven to be just fiction, obviously.
Loyalty is a cowboy trait, remember.
UPDATE: Schadenfreude does apply to the Obamacare "glitches" (much as Custer was confronted with numerous "glitches" at Little Big Horn), of course. Really, read all of Jonah Goldberg's article. It includes the sentence, “Behold the power of this fully functional website!”
