There’s little doubt Obama’s message of change resonated beyond America’s shores. European politicians and the media gushed with giddiness this week at the news that Obama will replace George W. Bush as America’s president, and change the course of U.S. foreign policy.

Obama’s election was met with a “huge sigh,” reportedU.S. News and World Report from London, “reflecting anticipation among political leaders on this side of the Atlantic that President-elect Obama’s administration will be less ideologically driven than the Bush administration and more accommodating to the views of European allies.”

Mr. Obama’s election was received especially well in Germany, arguably the Continent’s most influential state and a crotchety and fickle ally of the United States. But like most of Europe, the Germans were more excited about what an Obama presidency will mean for German and European interests than anything else. Spiegel reports:

With hopes of more cooperation among allies, a more ambitious attitude toward climate protection and less aggressive rhetoric, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her administration have great expectations for Barack Obama.

“Obama represents the America that Europe likes,” said Chris Brown, an international relations expert at the London school of Economics. “He’s jazz, not country and western.” Much of the reason for Obama’s soaring popularity in Europe is because he’s perceived as being the diametric opposite to President Bush.

“Public reaction to his election has been euphoric—a marked change from the deep disdain for President Bush that’s widespread in Europe,” U.S. News continued. “Obama’s popularity makes it easy for European heads of state to once again pal around with an American president without tanking in the polls themselves.”

Europe’s crush on Obama is fickle and likely to be short-lived. So while in the short-term it might appear America’s relations with Europe are improving, in time, and as Bible prophecy shows, Europe’s relations with America will deteriorate.

President of the World?

The Times, in “Calm down! He’s not President of the World,” speaks of the soaring expectations around the world of an Obama presidency.

[W]hat a long way down: down from the crest of expectation on which Barack Obama now surfs, on to the rough shingle of daily politics. Would that the wave might subside smoothly into the gentle swell of history. Would that it were not destined to break, dashing dreams and spawning new cynicism. …Yesterday I tried googling the name Obama with the phrase “President of the world.” There were 552,000 entries. In hopes of astringency I tried the leader column of The Daily Telegraph. “He is not so much an American citizen as a citizen of the world,” I read. “America, welcome back into the world,” gushed The Guardian, speaking for the world.I turned to the Australian media. A spokesman for the Aboriginal community explains that the President-elect will have a special place in his sympathies for Aborigines. While Gordon Brown hopes the President-elect will have a special place in his heart for a British Labor Government, the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd (says the sobersided Australian Financial Review), believes special attention can be given to the U.S.-Australian alliance “now [that] Barack Obama has won.” Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Leader of the Opposition, says Mr. Obama’s victory represented “a defining moment in history.””The election of Obama is when the old world ended and the new world began,” I read in the Australian Daily Telegraph. Kenyans look to Mr. Obama for the President-elect’s special attention. Gays note that he specially mentioned us in his victory speech.So many alliances strengthened! So many special places in his heart! …Useless, I know, to argue with infatuation, but I’ll ask anyway: will we never learn?Why, when we’ve been disappointed so often, do we fall for it every time with leaders?

Read our column on the subject from this past week for more on this theme.

The Changing Face of German Politics

A new era is under way in German politics, Spiegel reported last week. In hopes of streamlining the political process in order to tackle the economic crisis more effectively, democracy appears to be getting the squeeze. Spiegel noted that the “power is currently concentrated in the hands of the very few” as Germany’s leaders make changes to save the ailing economy. The public has been kept largely “out of the loop” by Merkel who has yet to make a detailed speech about the situation.

Spiegel hailed the changing nature of German politics as a positive development, saying, “A more streamlined process will also be more desirable after the crisis comes to an end. … It seems that politics in Germany is currently taking place under ideal conditions. As paradoxical as it seems, the crisis has had a calming effect” (emphasis mine throughout).

As the Trumpet recently observed, “Time after time, it has been the pretext of a ‘crisis’—economic, religious, social, military or otherwise—that opened the door for Europe’s most notorious leaders.” Also, as we predicted in that article, “The European crisis will not only act as a catalyst to unite Europe, but it will also cement the status of its leader, Germany.”

Spiegel observed that the economic crisis has caused a “globalization of politics” which follows in the footsteps of the economy: “A kind of global government is taking shape, and although it is still hidden from view, it is already in full operation, during every hour of every day.”

This is interesting in light of Angela Merkel’s comments after the election of Barack Obama. According to another article in Spiegel, Merkel said Germany will continue to seek solutions to global problems. She said, “We will do so in the knowledge that no one today can solve the problems of the entire world.”

With that in mind, Merkel called upon the Obama administration to put an end to “U.S. unilaterism.”

Iran Happy, Israel Worried

Did anyone notice who lined up first to congratulate President-elect Barack Obama last week? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian leader to wish the best for a president-elect since the Islamic revolution in 1979, when ties were completely severed between the United States and Iran. Speaking on behalf of the world, Ahmadinejad outlined what is now expected of an Obama-led United States:

People in the world expect war-oriented policies, occupation, bullying, deception and intimidation of nations and imposing discriminatory policies on them and international affairs, which have evoked hatred toward American leaders, to be replaced by ones advocating justice, respect for human rights, friendship and noninterference in other countries’ affairs.

Ahmadinejad also blasted America’s close ties with Israel, saying the U.S. must “reverse the unfair attitude of the past 60 years.”

Meanwhile, in Israel, the woman who hopes to be the next prime minister, sharply criticized Barack Obama for his apparent willingness to initiate dialogue with the Iranian leader. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told Israeli Radio, “We live in a neighborhood in which sometimes dialogue … is liable to be interpreted as weakness.” Livni said she did not support discussions between America and the Islamic Republic.

Reporting on Livni’s interview, the Ottawa Citizen wrote last week from Jerusalem,

Livni’s interview about Iran underscored how seriously Israel regards Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and how worried many here are that Obama may not be as staunch an ally to the Jewish state as President George W. Bush, who has sometimes been described here as the best friend that the country has ever had in Washington.

As strong as the support from President Bush has been, remember that over the past year, the Bush administration has done virtually nothing to slow down Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. So the uncertainty of an even more liberal administration occupying the White House for at least four more years must indeed be worrying for many Israelis.

Left and “Getting Lefter”

In his column on Friday, Mark Steyn made some similar observations to those we did about America’s decades-long slide to the liberal left. While democratic societies rarely vote to “go left,” Steyn writes, “oddly enough that’s where they’ve all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.”

Steyn points out that according to government spending statistics, the size and power of big government has been steadily growing over the past four decades. This has been especially true over the last 20 years. As Steyn says, “It’s hard for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party’s nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the private sector for putting profits before patriotism.” Steyn continues,

While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps every election, and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the West, it’s government health care. It changes the relationship between state and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. Henceforth, elections are fought over which party is proposing the shiniest government bauble: If you think President-elect Obama’s promise of federally subsidized day care was a relatively peripheral part of his platform, in Canada in the election before last it was the dominant issue. Yet America may be approaching its tipping point even more directly. In political terms, the message of the gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: “Individual responsibility” and “self-reliance” are for chumps.

Answering conservatives who say the Republicans will come back strong in the next election cycle because of America’s supposedly “center-right” core values, Steyn concludes,

I disagree with my fellow conservatives who think the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Frank liberal behemoth will so obviously screw up that they’ll be routed in two or four years’ time. The president-elect’s so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 percent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those who are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, on the dole.By 2012, it will be more than half on the dole, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the Nanny State. That is the death of the American idea—which, after all, began as an economic argument: “No taxation without representation” is a great rallying cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it’s unsustainable, and you’ve got to give some of it back?

As Melanie Phillips wrote after the election last week, America voted for change “because America is in the process of changing.”

Liberal Elites: Voters Are Bigots, Sheep, Dummies

As you may have heard, bans on same-sex “marriage” became law in three states this past election, including notoriously liberal California. As we wrote in a column last week, this hardly qualifies as a high-water mark for conservatism in America. Nevertheless, it did reflect a popular rejection of liberal elite support for same-sex “marriage.”

That fact put the burden on those elites to explain what happened. This made for some interesting commentary this week. The Weekly Standard made these observations:

[T]he scoreboard in popular referenda on such amendments is now Marriage 30, Same Sex Marriage 0. It was the fact that in the most socially liberal state in the country, whites had voted (narrowly) against the amendment, Hispanics narrowly for, and black voters overwhelmingly for the traditional definition of marriage. Amazingly, Los Angeles County, which chose Obama over McCain 69 percent to 29 percent, supported Proposition 8, with black voters in crime-ridden South Los Angeles neighborhoods like Compton voting strongly in favor, while Beverly Hills, Westwood, and Pacific Palisades were tolerantly and disdainfully against.So elite opinion makers had to say something about these black voters. The accounts I saw said two things: Many blacks are bigoted against gays, and the pro-Proposition 8 forces got to California’s black pastors. In other words, the anti-same-sex-marriage black voters are bigoted, they are sheep, or most likely some combination of the two. No other analysis offered—or needed.

Don’t expect to hear any mainstream criticism of such patronizing—even racist—views. Apparently it’s okay to criticize African Americans when they support a socially conservative position.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave an alternative view: She said those who supported the same-sex-marriage ban simply didn’t understand what they were doing.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Chronicle, Pelosi said she believes some voters might not have fully understood the initiative, which overturned a state Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. The measure was approved 52 to 48 percent.”Unfortunately, I think people thought they were making a statement about what their view of same-sex marriage was,” the San Francisco Democrat said. “I don’t know if it was clear that this meant that we are amending the Constitution to diminish freedom in our state.”

She acknowledged the fact that these voters are against same-sex “marriage,” but believes that they still wouldn’t have passed the measure if they understood that by doing so they would be defying the will of four out of seven California Supreme Court justices.

How’s that for liberal elitist thinking?

Observations From an Israeli Leftist

An alert reader sent us a link to this article from the Independent on November 1. It’s an interview with former Israeli politician and controversial author Avraham Burg. Burg’s far-left views have alienated him from even the liberal wing of the Knesset. His latest book, The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes, triggered a storm of criticism when it was released in Hebrew last year.

We’ll leave it to you to read the article for a sampling of Burg’s self-hating, defeatist ideas. There are, however, a few points worth mentioning here.

First, Burg says, “If Bibi Netanyahu comes back to power and Hamas stays in power there will be an awful clash between our one-state-solution vision and their one-state-solution vision.” On this point, he may actually be right. A senior adviser of the Likud party has already stated that Netanyahu will not honor any last-minute peace agreement between caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Syrian government over the Golan Heights. Netanyahu is also determined to keep Jerusalem united under Israeli sovereignty. If elected, his policies would assuredly clash more sharply with Israel’s enemies than would the policies of Kadima or Labor. This is definitely something we are watching closely.

Burg also sees the EU getting more involved in the peace process. “Even with Obama in the White House,” he says, “America is too far away to hear what’s going on here. It doesn’t hear the knocks on the door. Europe hears the knocks on the door. Europe sees the shadows passing under the window.” Of course, we have said this for some time now. As the United States continues its rapid decline in power, Israel will look to Europe—Germany, in particular—for help in defending against Islamic terrorism.

Icelanders Stunned by Economic Collapse

What is now happening in Iceland gives us a profound snapshot of what’s ahead for other nations when their economies collapse. Of particular note is the suddenness of Icelandic breakdown—life savings vanished, currency plummeting, interest rates skyrocketing, inflation soaring, unemployment shooting up. “The collapse came so fast it seemed unreal, impossible,” the International Herald Tribunewrites.

Overnight, people lost their savings. Prices are soaring. Once-crowded restaurants are almost empty. Banks are rationing foreign currency, and companies are finding it dauntingly difficult to do business abroad. Inflation is at 16 percent and rising. People have stopped traveling overseas. The local currency, the krona, was 65 to the dollar a year ago; now it is 130. Companies are slashing salaries, reducing workers’ hours and, in some instances, embarking on mass layoffs.”No country has ever crashed as quickly and as badly in peacetime,” said Jon Danielsson, an economist with the London School of Economics. …

Elsewhere on the Web

Peter Hitchens speaks out in the Daily Mail on America’s over-the-top response to the election outcome: “The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilization. … I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers.” Hitchens also puts the blame of the election loss on Republicans who were brave enough to order soldiers to fight evil in foreign lands, but were afraid “to fight on the cultural and moral fronts” in America.

The Telegraph writes of a leaked report by British intelligence of thousands of Muslim extremists, mostly UK-born and young, trained in foreign terrorist camps, planning terrorist attacks on Britain. “For the foreseeable future the UK will continue to be a high-priority target for international terrorists aligned with al-Qaeda,” the report says. “It will face a threat from British nationals, including Muslim converts, and UK-based foreign terrorists, as well as terrorists planning attacks from abroad.”

The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 6.5 percent this October, reaching the highest level since 1994 and setting America up for its steepest economic decline in decades. Economist Allan Ruskin says that America is “stuck in a bad dream” as the economy shed over 1 million jobs since the beginning of the year. The “bad dream” is driving millions of Americans to desperation and can only get worse from the economic consequences of increasing anti-Americanism around the globe. As our editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet, “[As] the U.S. and Britain become less and less competitive worldwide, unemployment will steadily increase. As that happens, domestic rioting and violence will become much more prevalent.” America’s current unemployment crisis is building up tensions that are about to explode.

Two more banks just failed, bringing the total in the U.S. to 19 this year. Regulators shut down Franklin Bank in Texas and Security Pacific Bank in California. The credit crunch continues despite the unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.

The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas effectively collapsed last week as Hamas shot over 60 Kassam rockets and mortar shells into Israel since Tuesday. This was in response to an Israel Defense Forces cross-border raid on a structure just 250 meters from the border that housed an entrance to a tunnel believed to be prepared for future kidnappings of idf soldiers.

China just announced a massive stimulus package in its biggest move yet to stop the global financial crisis from dragging down its economy. The package will be the equivalent of us$586 billion—a massive amount for an economy around a quarter the size of the United States. China’s stimulus package will be spent primarily on infrastructure development and increasing the wages of rural Chinese. Although China is already one of the world’s largest exporters, the stimulus package will encourage domestic consumption. For the implications of 1 billion Chinese becoming consumers, read “What the China Miracle Means” and “The Battleground.”

And Finally …

If you’re tired of hearing overused phrases like “with all due respect,” “it’s a nightmare” and “24/7,” you are not alone. Oxford has compiled a list of the most irritating expressions used in the English language.

I know an analysis about tired clichés isn’t exactly rocket science, but at this moment in time, with the ubiquitous and fairly unique coverage of the recent election, we absolutely think it’s worthy of mention. Personally, I like it. But at the end of the day, you be the judge. Literally.