OBAMA GETS WHAT HE WANTS AND DOESN'T LIKE IT

From Mark Steyn:

..."Retail Sales Plummet," read the Christmas headline in The Wall Street
Journal. "Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer
spending."
Hey, that's great news, isn't it? After all, everyone knows
Americans consume too much. What was it that then Sen. Obama said on the
subject? "We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping
our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra
or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4
percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say, 'You
just go ahead, we'll be fine.'"

.....

And yet, strangely, President-elect Barack Obama doesn't seem terribly
happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. He's proposing some 5.7
bazillion dollar "stimulus" package or whatever it is now to "stimulate" it back
into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then-Sen.
Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess?
They're aghast, they're terrified, they're on a one-way express elevator down
the abyss with no hope of putting on the brakes unless the global economy can
restore aggregate demand.

......

The message from the European political class couldn't be more
straightforward: If you crass, vulgar Americans don't ramp up the demand, we're
kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption,
the planet is screwed.

Hilareous. And these people are supposed to be the smarter, more sophisticated elite.