Screaming 'fire'

At least Barack Obama has a Prague friend in Václav Havel. The two will reportedly hobnob together when Obama visits on April 4-5. The U.S. press will eat it up. And the love-feast will divert attention from Obama's unavoidable meetings with two Prague ingrates, Václav Klaus and Mirek Topolánek. They have had the audacity to tell the truth about Obama's handling of the financial crisis. Klaus criticized the Obama budget in California earlier this month, and Topolánek told the EU Parliament that the U.S. crisis measures are the "road to hell." In less-critical times, such talk before a face-to-face meeting would rightly be considered undiplomatic and boorish. But the situation is extremely serious. The Obama administration's favoritism toward Wall Street (read Sachs or Taibbi, for example) threatens to take down Europe, too. It's proper to scream "fire" in a theater if the theater is indeed on fire. [Czech Republic United States of America European Union]