The issue: We can get on our high horse after we get our own country back on solid financial ground

Americans have always been generous to other countries, and especially generous with advice — solicited or not.

LAST WEEK, President Barack Obama observed that the 17 European nations in the eurozone had not only failed to recover fully from the 2007 banking crisis, but also “never fully dealt with the challenges that their banking system faced.”

The Greeks, he said, “are going through a financial crisis that is scaring the world, and they’re trying to take responsible actions, but these actions haven’t been quite as quick as they need to be.”

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told European finance officials that their debt crisis — Ireland and Portugal are in trouble and doubts are growing about Spain and Italy — is “the most serious risk now confronting the world economy.” Decisions, he said, “cannot wait.”

It’s not as if the Europeans have been unaware of the debt crisis. They’ve been wrestling with it for almost three years. And a lecture on the need for speed cannot sit well from the leaders of a country whose dilatory and dysfunctional Congress brought the U.S. to the brink of default.

CERTAINLY, the Americans’ lectures didn’t sit well with the German press, according to a roundup by the respected German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

The newspaper Bild said Obama’s lecture on the euro crisis was “overbearing, arrogant and absurd.” The U.S. president, the paper said, seems to have forgotten that the “most important trigger of the financial and economic crisis was U.S. banks and their insane real estate dealings.”

Now might be a bad time to mention that we still haven’t found a permanent fix for those particular problems.

Concluded Bild: “The president’s scolding is a pathetic attempt to distract attention from his own failings. How embarrassing.”

The more upscale, more serious Suddeutsche Zeitung called Obama’s lecture “simple electioneering.”

Then, in a somewhat startling admission, the paper said, “The problem, however, is that the U.S. president is absolutely right. For far too long, the Europeans — including the Germans — treated the financial crisis as a purely American problem. They have still found no solution for their own debt crisis.”

THAT STILL doesn’t give the U.S. administration the right or obligation to continually point out European failings.

Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung says of Obama’s administration, “The optimism of the past is gone, replaced by a cheap search for a scapegoat. Obama thinks he has found one. He blames the Europeans … ”

Handelsblatt said, almost plaintively: “That’s not how friends talk to each other.” Obama, the paper said, is a brilliant thinker, but in “the desperate battle for his re-election he’d rather construct myths, such as claiming that the Europeans alone are responsible for the American mess. Not only is this fundamentally wrong, but — coming as it does from a friend — it’s downright pitiful and sad.”

THERE IS A SOLUTION for this. The United States can keep its mouth shut. The Democrats and, especially, the Republicans should abandon their ideological idiocies and get this country back on solid financial ground through spending cuts and, yes, tax increases.

Then we can go back to lecturing the Europeans all we want. They may even feel obligated to pay attention.

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