Daniel Greenfield

Political Messiahs in Tailored Suits

Let's not pretend that the right is any more immune to leader worship and cults of personality than the zombie hordes on the left. The cult of personality as a means of power predates political orientation, it dates back to the first men who understood that leadership is not about doing what the tribe wants, but about elevating yourself above the tribe. Reasoned political involvement is about fixing toilets. When your toilet is broken, you look through the listings, find a plumber who seems to have a good track record, look at his rates and decide if you want to bring him in to do the job. Leader worship is about ignoring the broken toilet and reveling in the greatness of the plumber who doesn't actually fix your toilet, but spends hours talking tough about fixing all the toilets or movingly about the broken toilet inside each and every one of us.

An Earthquake Comes to Washington

It took an earthquake to interrupt Obama's golf game. Nothing else until now has. But while the rumbling of tectonic plates comes and goes, the deeper rumbling of millions of voters will not. The rumbling is larger than this election. It is bigger than Obama and larger than his feckless party. It is an earthquake of self-definition.

The End of Normal

The Arab Spring didn’t accomplish a whole lot beyond swapping out a handful of dictators for their more obscure henchmen and Islamist allies, but it did kill the treaty model of regional normalization completely dead.

Time for an American Spring

Stopped clocks are right twice a day, and Al Gore can be too, assuming you use a generous definition of "day" and "twice"... and "right". Long after the media had shamefacedly retired the "Arab Spring" in the same closet where they keep the Mondale presidency and Grateful Dead memorabilia-- Al Gore brought it out with impeccable timing on an episode of "Where on TV is Keith Olbermann".

Burying the Arab Spring

It was only three months ago that you could hardly open a newspaper without encountering columns full of growing predictions about the revolution sweeping the Middle East. Now the Arab Spring is swiftly becoming the embarrassing relative in the journalism family. The predictions as silly as crystal healing and alien visitations.

When Liberal Aliens Attack

The left has run out of all other options-- so now they're banking on an alien invasion. First Paul Krugman suggested that if we faked an alien invasion, the government would have the go ahead to spend the crazy amounts of money he wanted it to spend in the first place. Considering the 15 trillion dollar deficit, it's an open question of just what the debt pile for Krugman's War of the Worlds Economics would look like. But Krugman did argue that the stimulus was far too small, so the wages of Krugman's alien invasion might be quadrillions in debt.

The “Not Listening” Tour

For a man with such big ears, Barack Hussein Obama isn't actually very good at listening. And a listening tour isn't going to change that. Listening tours have become an obligatory stage of the early campaign, but their name is another degradation of meaning. Politicians don't conduct listening tours in order to listen to voters, but to have those voters listen to them. The occasional town hall meeting with its exchanges is the verbal version of a Letters to the Editor column. But does anyone pretend that a newspaper exists to listen to the readers?

Pessimistic Optimism, Optimistic Pessimism and Judaism

Sitting on the floor and mourning the fall of temples thousands of years gone, amid the plenty of an industrial empire has a whiff of perversity to it. "Why bother," some might ask, "Israel has been rebuilt and is home to the largest Jewish population in the world. If you want another temple, build it. With modern construction technology, it can be bigger and better than any before."

An Anatomy of Law Enforcement Impotence

The modern law enforcement apparatus is an impressive thing. It's no longer about men with clubs standing on street corners and cracking heads. Law enforcement is a scientific endeavor encompassing everything from high end forensic sciences to sociology and psychology. It's a field of ideas now, and it suffers from the same malfeasance of ideas that every other aspect of Western culture does. The modern police force does not enforce laws out of some abstract sense of justice, its only goal is the social good. And the social good calls for not enforcing laws, as often as it calls for enforcing them. Law enforcement does not exist for the sake of law, but for social stability, and how to achieve that social stability is still a matter of debate.

A Nation of What

The London riots are yet another episode in the slow disintegration of Europe. London is no longer an English city, it's just another pin on a map. Much of London is a bunch of Third World cultures living in a geographical area that they have no cultural or emotional connection to. The culture around them is as shamelessly materialistic, vulgar and violent as anything in the dark ages-- with the occasional tip of the hat to politically correct values involving the environment or tolerating gay people. And the same goes for the rest of Europe's capitals. Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels and Oslo are all obvious examples.

A Leftist Farce Plays in Tel Aviv

It was probably the cottage cheese protests that gave the left an idea about how to regain a fraction of relevance. The notion was simple enough, shift away from the pro-terrorist protests and union strikes to a cost of living protest movement. The Israeli left still commands international funding and attention, but it lacks domestic political representation. The Labor party is on its deathbed and the radical left has no hope of gaining anything beyond the usual handful of mandates. That leaves Kadima, the non-party created by corruptocrats, Sharon and Olmert.

Civilization’s End

The flash mobs in America or the Blackberry mobs in London have one thing in common. It isn't race, though they tend to predominantly be minorities. It's identity. The counterculture has not changed dramatically since the '70s, but it has tossed aside any appearance of idealism. The new counterculture draws in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white youth and lower class black youth. Their goals are purely materialistic, looted iPods and government subsidies for housing, education and anything else they can think of.

The Warrior’s Tale

The warrior's tale is a simple enough thing. Strong as steel, but fragile as chance. It is the wind in his soul and the wall we build around ourselves to tell us who we are. Before there were cities or nations, and railways and airports, computers and telephones-- the tale was told around campfires. Acted out in pantomime, dressed up in animal furs and cave paintings. But the tale was the same. The people were confronted with a threat and they called upon the best and strongest of their men to go out and fight it. These were their warriors. What they did in the face of that threat is the tale.

Cannibals, Vampires and Terrorists—Oh My!

Joe Biden has compared the Tea Party to terrorists. Maureen Dowd compared them to cannibals and vampires. Then having run out of mythical monsters, or monsters they believe are mythical, there was nothing to do but roll out a few more articles about the Republican Party being taken over by Dittoheads from Outer Space.

Government Amateurs vs Government Professionals

In the budget debate, government amateurs took on government professionals. And the professionals won. This is only to be expected. Professionals usually have the inside track in whatever field they're in. Not only do they hold the higher ground, but they know all the loopholes and how to shape the dialogue.

The Emperor of Debt is Naked

When Benjamin Franklin was asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention, "What have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” His answer was, "A republic, if you can keep it." What has come out of the debt ceiling talks is not a republic, but tyranny on the installment plan.

A Land Without History

"In a land without history, whoever furbishes the national memory, coins the concepts and interprets the past will win the future." -- Michael Sturmer Tell me who you are and I can tell you how you see the past. That vanishing country falling away behind us. Are we on the way up or the way down? Are we better off than we were four years ago, or forty or four hundred? Is this the best of times or the worst of times? The answer lies inside you. It is defined by your values. For some capacitive touchscreens and infinite channels mean a brighter future. For others, the values of home and family, dignity and country, that were lost matter more than the swipe pass and the digital swoosh.

Lynching Herman Cain

Herman Cain is being lynched for taking a stand. And the people doing it are Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives. Commentators who complain about the "race card" are eagerly laying down the "bigot card" because Cain did what few candidates are ready to do. He clearly spelled out the problem with Islamic involvement in American public life. If as some insist, Cain's campaign was brought down by his statements about Islam-- then Republicans have accepted the Dhimmi Principle that the viability of a candidate depends on taking a moderate position on Islam. A moderate position being skeptical, but not particularly confrontational. A position that easily leads back to that old "Handful of Extremists" saw.

A Clash of Histories

The clash of civilizations is also a clash of histories. The Western view of history is progressive. A march upward from barbarism to greater phases of enlightenment. This view is fairly modern and fairly liberal, yet closely associated with the success of Western civilization. In progressive history, human techniques from the technological to the social can be used to improve life and make the world a better place.

A New Deal for America

The New Deal's bargain was that Americans would trade higher taxes and less economic freedom for a social safety net. That was until the left decided that the social safety net was actually a wealth redistribution platform. The social safety net slid into the welfare state, a program of subsidies for reliable Democratic voters at the expense of the general public.