Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.
Who Will Protect the People from the Unions?
It is often forgotten that one of the causes of the evolution of the modern American urban union was the lawless suppression of workers by Democratic party affiliated political machines, and yet it did not take so very long before the union became an outgrowth of that same political machine. And having wiped out nearly every independent industry with which it was associated, the only unions still surviving are those in control of either municipal services or state subsidized service providers, particularly in the medical field.- Sunday, January 2, 2011
Like a Rorschach test which tells you more about the patient, than about the image on the card, Wikileaks reveals more about the left than it does about America. And what it reveals is that the left's antipathy toward America is not policy based at all. If Wikileaks' heavily edited helicopter video at least allowed the left to pretend that it was opposing American war crimes, the leaked diplomatic cables are based on nothing more than opposing American diplomacy. Not even the capital D diplomacy, but the small letter diplomacy. The minor observations, petty notes and random scribbles of a bored diplomatic corps observing well known situations.
It wasn't long after Obama's victory that liberals began trying on patriotism like an old ill-fitting coat, admiring themselves in the mirror, and even denouncing conservatives as unamerican (yes it happened). Caught in the afterglow of their win, basking in the radiance of their man addressing the country, beaming down from the carefully arranged set pieces and choreographed events, guzzling the myth like hopeandchangey brew-- they could almost believe that the great clock of history had wound back to the Kennedy Administration. Before the Vietnam War or the shot in Memphis that killed Martin Luther King. That golden moment between FDR and LBJ, only briefly broken by McCarthyism and Ike, when hating your country hadn't yet become the mandatory liberal position. When it was still possible to look up admiringly at the flag and be a liberal, even if Phil Ochs and the SDS might mock them for it. When America to them was still the hope of the world, not the shame of the world.
Airline travelers flying the unfriendly skies are presented with two options, that are actually only a single option, to have themselves and their children degraded in public in order to spare Muslim feelings. That we have a ban on profiling travelers, but no ban on molesting or humiliating them, tells us everything we need to know about why we have the current system that we do.
In a war we terrorize the enemy. In a siege we terrorize our own. And we have been terrorizing our own for a long time now.
It's fitting that No Labels, the new group launched by liberal Republicans and not very conservative Democrats, kicked off with Mayor Bloomberg, a liberal who ran as a Republican, because the Democratic line was already taken. Almost as fitting was the appearance of other transparty types like Charlie Crist and Mike Castle, who were Republicans until they lost a party primary, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who was a conservative Democrat until a disgraced governor picked her to be New York's Senator, and Governor Manchin, who beat the landslide by desperately grabbing his gun and acting like a right wing caricature long enough to win reelection.
Two years ago, the road to 2012 seemed like a cakewalk for Obama and an unreachable mountain for the Republicans. The roles haven't quite reversed yet, but they are evening out. And like in the old Hope-Crosby movies like "Road to Morocco" or "Road to Singapore", the road to 2012 has turned into an absurdist journey. Not a traditional political journey, but a silly parody of it with very serious stakes.
American politics has changed so dramatically over the last several years that anyone who had been in a coma would have trouble adjusting to this new world, in which the occupant of the Oval Office spends half his time abroad and the other half appearing on TV shows, and his likely opponent is doing her press releases via Facebook and has her own TV show.
As the seventh and penultimate day of Chanukah arrives, the candles are once again lit, wispy cotton wicks floating in pools of golden oil, touched by a burst of white flame. In Israel the spreading fire that killed 42 people and consumed 4 million acres has finally abated. And the freeze that Obama attempted to impose on hundreds of thousands of Israelis also melted in the light. And after a severe drought, rain has begun to fall upon the land. But the worst is not over. Not by far.