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.
The big lie of Occupy Wall Street begins with its name. It isn't occupying Wall Street, it's occupying the resources of a city with a budget crisis on its hands.
Wall Street has been locked down since after September 11 and the Zuccotti Park encampment and its associated barricades isn't doing much to impact the lives of the brokers and financial analysts the idiots in their best protest gear are braying about. The people who are being impacted are the small businesses adjacent to the protesters who are experiencing a return of the post 9/11 lockdown that wiped out so many downtown businesses.
There is no understanding environmentalism without also understanding the function of religion as a means of infusing spirituality into the material. The politicization of consumerism is an attempt to mimic the religious dimension of life without a guiding deity.
Environmentalism provides the believer with the grandiosity of a human centered existence, in which the actions of individuals can lead to massive catastrophes, floods, extinctions and hurricanes. It's the old biblical epic of Noah set in what pretends to be a rational scientific universe, but actually borrows the religious significance of human ethics placed at the center of life.
If you thought that political correctness was insane in the United States, take a long plane trip over to Melbourne, Australia, where Andrew Bolt, a columnist at the Herald Sun, has been sanctioned by a judge of the Federal Court of Australia for "insulting, humiliating and offending" that group known as "fair-skinned Aboriginal people".
Who, might you wonder, are these "fair-skinned Aboriginal people"? They are said to come from the Hiberian isle, the plains of Alba, the cities of Albion, the Teutonic forests and even the Hebraic tribes. They boast many fascinating arts and crafts, such as writing dissertations on the structural thematics of metaphor in aboriginal music and receiving aboriginal scholarships to compensate for all the suffering inflicted upon them by the European settlers.
Obama's team is nothing if not creative. After running for his first term as a force of change, he's off and running for his second term as... the force of change. Don't like the last change, this will be the change from that change to a whole other change.
"We Can't Wait" oddly echoes with Obama's old slogan, "We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For." Now after having waited for three for ourselves... we can't wait for another four years of the same thing. The problem with waiting for ourselves while waiting to vote again for the man who got us into this mess is that it means we'll be waiting a long time.
The left's worst crime in the Middle East has been its support for the region's Arab-Muslim majority at the expense of its minorities. It has supported the majority's terrorism, atrocities, ethnic cleansing and repression of the region's minorities. Very rarely has it raised a voice in their support, and when it has done so, it was in muted tones completely different from their vigorous defenses of the nationalism of the Arab Muslim majority.