Daniel Greenfield

Fear of a Lonely Planet

The left-of-center European press has responded to Prime Minister Cameron's veto of EU 2.0 with all the hysteria of a man on a desert island who sees the rescue plane flying off into the distance. Equal to them is the American press which is already barking that if we don't sign on to Durban's boondoggle and accept a global environmental court, then we have doomed the planet. This pathological drive toward regional and global union regardless of the negatives seems more like a neurotic reaction than serious policy. Is the UK really doomed outside of the EU, especially since for all the hyperbole it isn't anywhere near to being outside the EU, and is a failure to create another disastrous bureaucracy in the name of saving the planet from disaster really going to doom the human race?

A Badly Invented People

In the post-news environment, media no longer exists to report, it exists to disseminate glib talking points that sound good at first, but don't stand up to examination. Fact checks, one of the latest media gimmicks, have become another vector for disseminating talking points. So have media blogs which began repeating the same ridiculous thing over and over again.

The Prisoner

Few other places turn out dystopian fantasies quite like the United Kingdom and if the United States has never quite become the chrome skyscraper and flying car utopian wonderland of its utopian fantasies, with its ubiquitous cameras and DNA banks, the United Kingdom seems well on the way to its dystopian destination. 1984, The Prisoner and V for Vendetta are all a train ride away nowadays. Say the wrong thing and you can expect to be wearing a prison suit and nominated for a national run on Two Minute Hate.

A Holiday in Brussels

Prime Minister Cameron firmly saying no to EU Zero took quite a few people by surprise, I didn't really think he had it in him. But Merkel and Sarkozy have gotten most of the EU on board. The Swedes and the Czechs (barring referendums) may be joining the UK in holding out, but for now long? A change of government in the UK will put the Laborites squealing that Cameron has isolated them from the rest of Europe into power and how long will the resistance last then. Like all international orders, the EU has thrived by waiting around for governments decadent enough to join or fail to resist. Once you're in, getting out takes more guts than any government has shown so far.

Day of Infamy

When the Japanese fighters and bombers passed like shadows over the waters of Hawaii, they carried more than bombs and bullets, their fleeting shadows marked the end of over a century of security. The last time an enemy army threatened American territory was in the early nineteenth century, since then the closest thing had been the vicious clowning of Pancho Villa.

Who is Responsible for Muslim Violence?

Who is responsible for Muslim violence? Anyone but Muslims. When Howard W. Gutman, Obama's ambassador to Belgium, told his audience that Jews should be accepting responsibility for the violence practiced on them by Muslims, because it's their own damn fault for insisting on having a Jewish state, the State Department wasn't willing to stand behind his words, but neither did it disavow him. Imagine for a moment if Howard W. Gutman had adjusted his red hipster glasses and told his audience that Muslims should take responsibility for Islamic terrorism. Hillary would have personally fired him, after yelling at him for a good thirty minutes, and Obama would have issued an apology to the Muslim world. Every newspaper column on both sides of the Atlantic would have spent the better part of the week denouncing Islamophobia and clucking over how mainstream intolerance has become.

The Winter of Our Economic Discontent

What do the United States, Russia and the Middle East have in common? They all have unpopular regimes run by out-of-touch kleptocrats who faced popular uprisings. The opposition groups in all those place don't have much in common, but the governments do. Obama might have sneered at Mubarak or Putin, but for all the pretense of democracy, he was sitting at the top of his own kleptocracy, doling out fortunes to supporters out of the emergency bailout and stimulus plans. The Tea Party was the outraged and vocal response of a working middle-class that was seeing its taxes and its children's future being squandered to feed the appetites of the oligarchy. The media elite might bemoan the Tea Party as the second coming of the Klu Klux Klan, but it was a far more honest expression of economic discontent than OWS, which limited its manufactured anger to the junior partners in the kleptocracy, while giving the men in power a pass.

At the Table with Barry, Leon and Howard

Leon Panetta, fresh from a stint as CIA director and off to his new job as Secretary of Defense, did his best to butch up in the usual way of DC hacks "daringly" delivering the same utterances that have been current in the capital for generations. When Panetta, the man who looks like everyone's least favorite accountant or funeral director, showed up at the Saban Forum, he butched up by shouting that Israel needs to "get to the damn table" and negotiate with the Palestinian Arab terrorists.

A Lack of Leadership

What the 2010 elections and the 2012 primaries both tell us sharply is that having a vibrant grass-roots is not the same as having political leaders. Often when the base is boiling, that's when the party is unable to bring anyone to the table except the halfwits and leaders so uninspiring that no amount of hair pulling cognition can make you understand how they made it to the endgame. After four years of Clinton, the only man that the party thought could beat him was Bob Dole. And yet you can hardly blame the voters when the lineup included stars like Steve Forbes, Phil Gramm and Lamar Alexander. While voter anger was hitting a peak, the party had nothing to offer them except the sort of candidates who probably couldn't have even won forty years earlier.

The Man from Massachusetts

He was a prominent politician from Massachusetts with great hair and all the visual qualities of a leader. There were some who accused him of flip flopping on important issues, but he always had a glib reply, except for the times when he got nervous and said something stupid, like, "I voted for that 87 billion dollars before I voted against it."

The Donkey is Dead

Once upon a time a mad Caliph demanded of an old servant of his that he teach a donkey to talk for his amusement. If he refused, he would be put to death. If he failed he would be put to death as well. The old servant shrugged and asked for a year's time in which to complete the task. When other servants asked him why he had accepted, he answered. "A year is a long time. Either the Caliph will die, the donkey will die, or the donkey will learn to speak."

Muslim Anti-Semitism and the Arab Spring

Western columnists eager to bestow their blessing on the democratic impulses of the Arab Spring are troubled by its darker side, the bigotry, the sexual violence and religious fanaticism. Rather than admit that they may have gotten the Arab Spring wrong, they look at its dark side as an external factor, rather than an internal one.

Yes, Obama Wants to Win

It's downright strange that at a time when the field of Republican candidates has narrowed down to a few bad choices and the left has finally fielded its own answer to the Tea Party movement, that some pundits on the right are still cheerfully pushing the meme that Obama is all but done. Sure it would be great if Obama were lying on the floor in a pool of spilled beer while humming songs from Sesame Street, but that is not what's going on. And adding false self-confidence to the mix is about the worst possible thing to do.

The Myth of the Arab Spring Underdog

Ever since the Arab Spring began videos have been making the rounds of massacres in Syria and Bahrain, photos of violent protests in Egypt, excited tweets, bloodied faces, Molotov cocktails and all the rest of the revolutionary chatter. It is tempting to side with the people battling tanks, even when you don’t know why they are battling them. That was how Americans ended up cheering an alliance between the anti-American leftist Kifaya movement and the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo against the Egyptian government. Or backing an Al-Qaeda linked Islamist group against Gaddafi in Libya.

The Recession Hits the Green Movement

Do you know what Africa needs most of all? If you answered food or international peacekeepers, then you're wrong, and clearly not cut out to work for the government of a modern country. No, what a continent filled with genocide, starving children, female genital mutilation and warring factions needs is help fighting global warming. Even as Climategate 2.0 emails reveal that there's less of science and more hot air to the whole thing, global leaders will do their part to cut carbon emissions by flying to South Africa to discuss how to cap global warming, and not in the usual way someone gets capped on the streets of Durban.

So Much to be Thankful For

There was a time, long ago, when Americans were sad and unhappy, when the world hated us, people were forced to work for a living and there were no inspiring leaders. But today, in this wonderful age of free health care, free mobs and freedom for Islamists, there is so much for us to be thankful for. Like that new age of freedom and democracy breaking out like a rash across the Middle East.

The Future of Egypt

In the wake of the latest instability everyone has an opinion on the future of Egypt. But the future of Egypt is the past, not the distant past of its pre-Arab culture, but a repetition of the last century. In a region that has never escaped from the past, history is not a road, it is a circle. Travel far enough along it and you come back to where you were. There was once a time when the UK thought that Egypt and Jordan were the best regional prospects, but instead of becoming Arabic accented versions of Albion, today it is London that has taken on the accent and the Hijab.

The Decline of Nations

No country falls but from within. Given a sufficient population and resources to hold off its enemies, the only sufficient explanation for its fall is internal. Take the decline of the West, which is often talked about and attributed to leftist conspiracies and Islamic colonialism. But why is Japan, a First World nation whose culture and geography differs dramatically from America and Europe also in a state of economic, political and cultural decline? Not to mention demographic decline.

The End of the Peace Process

The "peace process" which created two terrorist states inside Israel may have begun in Oslo, but it ended in Cairo. Normalizing relations with the rest of the Middle East was one of the carrots that got the Jewish state hopping down the appeasement trail-- and that carrot is now officially off the table. The days when Thomas Friedman and his Saudi buddies could talk about normalization have passed. The Arab Spring saw to that and with Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and an unknown number of others sliding into the Islamist camp, and out of reach of negotiations, there's a New Middle East that has even less in common with the old gentlemanly diplomacy model than the old one did. Some of the dimmer Israeli leaders may still believe that peace is possible with the Islamists of Turkey's AKP, but not even they think that peace is possible with the Brotherhood.

The Impossible Numbers

Some political systems are based on beliefs and identity. The American congress is built on spending money. The spoils system long ago became the spoiled system with money as the lubricant of politics. The legacy of a leader used to be measured by his accomplishments, today it’s measured by how much money he managed to extract from the collective pool of real and imaginary money held in the sweaty hands of the legislatures. Much of the money is imaginary, but in the minds of the politicians it’s all imaginary. Unreality is an elementary tool of price inflation. The more outrageous the markup, the more the merchant works to create an atmosphere where money does not seem to exist and reality bends at the seams. It’s not a new game or a particularly clever one, but the unreality bubble now covers much of Washington D.C.