Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Do not panic. Everything is under control. Ladies and Gentlemen, Transmen and Transwomen and people of uncertain gender identities, some of you may be alarmed by recent reports of malfunctioning health care websites and policy cancellations. Do not be alarmed. We know what we are doing. Health care plans are not being cancelled. Opportunities are being transitioned. Some people are being moved from bad health care plans to good health care plans with higher deductibles and higher premiums that will provide transmen with maternity care and people of uncertain gender identities with drug counseling and mental health treatment. This is a good thing. Warning. This is a good thing. You are being transitioned. Why do you resist? Forget your old health plan. It was placed in the trunk of a Prius at 3 AM this morning, taken to a frozen lake outside an organic poultry plant in Minnesota and shot twice in the head. It was a bad plan. It has transitioned to no longer being a plan. We

Oliver Stone made Gordon Gekko and his famous quote “Greed is Good” into everything that was wrong with capitalism. A quarter of a century later, liberal politicians like Obama and Bill de Blasio are still running against Gordon Gekko while pocketing his contributions and doing special favors for him. Their class warfare is as nakedly greedy as Gordon Gekko shouting into a brick of a cell phone.Class warfare is the greed of the con artist playing on the stupid greed of his mark who wants to steal from someone else, but lacks the skill and daring to do anything but sign on to someone else’s scheme. The only way to get conned is to get greedy. The con artist plays on his mark’s desire to get something for nothing in a socially acceptable (or sometimes not socially acceptable) way. That’s why every piece of advice about not getting conned begins with “If it’s too good to be too true…” When Obama promised Americans that if they liked their health plan, they could keep their health pl

Our technocracy is detached from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance. These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't fix a toaster. The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works. It's hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that "progress" makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress. Healthcare.g

Wars are fought with steel and of words. To fight a thing, we have to understand what we are fighting and why. A blindness in words can kill as effectively as blindness on the battlefield. Words shape our world. In war, they define the nature of the conflict. That definition can be misleading. Often it's expedient. The real reasons for the last world war had very little to do with democracy. The current war does involve terrorism, but like fascism, it's incidental to the bigger picture. The United States would not have gone to war to ensure open elections in Germany. It hasn't been dragged into the dysfunctional politics and conflicts of the Muslim world because of terrorism. Tyranny and terrorism just sum up what we find least appealing about our enemies. But it's not why they are our enemies. They are our enemies because of territorial expansionism. The Ummah, like the Third Reich, is seeking "breathing room" to leave behind its social and economic pr

THE BETA ELEPHANT The GOP would like to win without fighting. It wants to wait for the voters to come around and recognize that it’s the better choice because it compromises. Like the nerd waiting for the pretty girl to recognize his niceness, the Republican Party is futilely courting an American voter who barely even knows it’s there… at least until he watches the next Saturday Night Live skit depicting Republicans as crazy evil billionaires who want to power Christian nuclear plants with the corpses of minorities. No one hires a lawyer to settle a court case. The court case may have to be settled, but a client expects his lawyer to get him the best terms by fighting as hard as he can. A lawyer who advertises his reasonable and moderate willingness to make a deal as soon as possible will have no clients. A party that advertises its eagerness to settle on any terms it can get will have no voters. What’s Right about Ted Cruz & the Tea Party Grover Norquist, Who has Tie

Chris Matthews, MSNBC's own Wise Latina, began his latest attack by denouncing Ted Cruz's racism against "Browns". Cruz had told a San Antonio audience that it was good to leave D.C. and come back to America. "This isn’t a casual reference," Matthews declared. Like Freudian psychoanalysts, MSNBC psychoracialists know that there are no such things as casual references. A misplaced comma can reveal unspeakable hidden depths of racism and does every time Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes run short of material. The Freudian psychoanalyst assumed that if you had a dream about a duck or the Orient Express, you were harboring a secret desire for your grandfather. The MSNBC psychoracialist knows that if you don't like Obama, you're a racist. All that's left is finding the comma that proves it. "This 'We’re Americans, we white people out here in Texas, as opposed to people who live in the big cities: the ethnics, the blacks, the browns,"

As Bob Filner, San Diego’s former progressive mayor, pleads guilty to charges stemming from his attacks on women, his essay, “Why I am Pro-Choice” still decorates the website of Planned Parenthood. A year ago, Filner had appeared at a Planned Parenthood rally while running for mayor of California’s second largest city to accuse his opponent of being part of the war on women. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund had sent out a letter saying that “for twenty years, Bob Filner has defended women”. At the rally, attendees were told that he had spent “the last twenty years protecting our rights and the rights of women everywhere.” But while Filner was protecting women, no one was protecting women from Filner. Filner’s behavior was well known, but not commented on. The California Democratic Party maintained its red wall of silence around the son of a Communist, a Freedom Rider and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus because he was one of their own. Even Filner’s disgrace h

The battle between Obama and the Republicans is a sad and pitiful contest for the same reason that a baseball game in which one side plays by the rules and the other one races the bases in motorcycles and shoots the balls over the fence with an RPG. Ted Cruz has come the closest to understanding that the other side just doesn't play by any rules, but lacks the leverage to make much of that. Cruz is still a product of a system in which there are rules. And that system is as unfit for challenging the left-wing radicals running things as trying to play a game of chess against an opponent who feels like moving the pieces any which way he feels like and always claims to have won. Law is a consensus. If you stop keeping the law, the police arrest you. If a gang of left-wing radicals in a basement somewhere stopped following the law, they might be locked up. It's not a certain thing considering that mad bomber Bill Ayers is a university professor. But once those same left-wing rad