Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

OF FISCAL CLIFFS Here's how the game is played. No matter what happens with the fiscal cliff negotiations the Republicans will get blamed. There is no scenario, perhaps short of agreeing to Obama's proposal to give him the power to borrow unlimited amounts of money, raise taxes and do the same crap that got us into a sixteen trillion dollar hole to begin with, and then maybe appoint him king, that will change that. And even that brief moment of praise will last about six seconds. Republicans are playing into the hands of the enemy by emphasizing the fiscal cliff negotiations. There is very little to negotiate here. Obama, fresh off a stolen election, carved out over the bodies of hurricane victims, is daring Republicans to say no to him. And a dispirited Republican establishment is still feeling beaten and too willing to give in. There are two scenarios here. Either Obama is bluffing or he isn't. And it doesn't really matter which one is correct. The crisis is

The United States of America has a State Department, it has row after row of people who speak badly every language from Arabic to Swahili badly, and it has rich donors who take on the task of acting as ambassadors to some foreign country every four to eight years. There are think-tanks, actual tanks and institutes dedicated to turning out papers on foreign policy. And despite all this, or perhaps because of all this, the country still has no foreign policy. Americans are by nature isolationist. American leaders, since Woodrow Wilson dumped ashes from his pipe on the Oval Office carpets and dumped America into the international game of empires, are bent on getting involved in world politics. Unfortunately everything they know about world politics comes from the back of cereal boxes. And yes that includes our current precious genius who comes to us from eating dog and living the life of a privileged member of Indonesia's upper classes, but knows almost as little about the world o

It would be tempting to attribute the disaster spreading across the Middle East to a brief flirtation with democracy snake oil, but for the better part of the last century the political class of the United States could talk of nothing else. Nearly every war was fought was to spread democracy, protect democracy or worship at the altar of democracy. For much of the 20th Century it was the working assumption of the sort of men who got up to give speeches in crowded halls that it was democracy that made America special. But it is not so much that democracy made America special, as America made democracy special and workable. And that is because democracy only works when government is limited. When government power isn't limited, then democracy is just tyranny with a popular vote behind it. In a poignant historical irony, American democracy went into a prolonged decline just as its political class was busy speechifying about the importance of exporting it abroad. Government author

Israel is being hanged on a public gallows erected on the grounds of the United Nations with yards of rope gleefully supplied by the Muslim world. But the hangmen are mostly Westerners who still think that the Muslim lynch mob at their doorstep can be pacified with the death of a single victim. There are three things you can do when you are about to be hanged. You can walk proudly, recite a glorious line or two to embed your martyrdom in historical memory, and then allow yourself to be hanged. Jews have an extensive body of experience with that brand of martyrdom. Alternatively you can plead your case all the way to the gallows, arguing that a mistake has been made, that your case has been improperly reviewed, begging for someone to listen and do something. This way also ends in a hanging. But it's the hanging of a slave without even a shred of dignity attached to it. A man that dies pleading with his murderers, and puts his fate in the honesty of the liars and hypocrites whose

In one of the curious ironies of history, the Democratic Party, in its present form, is animated solely by opposition to majority rule; an obsession that it attempts to disguise with insincere attempts at class warfare. There is nothing that the Democratic Party fears so much as democracy, which is why it is far more comfortable ruling through judicial rulings and the unrestricted powers of an unelected bureaucracy. Obama's two victories have given it a taste of a post-majority and post-American country ruled by a coalition of minorities, but its glee at that may be premature. cr The Democratic Party has built its house of cards on locking in political and economic privileges for the different tiers of its coalition. From food stamps to government jobs, it is the old political machine gone nationwide, dispensing money and privilege to the different group of its coalition, as a remedy for the supposed privileges enjoyed by the majority. It still talks about equality, now and

The difference between victory and defeat often comes down to morale. You've seen it in baseball games and wars. It's that faint sense of air leaking out of the balloon. A weariness and malaise that kicks in when one side decides it can't win and doesn't want to be here anymore. November 2012 was not a defeat. It was a loss in a close election that rattled the Democrats by showing just how much of the country had turned on their savior. It was a rebuke to Obama's mismanagement of the country and the economy over the last four years. Or it would have been if the Republican Party had not reacted to its loss by screaming and wailing in despair after their hopes were ludicrously inflated by establishment posters. Followed by running around like a chicken without a head because we fell 400,000 votes short of winning key states. And this defeatist behavior has helped the media create the myth of a second-term mandate. The country did not repudiate us. The majority