The Post-Partisan Emporium

Little weekend entertainment!  

The ‘Greater Israel’ Scheme And Its Global Power Play: A Delusional Recipe For Armageddon By Matthew Ehret In 1996, a nest of American-born imperialists revolving around Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle created a new think tank  called  “The Project for a New American Century.” While the principled aim of the think tank ultimately hinged on a new “Pearl Harbor moment” that would justify a new era of regime-change wars in the Middle East, a secondary but equally important part of the formula involved the dominance of “Greater Israel” Likud fanatics then taking power over the murdered body of Yitzhak Rabin. It was toward the start of the new regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Richard Perle wrote the  report  “ Clean Break: A Strategy for Securing the  Realm,” which outlined a series of goals that would govern the strategic vision of Washington and Tel Aviv for the next two decades. It called for: Canceling the foundations for the Oslo Accords

  A Message to Donald Rumsfeld’s Ghost About My Known Knowns Edward J. Curtin, Jr. On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any  evidence  that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists.  Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.” He never said he had evidenc

  The Mysteriousness of Conspiracy And the need to pretend otherwise BRIAN MOWREY i. Conspiracies are political On the eve of the 20th anniversary of September 11, an NPR/Ipsos poll found skepticism of the official narrative to be the  least popular  of numerous flagship conspiracy theories of the time: from  npr.org  (Additional questions in the  full Ipsos poll  (pdf) are not included in this graph, including “a deep state working to undermine Trump,” etc.) This result is driven by ambivalence among Republican-identifying respondents, who drive the high rate of “false beliefs” in more contemporary topics. A comparison with replies for the moon landings and climate change show that Democrat respondents are just as likely or more to have doubts about the two older topics. This is one of many ways by which belief in conspiracy theories reveals itself to be less a question of  what is believed  than a symptom of broader tensions and conflicts between the individual and society. Conspirac