The Post-Partisan Emporium

  A Brief History of the Apocalypse How a lunatic and a grifter changed the world Radio Far Side The question arose as to why the US is obsessed with Israel, as clearly enunciated by  Ted Cruz to Tucker Carlson . If you haven’t seen this interview, it gave me the willies listening to a US Senator declare that the interests of Israel are superior to all other concerns in the US CONgress. This cult-like obsession with Israel is a distinctly American phenomenon, and only appears in the American political landscape in the early 1900s. There is a single, identifiable source for this bizarre geopolitical worship cult, and perhaps getting it out in the open can help begin the healing process. It all begins in England (of course) with a rather unhinged fellow by the name of John Nelson Darby. This unbalanced preacher type developed the concept of “dispensationalism,” in which God’s Plan was divided into three parts, and the third and final act was upon us. He said that devout Christia...

  Mirages Edward J. Curtin, Jr. I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy.  The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau – the sand is rapidly drinking up the last wave that wets it.  I am looking far out to the horizon where the sun shimmers on what seems to be the world’s watery edge, creating a strange mirage that I wonder at but find hard to describe.  Earlier, I was rereading Thoreau’s  Cape   Cod  in which he mentioned this phenomenon 150 years ago, not just the mirages across the water but those here along the great stretches of sand.  Now I am confused and my mind wanders to other mirages that make me shake my head in wonderment.  It is hard to grasp what one is seeing these days. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a presidential aspirant, folded his c...