a norman podhoretz editorial from commentary powerclown?
commentary:
Quote:
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Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.
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this is why it is customary to cite sources.
as for the article, in order to get it's shabby logic up and running, our boy norman has to rely on pushing buttons the consensus of which is entirely limited to the manly-man but information-scarce neo-con set.
podhoretz's piece relies on a series of rhetorica flourishes to claim credibility for information that is in fact disputed at every point.
because it amuses me, i'll bite them and put them in a little row:
Up until a fairly short time ago, scarcely anyone dissented
Correlatively, no one believed the protestations
The reason for this near-universal consensus
And just as everyone agreed
To begin with, Iran was (as certified even by the doves of the State Department) the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world
Nor, as almost everyone also agreed,
Although, to be sure, no one imagined that Iran would acquire the capability to destroy the United States, it was easy to imagine that
Running alongside the near-universal consensus
was a commensurately broad agreement
all in the first section.
methinks me doth protest too much.
then the article begins, which is basically an entirely partisan argument based on flimsy information, contestable at EVERY point, buttressed only by this rhetorical hand-waving, that the americans should undertake the insane and worse not-doable campaign of bombing iran.
problem with all this is reality.
well that and the recent history of consequences that derive from actions launched that are rooted in the neo-con reality problem.