Sobran's -- 
The Real News of the Month

MAY 2000
Volume 7, No. 5

Editor: Joe Sobran
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Features

THE MOVING PICTURE
(page 1)

     I regret to announce that I won't be the next vice 
president. I've resigned from the Constitution Party ticket. 
Writing and campaigning don't mix as easily as I had thought; 
in fact -- if it doesn't sound self-pitying to say so -- they 
turned out to be a surprisingly stressful combination. I found 
that I was either implicating my running mate and the entire 
party in my personal views or watering those views down in 
order to avoid doing so. But with or without yours truly on 
the ticket, the Constitution Party remains the only party that 
stands for undiluted constitutional principle.

*          *          *

     Several Oscars this year went to AMERICAN BEAUTY, the 
latest daring expose of the dark underside of American 
suburban life, and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, the story of a 
kindly abortionist who initiates a youngster into the 
mysteries of his trade. Everyone agreed that it took 
incredible courage to make these breakthrough films, proving 
once more that Hollywood is the safest place to be courageous.

*          *          *

     I confess I'm addicted to VANITY FAIR, the high-toned 
gossip mag. I spend about half an hour just finding the table 
of contents, but I can't resist the dirt about Hollywood, 
especially in the old days -- such as a couple of recent 
pieces about Judy Garland (her rocky marriage to the 
homosexual director Vincente Minelli, Liza's dad) and Natalie 
Wood's suspicious drowning. It helps me understand why movies 
have gotten so awful: these folks want to pull the whole 
country down to their own level. It helps them feel normal.

*          *          *

     David Irving has lost his libel suit against Deborah 
Lipstadt. The judge played it safe, declaring Irving a racist 
anti-Semitic Holocaust-denying liar and ruling that he must 
pay more than $3 million in expenses to the high-powered 
defense team he faced himself, without the aid of a single 
lawyer. Irving took a huge gamble and lost. But I honor his 
courage, and he did expose the methods of the international 
Jewish thought-police, about which more next month.

*          *          *

     Garry Wills's forthcoming book is titled PAPAL SIN. 
Somehow I'm not surprised.

*          *          *

     Those of us who urge conservatives to leave the 
Republican Party are often charged with ensuring the election 
of Al Gore and especially with helping see to it that Gore 
will name the next few Supreme Court justices. But recent 
Republican nominees to the Court -- Souter, Kennedy, and 
O'Connor -- have saved Roe v. Wade; worse yet, Republicans in 
the Senate have voted overwhelmingly to confirm Clinton's 
nominees, Ginzburg and Breyer, and would no doubt do the same 
for Gore's picks. Both parties show approximately equal 
respect for constitutional law. That is, approximately none. 
Put otherwise, both parties -- and both candidates -- would 
support a continuation of lawless government. A moment of 
peace and prosperity is the ideal time to build a new party.

*          *          *

     In giving the press Kathleen Willey's personal letters to 
him, Bill Clinton argues, he didn't violate the 1974 Privacy 
Act -- *couldn't* have violated it -- because the act doesn't 
apply to the White House. Another bit of Clintonian audacity, 
this, since, as John Fund of the WALL STREET JOURNAL reminds 
us, the law was passed in response to White House shenanigans 
during the Watergate scandals. How simple, straightforward, 
and earnest Clinton makes the Nixon era seem.

*          *          *

     (Exclusive to the electronic version): The Republican-led 
House of Representatives has appropriated $100 million in 
federal subsidies for local fire departments. The Republican-
sponsored measure drew sarcastic praise from Barney Frank, the 
original Massachusetts Democrat: "I congratulate the 
Republican Party on sloughing off that old notion that the 
federal government was something whose influence should be 
restricted and resisted. Having the Republican Party bring 
forward a new federal program, putting the federal government 
into a new area where it had not previously been, helping 
local firefighting, shows a degree of intellectual growth on 
which I congratulate them."


IMPERFECT CONTRITION
(pages 2-5)

     The Pope's recent "apology" for the sins of Catholics 
seems to be having the direct opposite of the effect he 
intended. There must be a way to oppose anti-Semitism without 
fostering anti-Catholicism.

     Catholics should, and do, regret many things their 
ancestors have done over the centuries. But our forebears -- 
including Popes -- have to do their own repenting, just as we 
do. Their sins are not necessarily ours, and their offenses 
against non-Catholics, however deplorable by today's 
standards, weren't necessarily sins in their own minds. In the 
Middle Ages and long afterward, just about everyone regarded 
atheism, heresy, and apostasy as criminal; rulers were 
expected, as a matter of course, to protect the religion of 
the community. The "great religions," as we now call them, 
regarded each other as enemies -- *God's* enemies -- not as 
brothers under the skin or valid alternative lifestyles.

     The New Testament condemns "those of the synagogue of 
Satan, who say they are Jews and are not"; these words and 
others like them are ascribed to Christ, who apparently said 
nothing about "pluralism," "tolerance," "dialogue," or "the 
Judaeo-Christian tradition." The Jews are bluntly accused of 
crucifying Christ and persecuting Christians, and are warned 
that they must repent and convert. The Talmud is no more 
ecumenical, condemning all gentiles and Christians in 
particular, with obscene curses against Christ and the Blessed 
Virgin. Islam merely brought another fighting faith into the 
world, which sought to impose itself wherever it could: that, 
everyone agreed in principle, was what the True Religion was 
supposed to do. Immortal souls were at stake. Of course 
persuasion was the ideal, but, since human nature was 
obstinate, force was sometimes necessary. The early 
Protestants saw it the same way and acted accordingly.

     Is the Pope "repenting" because twelfth-century men 
weren't twentieth-century men? (As if we can safely assume 
that that would have been an improvement.) And his penitence 
seems to extend only to those putative sins that the twentieth 
century condemns, ignoring all manner of other things that are 
sinful by traditional Catholic standards. This is very much in 
the spirit of modern man, who condemns earlier generations for 
not having been modern men.

     So the papal statement, far from correcting the sins of 
the modern world, had the effect of seeming to justify every 
modern prejudice against Catholicism. Of course the Pope 
distinguished carefully between the Church as the Mystical 
Body of Christ, which can never sin, and the Church as a human 
institution. But since only Catholics accept this distinction 
-- anyone who does accept it is almost by definition a 
believing Catholic -- the qualification seemed Pickwickian to 
non-Catholics, who generally took the view that the Catholic 
Church had finally, belatedly, though imperfectly, admitted 
that it is, after all, the source of most of the great evils 
of history.

     In short, the Pope seemed to be validating every familiar 
anti-Catholic canard. Even ordinary Catholics of this 
generation, who are woefully weak in theological and 
historical understanding (a fact for which the hierarchy of 
today's Church really *should* repent), took the impression 
that the modern calumnies must be true after all. Since John 
Paul II is a man of considerable intellect and diplomatic 
skill, it's amazing that he didn't foresee this natural and 
predictable interpretation of his gesture. His successors will 
have a lot of explaining to do.

     The reaction was fascinating. To a purely rational 
unbeliever, it might be as if the current mayor of Athens had 
apologized for the execution of Socrates, or as if the House 
of Windsor had apologized for the depredations of Henry VIII 
(without, however, offering to return England's great 
cathedrals to the Church of Rome). How can people who reject 
the concept of apostolic succession -- the principle that the 
Church inherits the authority of Christ -- believe that 
today's Church can inherit guilt from the medieval Church? And 
if guilt is hereditary, why not also blame today's Jews for 
the Crucifixion? Can we now expect rabbis to apologize for the 
role of Jews in Communism and for their own "silence" during 
Soviet mass murders of Christians? There are interesting 
possibilities here. And does today's Church get credit for 
creating Western civilization? Or is her uniquely continuous 
moral identity over two millennia recognized only for the 
purpose of heaping accusations on her?

     For whatever reason, everyone seemed to assume that the 
present Pope *could* somehow take responsibility for all the 
sins of Catholics throughout history, *should* take 
responsibility for them, and yet had failed to do so 
adequately. Jews objected (again) that the Pope had failed to 
apologize specifically for the you-know-what and demanded that 
he condemn the "silence" of Pius XII; homosexuals complained 
that he hadn't expressed remorse to gays and lesbians; the NEW 
YORK TIMES noted sorrowfully that he hadn't repudiated 
Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion. Liberal 
Catholics found fault with him too, on similar grounds. As for 
believing Catholics, most of them saw the futility of trying 
to appease the insatiable.

     In short, if you're going to apologize to the modern 
world, you have to do it on the modern world's terms. 
Technically, of course, the "apology" was a prayer addressed 
to God, not to the Anti-Defamation League; but it was clearly 
designed to be overheard, as it were, by secular ears. The 
free-for-all of faultfinding was only to be expected.

     We must ask: What is the fruit of the hundred or so 
apologies this Pope has now uttered? Is there any evidence 
that they have drawn any souls to the Church? Do they not, on 
the contrary, confirm every malicious common belief about the 
Church, while discouraging faithful Catholics and confusing 
weak ones? What on earth is the *point?*

     Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League complains that 
the Pope had "stopped short in addressing specific Catholic 
wrongs against the Jewish people, especially the Holocaust." 
This is now a tenet of Holocaust-centered secular Jewish 
ideology: that the Catholic Church bears guilt for the 
Holocaust, not only because Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope," but 
because the Church is the historic mother of anti-Semitism. 
This attitude has been reinforced, not softened, by the papal 
statement. 

     It would have been only fair if Jews like Foxman had 
communicated their view to Catholic soldiers in the Allied 
armies early on, so that those boys would have had some 
inkling of what they were being sent to fight for: a postwar 
world in which countless of their fellow Catholics and other 
Christians were subjugated and persecuted by Communism, while 
Jewish propaganda blamed the crimes of the Axis on their 
Church. Probably not the sort of victory they had in mind. 

     But the Foxmans maintained a discreet silence on the 
subject as long as they needed those Catholic boys to do the 
fighting. Now that the war has long since ended favorably, 
they've sized up today's Catholic Church as soft, and they 
deem it safe to insult the dead as well as the Church with 
their measureless libels. They can be confident that a Church 
that craves their pardon won't give them any backtalk. As for 
the young Christians who died fighting Hitler, well, who 
cares? They've served their purpose; did they expect to be 
thanked?

     Speaking as a convert, I am deeply grateful that the 
Catholic Church of my boyhood -- the Church of Pius XII -- 
evangelized in a different spirit, claiming, and proclaiming, 
the authority of Christ. Nobody dreamed of demanding apologies 
from that Church, and none were forthcoming. The message was 
simple, unclouded by equivocation: the Catholic Church was the 
way to salvation. To reject Christ and his One True Church was 
to incur damnation.

     There were, to be sure, qualifications. We were taught 
that people might guiltlessly reject Catholicism out of 
"invincible ignorance"; but they were still in danger of 
damnation as the natural result of original and actual sin, 
and they still *needed* the Church, even if they didn't know 
it. Catholic teaching covered everything with majestic common 
sense; the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas merely took common 
sense to sublime heights. The simple old widows I saw at daily 
Mass and the sophisticated scholars from whom I sought answers 
were in this thing together, and they understood each other as 
members of the same divine family. We were American and French 
and Filipino and African and everything else. Every Catholic 
priest in the world spoke Latin. Catholicism was universal in 
a way that was far more real and resonant than today's 
abstract "universalism" and "multiculturalism" can ever be.

     It all revolved around the Last Supper and the 
Crucifixion. Christ had instituted the Eucharist, turning 
bread and wine into his body and blood and telling us to do 
likewise. He called himself "the bread of life" and said that 
eating his flesh was necessary for salvation. The Mass, 
reenacting his sacrifice at Calvary, was our essential rite. 
The Mass necessitated a priesthood, which in turn necessitated 
a hierarchy to ordain priests and, in time, a magisterium to 
keep doctrine pure. The Holy Inquisition followed eventually, 
and was essentially legitimate in spite of any abuses that 
might befall it. Within this framework, the notorious Index of 
Forbidden Books didn't trouble me at all. The infallibility of 
the Pope, our supreme shepherd in the line of St. Peter, the 
rock on which Christ built his Church, was my assurance that I 
could trust the Church's teaching authority not to mislead me. 
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints, prayers 
for the poor souls in Purgatory, the rosary, the Stations of 
the Cross, all this seemed to offer a wealth of spiritual 
opportunities. The Latin liturgy exuded holiness and mystery; 
it also signified the unity and ancient continuity of the 
Church. Catholic morality was unchanging and uncompromising. 
In all this I saw nothing that called for improvement as of 
the commencement of the Second Vatican Council in 1962; I was 
confident that the Council would merely continue what had 
already existed, making some parts of the Deposit of Faith 
more explicit, leaving intact everything that was already 
established.

     I understood the logic of Protestantism too. It issued 
from the rejection of the Eucharist: the words "This is my 
body" and "This is my blood" were only figurative, even to 
"fundamentalists" who took the Bible literally! But if Christ 
had been speaking figuratively, why had so many disciples 
deserted him when he announced that eating his flesh and 
drinking his blood were necessary for salvation (John 6: 53-
66)? When they left, saying, "This is a hard saying; who can 
accept it?" he could easily have said, "Wait, come back! I was 
just using a metaphor!" Instead, he rebuked them for not 
believing.

     Once the Eucharist was demoted to a mere symbol, there 
was no need for a priesthood to consecrate bread and wine, no 
need for a hierarchy, et cetera. The "priesthood of all 
believers" became the papacy of each believer, with no 
cohesive authority to ensure unity. Freedom of conscience, 
permitting each believer to interpret Scripture for himself, 
seemed to me anarchic; and Protestantism seemed doomed to 
dissolve into countless sects, creating a centrifugal culture 
that would terminate in unbelief and sensuality. Some 
Protestants held firm to as much of the Deposit of Faith as 
they had received; such people were faithful to Christ by 
their lights, though they lacked the blessings of the 
Sacraments they had rejected and had cut themselves off from 
the graces they might have received through Our Lady and the 
saints. I considered Protestants of this kind better 
"Catholics," as it were, than those nominal Catholics who 
picked and chose among the Church's teachings and therefore 
essentially rejected the authority of the Church.

     Today, whether because of the Council I don't know, many 
Catholics as well as Protestants have committed apostasy while 
continuing to call themselves Christians. The "dissident" 
Catholic insists that he is as good a Catholic as the faithful 
members of the Church, even if he denies the Real Presence of 
Christ in the Eucharist and therefore rejects the very 
rationale of Catholicism. But the usual motive for this 
internal apostasy isn't specifically theological; it is 
sexual. The defector claims a "right" to sexual freedom -- 
fornication, contraception, sodomy, divorce, and remarriage; 
nominally Catholic voters and politicians even treat abortion 
as a right. I can only wonder why these virtual Unitarians 
insist on identifying themselves as Catholics.

     But such dissidence suffers no penalty in today's Church. 
If the Pope seeks matter for repentance -- sins he can 
actually do something about -- he should look to the failure 
of the Church under recent papacies, very much including his 
own, to teach and discipline Catholics properly. The Eucharist 
itself is constantly abused, even to sacrilege, in the Novus 
Ordo Mass, which permits the Body of Christ to be treated with 
contempt.

     Do I exaggerate? Not long ago I saw a young man take 
Communion while wearing a T-shirt that read "PARTY NAKED." 
Nobody in the Church is apologizing for letting that sort of 
thing happen. But then, the Anti-Defamation League isn't 
complaining.


THE CASE OF ELIAN GONZALEZ
(pages 5-6)

     As I write, the case of Elian Gonzalez remains 
unresolved, but Al Gore has broken with the Clinton 
administration -- and the entire Democratic Party -- over 
whether the six-year-old should be sent back to his father in 
Cuba. Gore now favors letting Elian stay with his relatives in 
Miami, a position that is being harshly denounced by other 
Democrats, including congressional leaders Richard Gephardt 
and Tom Daschle, not to mention such odious leftists as 
California's Maxine Waters and New York's Charles Rangel. Lee 
Hamilton of Indiana says Gore's shift calls into question his 
"convictions and commitment." So the Gonzalez case amounts to 
a sort of litmus test of liberal Democratic orthodoxy -- as 
well it should. (Within a few days Gore, feeling the heat, was 
already edging away from his new position.)

     City officials in Miami, including the mayor and police 
chief, have announced that they won't assist federal forces in 
repatriating the boy. Many of Miami's Cubans are ready to take 
arms, if necessary, to prevent his deportation.

     What is most impressive in this case is the near-
unanimity of liberal opinion that Elian should be sent back to 
life under Communism. Not a single liberal voice, as far as I 
know, has even called for some assurance by Fidel Castro that 
Elian will not be killed if he tries to leave Cuba later. 
Liberal anti-Communism, never a hardy plant, appears to be 
extinct.

     A believer in the sanctity of family ties may honestly 
feel that Elian should be returned to his father, no matter 
what the political environment. And such a view would not at 
all palliate or play down the evil and sordidness of Cuban 
Communism; it might even underline the dangers repatriation 
poses for Elian.

     But this is not the case that is currently being made for 
sending Elian back to Cuba. To hear the advocates of sending 
him back, you might gather that there is no downside at all.

     Suddenly the liberal-feminist bloc has discovered the 
"family values" it usually ridicules, swallowing its 
opposition to "patriarchy" for the sake of Elian's piteous 
father. Even Janet Reno -- Mother Waco herself -- now speaks 
of "the sacred bond between parent and child." As a Florida 
prosecutor, she was noted for taking children from their 
parents on the slenderest pretext of "protecting" them from 
"abuse." This solicitude for "our children" is grotesque, 
coming from people who defend the killing of unborn children 
even at full term.

     Bill Clinton isn't one to put Castro on the spot by 
demanding, or even suggesting, that Elian's father and his 
family be permitted to migrate to this country. We can't have 
that! The United States may be bedeviled by illegal 
immigrants, but Castro's Cuba has never had that problem: it 
has always had to deal with Communism's perennial problem -- 
illegal *emigrants.* More than any other form of government in 
history, Communism, from the beginning, has made people want 
to leave their ancestral homes behind and take their chances 
elsewhere. This has produced that reliable fixture of 
Communist rule, the armed, barbed-wired border, not to keep 
invaders out but to keep the natives in. Not that Castro is 
the least bit abashed about this; but then, Communist rulers 
tend not to be people who care much when they're not wanted.

     Liberal opinion has also been strikingly hostile to the 
exiled Cubans in Florida. Stalin may be long gone and the Cold 
War may be over, but most liberals can still be trusted to 
take the Communist side whenever there is a Communist side to 
take. And they still hold refugees from Communism in contempt.

     No liberal -- none of the audible ones, anyway -- is 
holding Castro responsible for Elian's mother's death; she 
drowned after escaping the gunboats that patrol Cuba's 
shoreline for the purpose of killing would-be refugees. On the 
contrary, some liberals blame her for exposing Elian to danger 
with her "reckless" escape attempt in a pitifully inadequate 
boat.

     To ideologues, Communism may still appear as a 
"progressive" -- if sometimes heavy-handed -- form of 
government, aspiring to "social justice." But to those who 
have lived under it, Communism is defined not by any such 
abstract aspirations but by its claim, and unabashed exercise, 
of total power, including the power to kill its subjects, 
particularly those who try to escape. That power, not Marxist 
theory or "class stuggle," is the ugly essence of Communism.

     That power was what the Berlin Wall signified; and some 
liberals openly defended the Wall. The tens of millions 
murdered by Communist states haven't essentially altered 
Communism's ideological attraction for liberals. By Communist 
standards, after all, any dictator who has killed fewer than a 
million people practically qualifies as a humanitarian.

     Not that the numbers really matter. Liberals, after all, 
judge Communism not by its history but by its future. What it 
does never matters as much as what it promises to do. And it 
doesn't matter how often the promise is broken: Communism is 
right in principle. After all these years, liberals still 
accept Communism on its own terms and grant Castro the moral 
high ground against the Cubans in Miami.

     This is all the more remarkable in that today's liberals 
are far less gullible, far less likely to be "dupes" and 
"useful idiots," than those of the Stalin era. Solzhenitsyn, 
the Vietnamese boat people, and long experience have rendered 
the old illusions impossible. Today it comes down to basic 
principles, stripped of utopian hopes. And the Gonzalez case 
shows that liberalism doesn't need illusions about steel 
production, literacy rates, and five-year plans in order to 
approve of Communism in principle.

     One standard feature of liberal anti-anti-Communist 
(i.e., obliquely pro-Communist) polemics is the denigration of 
refugees. They are never admitted to be seeking freedom or 
fleeing tyranny; they are always "landed oligarchs," bitter at 
being dispossessed of ill-gotten wealth and privilege; or, at 
best, they are materialists who want to get a piece of Western 
prosperity.

     Liberals won't acknowledge that people have a natural 
right to acquire wealth and property without impediment by the 
state, or that they also have a natural right to escape 
religious persecution, which is always a feature of the 
Communist state. After all, liberals share the Communist 
desire to impose total economic control and eliminate 
Christianity from public and private life.

     So the refugees get no credit for courage when they risk 
their lives to escape. To liberals there is nothing heroic 
about fleeing Communism and therefore nothing sympathetic 
about those who perish in the attempt. Naturally, then, 
liberals have infintely more pity for a Communist "victim of 
McCarthyism," who has lost nothing more than a livelihood as a 
Hollywood screenwriter, than for a woman who drowns escaping 
from Castro.

     It's vital to bear in mind that liberals don't believe in 
natural rights. When they speak of "rights," they mean legal 
rights they think it desirable for the state to confer. But 
since they think the state, not God or nature, is the actual 
source of rights, they don't object in principle to a 
Communist state that confers no rights at all. They recognize 
sovereign "states' rights," but in a peculiar modern sense, 
not in the sense meant by John Calhoun and Jefferson Davis. 
Such limitless sovereignty belongs only to "progressive" 
states, not to "reactionary" ones. So liberals favor the 
prosecution of a Pinochet, but would never call for or assent 
to the prosecution of Castro. The liberal press tips its hand 
by calling Pinochet a "dictator," while calling Castro a 
"leader."

     The Gonzalez case should clear our minds. Even now, when 
we are told that not only the Cold War but "the era of big 
government" is over, liberalism hasn't repudiated its affinity 
to Communism. It insists on treating Castro's murderous slave-
state as a perfectly legitimate regime, not as a monstrous 
tyranny. It accepts his right to kill his subjects,even for 
the crime of emigration. One Cuban diplomat called Elian a 
"possession" of the Cuban government; among the media, only 
the conservative WASHINGTON TIMES quoted this revealing claim, 
though the liberal WASHINGTON POST ran a damning op-ed piece 
about Castro's Cuba by a former Cuban official, now in exile. 
If Elian is sent back, he wrote, it will not be to his father 
so much as to Fidel. Cuban law requires that every child be 
imbued with a "Communist personality" and proscribes 
"influences contrary to Communist commitment"; children begin 
the school day with a chant: "Pioneers for Communism, we will 
be like Che!" Beginning at age ten they attend mandatory 
summer indoctrination camps.

     So Castro mustn't be asked to assure us that Elian will 
be free to leave Cuba later: why should one boy be so 
privileged in a land where all are equal, if only in 
subjection? If, when he grows up, he is caught trying to 
escape, he'll be shot like anyone else; as his unpitied mother 
would have been, for example. Liberals simply don't find this 
horrifying. And they don't want to embarrass Castro (or 
themselves) by calling attention to it.

     The debate over Elian Gonzalez, like many previous 
debates (e.g., those over McCarthyism, the Vietnam war, and 
recognizing Red China), is really a debate over the moral 
legitimacy of Communism. By taking the Communist side again, 
liberalism is reminding us that it still stands for 
unconditional state power.

     Liberals would of course deny that this is their creed. 
But as Bernard Shaw observed, a man's real beliefs must be 
inferred not from the creed he professes, but from the 
assumptions on which he habitually acts. In the real world, 
liberalism is a welter of hypocrisies that mask a set of 
cynical attitudes. It isn't hard to penetrate those 
hypocrisies and deduce those attitudes.


Boxed Copy

IT TAKES A VILLAGE (SUCH AS HAVANA): Janet Reno says Elian 
must go back to Cuba because of the "sacred bond" between 
father and child. When has she -- or any Clintonite -- ever 
used that phrase for that relationship before? (page 6)

LEST WE FORGET: Even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had a 
constitution that guaranteed all sorts of rights, including, 
as Franklin Roosevelt enthusiastically noted, religious 
freedom. Of course, as with Roosevelt's Supreme Court, such 
rights were qualified: they meant what the government wanted 
them to mean. In short -- a living document! (page 8)

NO! NO! DON'T RAISE IT! George W. Bush has met with a group of 
homosexual Republicans and emerged feeling like "a better 
person" for the experience. "I welcome gay Americans into my 
campaign," he said. (Mark the phrase "gay Americans." Will he 
also welcome pedophile Americans into his campaign?) He added 
that he was "very interested in the idea" of a gay speaker at 
the GOP convention this year. One of the group said the 
purpose of the meeting was to "raise his consciousness." 
Heaven forbid. The very thought of a Bush with a raised 
consciousness is kind of creepy. (page 10)

A DEFINITE MAYBE: As we head into the homestretch of the 
Clinton era, a question naturally arises: Will Bill be 
indicted when he leaves office? The new special prosecutor, 
Robert Ray, says it's a live issue; and he can quote all those 
Democrats who, while insisting that perjury and obstruction 
didn't "rise to the level of impeachable offenses," bailed out 
with the proviso that Clinton remained liable to criminal law 
at the end of his term. The new party line, though, is "Enough 
is enough." Clinton and Al Gore are dodging the question of a 
pardon. Their equivocations amount to the usual Clintonian 
denial: a yes that sounds like a no. (page 12)


Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12)

* The Papal "Apology" (March 14)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000314.shtml
* In Defense of Bob Jones (March 16)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000316.shtml
* Punishing "Hate" (March 21)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000321.shtml
* Pat Buchanan: The Next John McCain? (March 23)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000323.shtml
* Smearing a Pope (March 28)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000328.shtml
* The Clinton Rap Sheet (March 30)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000330.shtml


All articles are written by Joe Sobran

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[ENDS]