Sobran's -- 
The Real News of the Month

August 2000
Volume 7, No. 8

Editor: Joe Sobran
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Features

THE MOVING PICTURE
(pages 1-2)


     I take no position on Harry Potter. Haven't even glanced 
at the books. For now I'll say only that I don't like the 
sound of him.

*          *          *

     As Bill Clinton, his days in office numbered, tries to 
rustle up a "legacy" -- a Middle East peace treaty or 
something -- two new books focus on what he'll really be 
remembered for. It seems he has nicknamed his guiding organ 
"Willard." One book explains the origin of the name (from one 
of Hillary's uncles); the other makes Willard a speaking 
character. How vile! How vulgar! How appropriate.

*          *          *

     A black suspect has been arrested in the murder of an 
eight-year-old white boy in Alexandria, Virginia in April. The 
WASHINGTON POST reports that police found a note in the 
suspect's rented room near the scene of the crime reading 
"kill them racess whiate kidd's anyway." This would seem to be 
the purest possible example of a "hate crime" -- singling out 
a child because of his race and slashing his throat -- yet 
that phrase has been conspicuously absent from media coverage. 
The POST described the note as "racial" rather than "racist."

*          *          *

     A 13-year-old ballplayer in the local Junior League, the 
step up from Little League, finished his brilliant season as 
pitcher, catcher, and shortstop by going 4 for 4, with two 
doubles and a triple, in his final game. His last hit raised 
his average over .500 for the year (best in the league) -- 
shades of Ted Williams. His name: Joe Sobran. His grandfather, 
a career .200 hitter, is inexpressibly proud and of course 
claims full credit for this prodigy.

*          *          *

     The U.S. Supreme Court has closed its term with a spate 
of interesting rulings, all wrong. First it ruled that a Texas 
public school couldn't allow a student to lead a voluntary 
prayer before a football game, on grounds that this somehow 
violates the First Amendment's injunction that "Congress shall 
make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Congress 
had nothing to do with it. That's all that counts.

*          *          *

     Then the Court ruled that New Jersey couldn't force the 
Boy Scouts to accept sodomite scoutmasters. Conservatives 
applauded, but they shouldn't have. New Jersey, though dead 
wrong, was acting within the reserved powers of the states, 
since the federal government has no authority to overrule such 
laws, however monstrous. If federalism means anything, it 
means that even tyrannical laws may be constitutional.

*          *          *

     The Court also ruled that laws banning late-term 
abortions place an "undue burden" on a woman's right to kill 
her unborn child and are therefore unconstitutional. Nonsense, 
and sickening nonsense at that. Even the majority in Roe v. 
Wade acknowledged that the states may protect the child when 
it attains "viability." Now even that flimsy criterion has 
been abandoned. Shame on Sandra Day O'Connor for joining the 
forces of evil on this one.

*          *          *

     The Court upheld certain forms of federal aid to 
religious schools. Clarence Thomas's majority opinion rightly 
argued that such aid doesn't violate the First Amendment, but 
he forgot the Tenth Amendment, which denies to the federal 
government all powers not delegated to it (as opposed to all 
powers not arrogated by it). Discouraging, since Thomas is the 
only justice who occasionally remembers that the Tenth 
Amendment exists.

*          *          *

     Did Al Gore know that the Buddhist temple fundraiser was 
a fundraiser? A sharp NEW YORK POST reader poses a simple 
test: Who paid for the trip? If the government paid for it, it 
was illegal anyway; if the Democratic National Committee paid 
for it, Gore knew the truth and is lying.

*          *          *

     A fond farewell to Walter Matthau, one of the screen's 
great comedians. He could make a scene funny by his sheer 
presence; he made you feel what was comical about it just by 
being in it, and his lines seemed hilarious even before he 
delivered them. Actually, he seldom got material worthy of his 
talent; but his Whiplash Willie, the crooked lawyer in THE 
FORTUNE COOKIE, and Oscar in THE ODD COUPLE (the original, not 
the vulgar sequel) would be sufficient to justify a career.

*          *          *

     When a tabloid headlined "HITLER IS ALIVE," one's first 
reaction was: "Oh, rats!" Luckily the report appeared to be 
baseless. But THE NEW YORKER reports that some of Hitler's 
relatives wound up in the United States -- in, of all places, 
the New York City area. (Of *course* they changed their 
names, dummy!) Meanwhile, some of the German branch of the 
family are still fighting legal battles over the royalties 
from MEIN KAMPF. Hope springs eternal, doesn't it? All of 
which reminds me: when I lived in New Jersey, I sometimes used 
to see a plump little woman, vaguely familiar-looking, on the 
morning bus to New York. At first I paid little attention to 
her; but eventually I learned that she was Svetlana Stalin. I 
wish I could have gotten to know her, but I could never quite 
think of an appropriate way to introduce myself. You try it.

*          *          *

     My book ALIAS SHAKESPEARE is still being attacked on the 
Internet; but it's the same old stuff. The case for William of 
Stratford comes down to testimony, which can never be 
conclusive, witnesses being notoriously unreliable. The 
evidence of the works themselves, especially the Sonnets, 
speaks loudly for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The other 
side keeps dodging my argument that the speaker of the Sonnets 
sounds like Oxford, point for point, and can't be matched to 
anything we know of William. Among other things, the poet is 
bisexual, as Oxford seems to have been; or, as I like to say, 
he's here, he's queer, he's Edward de Vere!

*          *          *

     The Pope has scolded the countless sodomites who held a 
"Pride" week in Rome to affront the Catholic Church for its 
traditional attitude toward sodomy. It goes without saying 
that the Church and other reactionary institutions have no 
right even to disapprove of such practices. Note the ground 
rules of tolerance: "gays" can contribute to pluralism just by 
being what they are; Catholicism and the Boy Scouts can only 
contribute to it by ceasing to be what they have always been.

*          *          *

Exclusive to the electronic version:

          Think how much of last year's journalism was 
expended on the questions of a Y2K crisis and whether George 
W. ever snorted cocaine.


The Religion of the World
(pages 3-6)

     I've often marveled that modern man has more faith in the 
State than medieval man had in the Church. Though the State's 
utopian promises have been kept by fraud at best, and war and 
mass murder at worst, its authority has hardly been impaired 
by experience -- probably because it has taken charge of 
education and erased its subjects' memory of its own crimes.

     All political discussion, you'd think, should naturally 
begin with a haunted awareness of two world wars, the Gulag, 
forced famine, genocide, the bombing of cities, nuclear 
weapons, that sort of thing; not to mention the State's 
enormous and ever-expanding parasitic economy of dependency, 
debt, and funny money. But evil has a way of inuring us to 
itself; having supped full with horrors, we cease to be 
horrified. In time the horrible seems normal, and we live 
contentedly with things our ancestors would have crossed 
oceans to escape.

     By now even ordinary people should talk about the State 
in the same mordant tones in which Jews talk about Hitler. But 
modern man not only still obeys the State (he has little 
choice) but still expects it to better the human condition. He 
thinks of Hitler as an unfortunate anomaly, with whom his own 
rulers have taught him they have nothing whatever in common, 
even as they promote the right to slaughter unborn children.

     Even if I were an atheist, I'd cherish the Catholic 
Church as a bulwark against the prevalent fanaticism of the 
State. As G.K. Chesterton once put it: "Only the Catholic 
Church can save a man from the degrading slavery of being a 
child of his time."

     As my patient readers know, I've long been fascinated by 
Garry Wills, whom I consider one of the exemplary writers of 
our time -- one of the brighter children of our time. He's 
undeniably gifted, and I always look forward to wrestling with 
his books. He writes a lot of them. He's one of the most 
learned, stylish, and stimulating journalists in America. 
After dropping out of a Catholic seminary, he took his 
doctorate in the classics at Yale. He has written dozens of 
books -- about Chesterton, Richard Nixon, Jack Ruby, 
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, the Kennedys, Ronald 
Reagan, and John Wayne, not to mention Roman culture, 
Catholicism, and Shakespeare.

     Wills began his journalistic career as one of Bill 
Buckley's Catholic conservative crew at NATIONAL REVIEW. No 
doubt his early writing would embarrass him now, but it holds 
up very well. His first submission to the magazine, in 1957, 
was so mature and assured that Buckley was floored to learn 
that the author was a lad of 22. Even now I can hardly think 
of another writer with such a wide-ranging mind, who can write 
so much high-quality prose on so many subjects.

     In 1968 Wills shocked his conservative friends and 
readers with a sudden lurch to the left, political and 
theological. He left NATIONAL REVIEW and quickly established 
himself in the liberal mainstream with his book NIXON 
AGONISTES. It was typical of his later work: big, sprawling, 
and impressive, yet not very satisfying. In Wills the parts 
are always better than the whole. He has rarely written a bad 
sentence or a good book. His next book was a smaller effort, a 
short but unfocused attack on the Catholic Church titled BARE 
RUINED CHOIRS. He continued, however, to insist that he was a 
loyal Catholic, even as he adopted the latest liberal causes, 
including, at last, abortion on demand.

     I've been puzzled by Wills ever since his conversion. 
*Why* did he change? One of my own first efforts for NATIONAL 
REVIEW was a critique of Wills, which he pronounced "solemn, 
long, [and] laughable." No argument there (I hope nobody ever 
digs it up and reads it!), though I stand by my central 
judgment, which, I must say, strikes me as extraordinarily 
shrewd, coming from such a callow fool: Wills had, and still 
has, a taste for the subtle and the clever that distracts him 
from the obvious. If he sounded mature when he was young, he 
seems oddly unfinished in his advanced years. I've spent 
decades trying to plumb depths that I'm not sure were ever 
really there.

     A few months back I discussed his book A NECESSARY EVIL: 
A HISTORY OF AMERICAN DISTRUST OF GOVERNMENT. It supplied half 
the answer to my question: he has an uncritical faith in the 
State. His new book, PAPAL SIN: STRUCTURES OF DECEIT, supplies 
the other half: he has no faith in the Church. After a century 
in which the State has usurped the authority of the Church and 
murdered countless Christians, Wills is on the side of the 
State. He has dedicated his considerable talent to bearing 
witness for the State against the Church. He's what I call an 
anti-martyr. He has made himself at home in the modern world. 
That's one reason I call him exemplary.

     "I am not attacking the papacy or its defenders," Wills 
announces at the outset in PAPAL SIN. Most people would say 
that denying the claims of the papacy is "attacking" it, but 
Wills is actually denying much more than that.

     His thesis is that since 1870, when the First Vatican 
Council defined the dogma of papal infallibility, the Catholic 
Church has been trapped in its own "structures of deceit." 
Since the Church claims to be error-proof, it can't back down 
from its errors. "In order to claim that popes cannot err," he 
writes, "popes must lie." He traces this bad habit back to 
Pius IX, the villain of the book, whose papacy lasted from 
1846 to 1878.

     His first case study is the Holocaust. Wills concedes 
that Pius XII may have worked to save Jews from the Nazis, but 
he insists that Pius kept a culpable silence about the 
Holocaust -- and later lied by claiming to have spoken out. 
The Vatican has subsequently lied to maintain Pius's, and its 
own, reputation, despite its "terrible record" on the Jews. 
Wills doesn't explain what this "terrible record" consists of, 
beyond recounting the story of how Pius IX personally adopted 
a baptized Jewish boy against the wishes of the anguished 
parents, outraging much of the general public.

     For the most part he repeats familiar charges against 
Pius XII, ignoring all contrary evidence, including heartfelt 
tributes from Jews, notably Israel Zolli, the chief rabbi of 
Rome, who not only became a Catholic after the war but took 
Pius's baptismal name, "Eugenio," as his own. The evident 
purpose of these opening chapters is to make the Church look 
bad in the eyes of the secular world. This is propaganda, not 
history.

     Wills briefly acknowledges that Pius was constrained by 
many factors, not least of them the peril of Communism (which 
even before the war had dwarfed the Nazis in the mass murder 
department), but he treats anti-Communism as a neurotic 
anxiety. Never mind that Communism killed quite a few 
Christians and that Christians didn't kill very many 
Communists (though let us *never* forget that McCarthyism 
deprived a few Communists of their government jobs).

     If your working premise is that Communism was nothing 
worth worrying about, you can make all sorts of responses to 
it look not only unreasonable, but reprehensible. But Pius was 
perceptive enough to realize that the war would be won by 
either Hitler or Stalin, and he could hardly have seen this as 
anything but a terrible dilemma for the Church, which Hitler 
had pledged to crush "like a toad." Wills says not a word 
about the Catholic nations that fell to Stalin, or about the 
martyrs and other, more ordinary victims of that Famous 
Victory, whose religious and cultural life was devastated by 
Communist tyranny. (Let's not cavil about the hellish poverty 
Communist rule also imposed on them; that would be mere 
"economics.")

     Wills's argument appeals strictly to regnant prejudices 
about liberalism's holy war: anyone who wasn't denouncing 
Hitler at top volume must have been Hitler's friend. Yet as 
Sidney Zion has recently observed, Pius did far more to save 
the Jews than those prize hypocrites, Franklin Roosevelt and 
Winston Churchill.

     For all that has been said, written, and shrieked about 
Pius's conduct, it has seldom been examined from a Catholic 
standpoint. I confess I'm partial to Pius, one of the greatest 
men of the century. He was tactfully silent about many 
horrors; why not condemn him for failing to denounce the 
Allied bombing of cities, including Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, 
and of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I presume he thought it 
was simply useless to do so in the colossal welter of violence 
that was World War II. There were so many things to denounce, 
for those inclined to do so. But since liberals specialize in 
retroactive denunciations, we may fairly ask why they choose 
to blame Pius for some silences and not others. Wills himself 
rightly denounces nuclear weapons -- the modern State's most 
typical achievement, I'd say -- yet he doesn't even think to 
blame Pius for failing to thunder against them. A recent book 
has stigmatized him as "Hitler's Pope." With equal justice (or 
injustice) he could be called "Roosevelt's Pope," or perhaps 
"Truman's Pope."

     Wills also accuses Paul VI of dishonesty for overruling 
his own committee of experts in order to uphold the Church's 
condemnation of contraception. He treats it as self-evident 
that Paul was wrong, giving no weight to any reservations 
about birth control and the sexual revolution. He blames 
priestly celibacy for the scandal of pedophile priests, as if 
allowing a man to marry would redirect his appetite for boys. 
It doesn't, as witness similar scandals among ministers, 
rabbis, scoutmasters, teachers, athletic coaches, and guidance 
counselors. Wills also scores the Church for its treatment of 
"gays," including priests; yet it doesn't occur to him to 
suggest that marriage may be the cure for *that.* As "we" now 
"know," homosexuality is fixed in one's makeup by birth and 
can't be "cured." If Wills is not very consistent with 
himself, at least he's consistent with fashionable opinion; 
and that seems to be what counts.

     Wills argues that the several Scriptural condemnations of 
sodomy don't apply to all homosexual acts as such, though St. 
Paul seems to be pretty unambiguous, and even Moses doesn't 
seem to leave much wiggle room for "gay people" (my term, not 
Moses'). The notion that modern liberal attitudes may be 
lurking in ancient Hebrew and Christian texts, against all 
appearances and every traditional understanding, strikes me as 
a triumph of trendiness over honest scholarship. The idea that 
St. Paul was condemning only the *abuse* of homosexuality 
sounds like a weird joke. He strikes me as pretty "homophobic" 
(Wills's term, not Paul's).

     According to Wills, priestly celibacy was not a genuinely 
Christian idea, but a cultural infection, resulting from the 
contamination of Christian thought by pagan and Jewish 
misogyny. As a specimen of this misogyny he cites the third-
century Dionysus, Patriarch of Alexandria, who wrote that 
during menstruation, "pious, devout women would never even 
think of touching the sacred table or the Body and Blood of 
the Lord." But Wills fails to see where this citation leads.

     As the book proceeds, Wills proves that he is indeed 
attacking much more than the modern papacy. He denies the 
doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, 
deriding the notion that the priest has a "magic" power to 
consecrate mere bread and wine. Once again he ignores the 
obvious: the words of Christ, not only at the Last Supper, but 
on the occasion where, according to John's Gospel, many of his 
disciples fell away when he told them that nobody can go to 
heaven unless he "eats my flesh and drinks my blood." They 
were shocked: "This is a hard saying; who can accept it?" 
Obviously they were taking this teaching literally, and Christ 
didn't correct them. Paul likewise warned the Corinthians that 
to eat "the body of the Lord" unworthily was to incur 
damnation, just as every little Catholic, until recently, used 
to be taught. This strange idea gave rise to the Roman slander 
that Christians practiced cannibalism.

     Wills denies that the early Church had a priesthood apart 
from the whole body of believers. He notes with satisfaction 
that his hero, St. Augustine, in his hundreds of sermons, 
"never mentions (any more than the New Testament did, or [St.] 
Ignatius did) the power of the priest to consecrate." But as 
his quotation from Dionysus shows, the doctrine later called 
"transubstantiation" had become established a century before 
Augustine. If Augustine had rejected a belief so widespread, 
he would have had to deny it explicitly. If his silence proves 
anything, it proves that he accepted it. Wills needs better 
evidence than this to discredit so fundamental a doctrine; he 
needs, at the very least, a positive denial, from someone of 
Augustine's stature, that the Eucharist is actually the Body 
of Christ. And Paul's warning to the Corinthians surely means 
that someone other than Christ had the power to consecrate 
bread and wine. If not a priest or someone specially ordained, 
then who?

     At this point it's clear that we are far from the "sins" 
and "dishonesty" of the modern papacy. Wills is really 
attacking some of the most ancient Christian beliefs, beliefs 
that Catholicism shares with Eastern Orthodoxy, which has 
rejected the papacy. These include not only the Real Presence 
and the priesthood, but apostolic succession, the authority of 
bishops, the Sacrament of Confession, and the special status 
of the Virgin Mary. Wills denies the Immaculate Conception, 
which he sees as a trick of Pius IX (who defined it as a dogma 
in 1853) to exalt the papacy by elevating the Virgin to "this 
idol-goddess." He cites another saint, St. Thomas Aquinas, who 
argued against the doctrine in the thirteenth century. But 
again his evidence backfires: it shows that the doctrine was 
widely believed long before 1853. So, by the way, was papal 
infallibility, which Luther attacked long before 1870. These 
teachings weren't innovations of the autocratic Pius IX.

     Wills offers an innovation of his own when he suggests 
that we "welcome a female analogy for God, but assign it to 
the third person of the Trinity.... The pronoun for the Spirit 
should be She, which will make it clear that many of the 
functions [traditionally] assigned to Mary (as a symbol of the 
church, or its protector) truly belong to the Trinity in its 
female analogue." Here he appeals not to Scripture, but to the 
Zeitgeist.

     It's not only fair but irresistible to ask why Wills 
still counts himself a Catholic. (Even a friendly reviewer of 
the book, the philosopher Richard Rorty, has raised this 
question.) His vision of Catholic history suggests a 
despairing view of a Church far beyond repair through a good 
dose of "honesty." If Wills is right, Christ's promise to 
stick with the Church "until the end of time" was broken early 
on, and Catholics have been guilty of what the Reformation 
accused them of, "the idolatry of the Mass" -- groveling daily 
before mere bits of bread. Not only have popes lied; priests 
have been performing empty rituals, women and "gays" have been 
insulted routinely, and prayers have been sent to the wrong 
address *every single day, in every single parish* for at 
least fifteen centuries. As for the Spirit, where has *She* 
been while all this was going on?

     Once you adopt Wills's reductive methods, there is no 
obvious stopping point. If he rejects so much not only of 
Catholic doctrine but of daily Catholic worship, what, the 
reader wonders, does Wills still believe in? He affirms very 
little, beyond the need for "honesty," which seems to mean 
that other Catholics should admit that they don't really 
believe in all this stuff either. Even so, the reader suspects 
that Wills hasn't yet come clean, that he doubts even more 
than he has told us. Does he really believe in the Virgin 
Birth? In the Redemption and Resurrection? In the divinity of 
Christ? In the immortality of the soul? In the existence of 
hell? Why should he?

     Another of Wills's heroes is John Henry Newman, largely 
because Newman bitterly opposed Pius IX on the question of 
infallibility (though he later reconciled himself to it). But 
Newman embraced Catholicism because he saw what Wills calls 
corruptions as authentic "developments" whose seeds were in 
the Gospels. He argued that the doctrines that scandalized the 
early Protestants were implicit in Christianity from the 
beginning, however surprising they may seem to a naive reader 
of the Scriptures. Over time, Newman said, the Church found it 
necessary to define these doctrines and to give them full 
expression in response to new circumstances; but they were no 
less genuine for that. Newman would be horrified by Wills's 
conclusions; but so would Augustine and Paul.      

     Apart from the manifest dishonesty of some of his own 
arguments, Wills arouses the suspicion that he is seeking to 
bring the Church into alignment not just with the modern 
world, but with the modern State. The most he can bring 
himself to say against abortion is that it "should be 
avoided." He counsels a "respectful agnosticism" about the 
humanity of the human fetus, but not respectful enough to 
warrant giving it the benefit of a doubt against the 
abortionist. Of course he says nothing about whether the fetus 
may have an immortal soul, a question Augustine and Aquinas 
might have deemed relevant.

     Coming after his endorsements of contraception, 
homosexuality, and other current causes du jour, this is too 
many for me. If we weren't inured to it by now, the very 
mention of abortion would induce nausea. Is there *any* 
question on which Wills would take the side of his Church 
against liberalism and the liberal State?

     One almost feels that Wills thinks the Spirit has been 
guiding the State instead of the Church. He thinks the 
development of the State -- in particular, the centralization 
of power in the federal government -- has been benign.

     Christianity sprang out of a cultural soil remote from 
and alien to the modern State. How is it possible, just as a 
matter of mere anthropology, that the early Church -- 
basically a bunch of Jews who thought their Messiah had 
arrived in an unexpected form -- should be in such perfect 
harmony with today's State and, particularly, with the sexual 
revolution the State has been promoting? It's just too 
convenient, especially since that Messiah was even stricter on 
sexual morality than Moses had been. (No divorce, no dirty 
thoughts.)

     Newman had something to say on this head too: "In every 
age of Christianity since it was first preached, there has 
been what may be called a "religion of the world," which so 
far imitates the one true religion as to deceive the unstable 
and unwary. The world does not oppose religion *as such.* I 
may say, it has never opposed it. In particular, it has, in 
all ages, acknowledged in one sense or other the Gospel of 
Christ, fastened on one or other of its characteristics, and 
professed to embody this in its practice; while by neglecting 
the other parts of the holy doctrine, it has, in fact, 
distorted and corrupted even that portion of it which it has 
exclusively put forward, and so has contrived to explain away 
the whole....

     "What is the world's religion now? It has taken the 
brighter side of the Gospel -- its tidings of comfort, its 
precepts of love -- all darker, deeper views of man's 
condition and prospects being comparatively forgotten. This is 
the religion *natural* to a civilized age, and well has Satan 
dressed and completed it into an idol of the truth."

     Such imitation versions of Christianity are always more 
or less plausible; but when a man tells us in effect that the 
Catholic Church can return to its Gospel roots by adopting the 
latest Democratic Party platform, the question is not what's 
wrong with the Church, but what's wrong with *him.*

     In Wills's case, I still don't know. I probably never 
will. I recognize that it may be a mystery of the soul, a 
drama of grace, to which only Wills himself is privy and which 
I can't presume to assess. But I do know that, at the purely 
natural level, he keeps making arguments on politics and 
religion that are beneath his own intelligence, and even below 
my own. And I know that the version of Christianity he 
espouses is the religion of the world. He is trapped in what 
you might call structures of self-deceit.


Nuggets

RANDOM THOUGHT: I'm convinced that if it weren't for white 
racism, our national anthem would be "I Heard It through the 
Grapevine." (page 6)

UTOPIAN THOUGHT: Al Gore's charge that we have a "do-
nothing" Congress inspires wishful thinking. If only it were 
so! If only candidates would pledge: "Since our citizens are 
already burdened by staggering taxes and oppressive laws, most 
of them unconstitutional as well as unjust, I favor a surcease 
from new legislation. In fact, our business now should be the 
repeal of most of the laws currently on the books." (page 8)

CAMPAIGN KARMA: Hillary's New York campaign is in trouble 
for an alleged ethnic slur 26 years ago. A new book says that 
after Bill's first political defeat in 1974, she blamed an 
ally whom she called an illegitimate fornicator of Hebraic 
extraction (though she managed to condense the thought into a 
mere five syllables). She insists she never said it, but three 
witnesses laugh at her denials, and she's notorious for her 
foul, abusive mouth. Unfortunately, the only witness who 
vouches for her is a well-known perjurer. (page 10)

ELDER STATESMAN: Jerry Ford thinks George Bush should pick 
a pro-abortion running mate. As for pro-lifers in the 
Republican Party, "Where are they gonna go?" At 87, Ford still 
shows the political sagacity that made him such a winner. 
Alas, the Republicans aren't quite ready to commit suicide. 
(page 12)


Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12)

* The Day of the Yoot (June 15, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/0000615.shtml
* Dr. Johnson, Radical (June 22, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000622.shtml
* Structures of Deceit (June 27, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000627.shtml
* Prejudice and Precent (June 29, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000629.shtml
* Let's Debate "Basics" (July 4, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000704.shtml
* Crossing Bloodlines (July 6, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/000706.shtml


All articles are written by Joe Sobran

Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved.
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[ENDS]