Sobran's --
The Real News of the Month
January 2001
Volume 8, No. 1
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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Features
THE MOVING PICTURE
(pages 1-2)
So it's really, really George W. Bush after all. He
will soon take a ritual oath to uphold a document he is
not bound to swear he has actually read. He needn't
demonstrate any comprehension of the careful distribution
of powers or of how this arrangement is designed to
protect liberty. He must only have the gist of it;
though, as a philosopher has put it, "To know the gist is
to know nothing."
* * *
The 2000 presidential campaign was a typical
American debate: full of fierce arguments about secondary
matters, while first principles were entirely ignored.
This sheer dread of thinking isn't an exclusively
American trait; not at all. But one expects more of a
country that began with a bold and earnest appeal to
self-evident truths. How have the heirs of Jefferson,
Madison, and Hamilton descended to this pathetic level?
* * *
It's a huge relief that Al Gore won't be our
president, but still -- why should the U.S. Supreme Court
have had any say in it? How Florida's electoral votes
should be disposed was properly an internal matter for
Florida. The Constitution clearly says it's up to the
state legislature to decide. One liberal columnist called
the Court's ruling on Florida recounts "a muddled opinion
that should silence critics of Roe v. Wade." On the
contrary, the ruling shows exactly what critics of Roe
have been complaining about: judicial usurpation yielding
arbitrary results.
* * *
On the night Gore finally conceded, he and Bush both
spoke grandly of the need for "healing." Well, just who
was bleeding? We needed a rest from these two guys,
maybe, but hardly a spell in intensive care. Ennui isn't
usually life-threatening. Personally, I was able to pull
through by watching about fifty Hitchcock movies and
listening to a few hundred Haydn symphonies. I might also
mention a lovely dinner with a *startlingly* delicious
bottle of Robert Mondavi pinot noir. And a buddy in
Cleveland. No, friends, *I* don't need to heal.
* * *
Give Bill Clinton credit for one thing: he hasn't
*bored* us. I hope he'll be indicted for at least one of
his crimes in office. Even if he's acquitted on technical
grounds -- the likely resolution -- a criminal trial
would be sufficient punishment in itself and an
appropriate culmination of his years of Public Service.
Query: In the unlikely event that the former president
was convicted by a D.C. jury, would his Secret Service
detail accompany him to prison? And could he receive
conjugal visits from a U.S. senator?
* * *
Though everyone in the postelection marathon agreed
that this is a "democracy," the Constitution says nothing
whatever about the people electing the president.
Constitutionally, we can all be "disenfranchised." Gore's
claim to a victory in the popular vote was silly: his
margin of victory nationally was only slightly larger,
proportionally speaking, than Bush's margin of victory in
Florida. And if the popular vote were decisive, it would
also have merited a thorough recount, especially given
the Democrats' venerable tradition of vote fraud in their
big-city strongholds. Without the electoral college, this
election could have been an even worse fiasco.
* * *
DEMOCRACY n. The most excellent form of government,
never quite defined, under which nearly all human beings
are convinced they live.
* * *
Jesse Jackson promised to "take to the streets" if
George W. Bush won. Not a bad idea. That's where that
semiliterate fool, that absurdly self-important buffoon,
belongs. He wants to "delegitimize" Bush -- not a bad
idea, if only he'd do it for the right reasons. But it
goes without saying that his idea of a legitimate
president would be someone even worse than Bush. Jackson
and other racial demagogues want to turn every dispute
into a "civil rights issue," identifying civil rights
exclusively with their own interests. Or rather, with the
privileges they demand. In any case, the inability of
Democratic voters to follow simple instructions in the
voting booth hardly amounts to a massive civil rights
violation, let alone what Jackson called Bush's "Nazi
tactics."
* * *
Bad news travels slowly. Despite the postelection
morass, punditry has bubbled with the happy theme that
"the Republic will survive." Actually, it didn't. The
great Republic was destroyed long ago, and we're living
in its ruins. I recommend Garet Garrett's classic
pamphlet THE REVOLUTION WAS, if you can find a copy.
Garrett saw the truth during the New Deal.
* * *
Watch for conservatives-in-denial -- NATIONAL
REVIEW, Rush Limbaugh, THE WEEKLY STANDARD -- to insist
that Bush is "really," as they say, "one of us." No
matter what he actually *does,* he's "one of us," and we
must support him against those awful Democrats. Only a
conservative intellectual could be outsmarted by George
W.
* * *
The maverick leftist Christopher Hitchens has
written a scathing profile of North Korea for VANITY
FAIR, exposing both the cruelty and the shabbiness of
this Communist relic, "a society and state where the
human personality has been ruthlessly erased, and one
individual character obscenely exalted" -- referring to
the cult of Kim Il Sung, the dead dictator whose image is
still displayed everywhere. The entire population is
brainwashed and terrorized by "an indescribable degree of
surveillance and indoctrination," which keeps them
totally ignorant of the outside world. "North Korea is a
famine state," Hitchens says bluntly; he saw the starving
people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of
corn. Having sampled a "dog stew" at a restaurant, he
realized he "hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the
merest cat, the whole time I was there." He offers a wry
tourist tip: "In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask
for a doggie bag."
* * *
Readers often say they agree that the Constitution
has been abandoned, but they complain that I don't offer
a solution. Well, who said there's a solution? All we can
do at this point is keep doggedly reminding our fellow
Americans that it wasn't supposed to be this way, that
we've never consented to the present system, and that
this government isn't playing by its own rules. At the
moment there may be only a few of us who fully grasp
this, but there are millions who are ready to hear it. As
Samuel Johnson said of the Whigs of his day: "Though we
cannot outvote them, we can outargue them."
* * *
Magna est veritas et praevalebit. I believe that.
Our strength -- and a great strength it is -- is that
this government bases its claim to legitimacy on the
Constitution it abuses. We must do everything we can to
discredit that claim. No, I don't expect to win. But even
less do I expect to give up.
Exclusive to the electronic version:
OU
THE PAPER OF RECORD'S MEMORY HOLE
(pages 3-4)
One reason I believe in Christ and the Catholic
Church is that they continue to be bitterly hated by the
secular world. Christ himself predicted that the lot of
his followers would be enmity and persecution, to the end
of time. Yet because of his unique stature, even in an
irreligious age, explicit hatred of Christ is still rare;
the world pretends to honor him, if only as a "great
moral teacher," but is evasive about just why he is
"great." It neither worships nor repudiates him.
The Catholic Church is another matter. She has a
long history, and her children have committed so many
sins and crimes that it's easy to make a superficial case
that these reflect her true nature. So the hostility that
can't be expressed against Christ can be directed against
the Church and her earthly leaders. The most effective
anti-Catholic propaganda always seeks to link the Church
to what the world sees as the worst historical and
contemporary evils. Even the moral teachings of Christ
(as on divorce and sexual morality) may be attacked if
they are ascribed to the whims of popes and priests.
It's only natural, then, that the most persistent
big lie of our time should be that the Church, under the
leadership of Pius XII, was the silent partner of Adolf
Hitler, maintaining an indifferent silence as Hitler
murdered millions of Jews. This myth is vigorously
promoted in Jewish-controlled publications, but it has
been repeated by disaffected Catholics as well, notably
by John Cornwell in his recent book HITLER'S POPE and, in
a slightly toned-down version, by Garry Wills in PAPAL
SIN.
The "silence" of Pius XII has become an article of
faith for most liberals and even some conservatives. It
is treated as an established fact by the NEW YORK TIMES,
our "paper of record." Yet it is decisively refuted by
back issues of the TIMES itself.
The Church is notorious among liberals for opposing
nearly every modern idea liberals regard as
"progressive." But on occasion she has also condemned,
for her own reasons, modern ideas liberals disapprove of.
One of these was German National Socialism. From her own
point of view, this was simply one more contemporary
heresy, to be rejected with the others.
From the beginning, the Church recognized Hitler's
racialism and nationalism as inimical to Catholicism --
as Hitler himself said they were. Pius XI, the immediate
predecessor of Pius XII, issued an encyclical in German
in 1936, MIT BRENNENDER SORGE ("With Burning Sorrow"),
condemning those doctrines as incompatible with Natural
Law, the eternal moral law that even God can never change
because it is inherent in creation itself. The Pope
insisted that no nation or race had the right to
subjugate another.
This, like most papal statements, was put in very
general and impersonal terms, rhetorically above the
current fray, but there was no doubt that Pius XI meant
it to refer and apply to the German regime at that
moment. The encyclical amounted to a declaration of war
on Hitlerism. From then on, the Vatican and the Third
Reich were open enemies. The German state began a
crackdown on the Church.
Even before the war, hostilities between the Reich
and the Church flared publicly. In a famous statement,
Pius XI condemned anti-Semitism because "spiritually, we
are all Semites." Again, the allusion to Hitlerism was
obvious to everyone.
When Eugenio Pacelli became Pius XII in March 1939,
he continued the anti-Nazi policy of Pius XI. In 1940
Albert Einstein praised the Church for her courageous
opposition to Hitler when others were silent: "Only the
Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's
campaign for suppressing the truth."
There was nothing secret about this. The TIMES
reported the long duel between Hitler and the Church in
abundant detail, before, during, and even after World War
II. Yet this has been almost totally forgotten -- even by
the TIMES itself.
Now the record has been corrected by Msgr. Stephen
M. DiGiovanni in a monograph titled PIUS XII AND THE
JEWS: THE WAR YEARS. In telling the story, Monsignor
DiGiovanni draws almost entirely on reports published in
the TIMES.
One of Pius XII's first acts as Pope was to issue an
encyclical reiterating that the state must respect the
divine law, without prejudice to any race -- an utterance
universally understood as a rebuke to Hitler. In 1940,
over the protests of Hitler's ally Benito Mussolini, the
Vatican appointed two Jewish scholars to its academy of
science and another to its library. Louis Finkelstein, a
leading Jewish theologian, praised Pius for these
measures in the TIMES, which also joined in praising the
Pope in several editorials. Further TIMES editorials in
those years hailed the Pope's Christmas messages
denouncing racial persecution, calling him "a lonely
voice crying out in the silence of a continent."
So, far from being peculiarly silent, Pius was,
according to the TIMES, uniquely outspoken, in contrast
to the rest of Europe. The later myth would create the
opposite impression; but at the time, Pius was hailed as
the sole *exception* to "the silence of a continent."
In 1942 readers of the TIMES learned that Pius was
intervening to save Jews in occupied France from being
deported; soon afterward the paper reported that two
French cardinals and several bishops made a "spirited
written protest against racial and religious
persecution." In 1943 the TIMES related that Pius had
assured the chief rabbi of Jerusalem that he would "do
all in his personal power to aid persecuted Jews in
Europe." Throughout the war Catholic leaders sheltered
Jewish children in France, which led to what the TIMES
described as "an open rift between the Vichy government
and priests." (After the war, the TIMES ran a story
about Pius's removal of several French bishops who had
cooperated with the German and Vichy governments.)
When Catholic bishops in Germany denounced the
persecution of Jews and Poles in 1943, the TIMES covered
the statement ("Reich Churches Resist Nazi Rule," said
its headline), as well as the Nazi press's retaliatory
charge that the Church was fomenting unrest. A month
later the TIMES reported that the Reich had put three
bishops under house arrest and seized convents,
hospitals, and other Church properties. Soon afterward
the paper informed its readers of the arrests of
thousands of priests and nuns, many of whom died in
concentration camps. In an ironic anticipation of later
propaganda, the Nazi press frequently accused Pius of a
culpable failure to speak out against Communism, calling
him a virtual ally of Stalin.
In December 1943 the TIMES covered the Vatican's
protest against the internment of Italy's Jews. In early
1944 it reported that Rome's Fascist police forced entry
into a basilica, arresting not only Jews taking sanctuary
there but priests who were sheltering them as well; it
also reported Pius's protests.
When the Allies captured Rome in June 1944, the
city's chief rabbi, according to the TIMES, formally
thanked Pius on behalf of the Jews. The paper also noted,
after the war, that the World Jewish Congress gave the
Vatican a $20,000 donation "in recognition of the work of
the Holy See in rescuing Jews from Fascist and Nazi
persecution."
Late in the war matters took an ugly turn when the
Soviet press, seeing the Church as an obstacle to
Communist postwar expansion, accused Pius of being pro-
Nazi. To its credit, the TIMES vigorously attacked this
blatant lie in several editorials as "reckless,"
"unjust," and "intemperate," damaging to the Allied
cause. Its editorials were sincerely indignant at the
slander of Pius, whom it rightly regarded as a great man.
What the editors naively failed to realize, of
course, was that Stalin cared nothing for the Allied
cause. As soon as Germany was clearly losing the war, he
began to treat the United States and Britain as enemies.
Even his friend and benefactor Franklin Roosevelt was
shocked and hurt by his treachery. But Stalin's behavior
was dictated by the unsentimental logic of Communism,
according to which today's ally, having served his
purpose, becomes tomorrow's enemy. He correctly judged
that the interest of Soviet Communism required him to
open a new war on the Church -- a war that began with
propaganda and soon advanced to savage persecution,
possibly the worst in the two thousand years of the
Church's history.
Can we discern a parallel development in American
liberalism? For a long time, liberals and Catholics in
this country got along well. They even made common cause
on many social issues (the rights of labor and minority
groups, for example); liberals defended the rights of
Catholics against nativist and Protestant bigots; in fact
there seemed no difficulty in being a Catholic and a
liberal at the same time. Most Catholics were Democrats
who supported the New Deal, the Allied cause in World War
II, and the containment of Communism (originally the
liberal approach to the Soviet threat); Catholic
Republicans weren't rare, but they were rather
exceptional. The seeming harmony between liberalism and
Catholicism was personified in John Kennedy.
But during the late 1960s liberalism changed, moving
sharply leftward and adopting the sexual revolution as
part of its agenda. As it embraced abortion,
homosexuality, and radical feminism, subverting the
entire Western ethos of the family, it turned venomously
against the Catholic Church, the mother and champion of
that ethos. And liberals, like the Communists before
them, found that the surest way to discredit the Church
was to associate her with their devil, Hitler.
So now the NEW YORK TIMES has adopted the position
it once denounced the Soviet press for taking. And it has
done so with a combination of fanaticism and cynicism
worthy of the old Communist apparat. This is what
contemporary American liberalism has come to.
The Evolution of the State
(pages 5-6)
In all the electoral confusion of November, there
was never the least danger that our chains would be
struck off. Throughout their quarrel over who would be
boss for the next four years, both parties firmly agreed
on the fundamentals. Tax collection and the issuance of
checks to government dependents -- the normal operations
of the lawless state -- continued uninterrupted.
The election "crisis" inspired very little critical
reflection on the foundations of what Sixties radicals
used to call the System. Or if there was any such
reflection, it didn't appear in the media. I didn't see a
single op-ed piece asking what we were really arguing
about.
The most interesting article I read during that
turbulent month was written before the election. It was a
profile of Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal
Reserve Board, by the leftist Christopher Hitchens in
VANITY FAIR. It didn't quite hit the mark, but it poked
around in the right general direction.
Greenspan's job wasn't at stake this year. He is
widely given credit for the current prosperity of the
stock market. The occupant of so important a seat of
power must not be exposed to the whims of electoral
democracy.
Hitchens, who saw even Mother Teresa of Calcutta as
a corrupt cog of the capitalist system, remarked on the
obvious irony of the Federal Reserve being headed by a
disciple of Ayn Rand. Greenspan used to write for Rand's
atheist-capitalist publication THE OBJECTIVIST
NEWSLETTER, and he still says she was right. Which would
seem to imply that he doesn't believe in the legitimacy
of the Federal Reserve System, or in any other state
involvement in economic matters.
John Galt, the hero of Rand's mammoth novel ATLAS
SHRUGGED, is a scientific genius and champion of the
free market who persuades his fellow "men of the mind" to
go on strike in protest against the tyranny of the state.
When the economy collapses as a result, the villains --
those who run the government -- try to force Galt to
become dictator, in the belief that he can make things
work again. Is John Galt (voluntarily) running the Fed
today?
What is the best policy for an institution that
shouldn't exist in the first place? In Rand's view, Galt
could no more "run the economy" than anyone else, because
state power is inherently stupid and even a genius can't
make it "work," any more than an Einstein could make a
pig lay an egg. Of course the Fed isn't exactly the
state. It's an entanglement of state and banking. Maybe
the damage it does can be minimized if it's headed by
someone who's properly dubious about it. As a champion of
the gold standard -- the position he took in Rand's
newsletter -- Greenspan may figure that the next best
thing is to keep the paper dollar on a short leash,
curbing inflation and letting the market do the rest.
How does the Fed work? Having read various articles
and books on the subject and listened to the lucid
explanations of several economists of my acquaintance, I
*still* don't get it. And I am ready to conclude that I
never will.
But it smells mighty fishy. The very secrecy of its
origins -- it was conceived at a furtive meeting of
leading bankers on Jekyll Island, off the coast of
Georgia, in 1910 -- speaks for itself. So do its powers.
It can issue paper money at will, in direct defiance of
the Constitution, which authorizes Congress alone to
"coin money [and] regulate the value thereof." Congress
has no authority to transfer this power to any other
agency, public or private. Nor has it any power to issue
paper money: the Constitutional Convention voted
overwhelmingly against such a power, and since it was
never granted, it remains denied. To "coin" money does
not mean to print it. The language of the Constitution is
precise.
So was the value of a dollar. The United States
adopted the Spanish dollar rather than the English pound
as its currency, and a dollar was a specific quantity of
silver: 371.25 grains (troy). As Edwin Vieira points out
in his monograph WHAT IS A "DOLLAR"? Congress could no
more manipulate the value of a dollar than it could
change the length of a year. It was that objective. The
idea of fiddling with the value of money horrified the
generation that made the Constitution, which also
empowered Congress to "provide for the punishment of
counterfeiting" -- since, after all, counterfeiting is
the debasement of money.
How times have changed. Neither our language nor our
money has fixed value. Just as the Constitution has
become a rubber document (or, as they say, a "living
document"), the dollar has become, in most people's
minds, a slip of paper with a picture of George
Washington on it. It might as well bear a picture of Bugs
Bunny. Since its ties to metal have been severed, its
value is whatever the Fed may choose to make it. In
effect, then, the Federal Reserve System authorizes
private agencies not only to issue currency, but to
counterfeit it! Though nominally private, the Fed
achieved an unprecedented centralization of the money
power.
The Fed is merely one more illustration of the bad
faith with which we are ruled. When the Constitution
can't be amended, or when it can be "interpreted" to mean
what those in power want it to mean, it can always be
disregarded.
To say that the Constitution's meaning "evolves" is
to attempt a rhetorical concealment of what really
happens. In the first place, the pleasant organic
metaphor conceals the plain fact that the Constitution
itself doesn't do anything. Things are done *to* it.
*Men* do those things.
And the "evolution" always goes in the same
direction, to the great satisfaction of those particular
men. Every change in the Constitution is a change toward
a more powerful and monolithic central government, and
away from everything that used to be understood as
"federalism." If this "evolution" were an impersonal,
inexorable natural process, it ought to be a little more
unpredictable. But it's all too predictable, because the
process is very personal and not at all natural, if by
"natural" we mean that it represents the logical
development of principles inherent in the Constitution.
This "evolution," furthermore, always seems to occur
in the same place: a certain building on Capitol Hill,
Washington, D.C., and not in "nature" as commonly
understood. In fact it seems distinctly UNnatural that
the evolving meanings of the Constitution should be so
exclusively and locally confided to the nine members of
the U.S. Supreme Court.
Above all, the "evolution" metaphor implies that the
changes in the Constitution develop gradually, as new
species are said to arise from long series of small
mutations. But this hardly describes the Court's most
notable rulings, which have been marked by their
disruptive violence. In Roe v. Wade, for example, the
Court abruptly imposed on all 50 states a new "right"
that no previous Court, justice, lower court,
legislature, or legislative minority had ever suspected
of lurking in the Constitution. A less "organic" act of
jurisprudence would be hard to imagine. It was, as Byron
White said in his bitter dissent, an act of "raw judicial
power."
"Raw judicial power" isn't supposed to exist, but it
does. And that's what has really "evolved," in the sense
that the Supreme Court, like the other branches of the
federal government, has gradually advanced from tiny
usurpations of power to extremely audacious, even
revolutionary ones. Such acts, overturning old
understandings, depend on an ill-educated populace with
little historical memory and a feeble sense of tradition.
Even those who appreciated the moral monstrosity of Roe
rarely understood how radically defective it was as
constitutional law.
I often wonder whether the Fed was part of a
conscious and concerted effort to destroy the old
Constitution. It was established in 1913, the same year
the disastrous Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments were
adopted; all three measures had the same tendency. The
Sixteenth Amendment authorized Congress to levy income
taxes, thereby giving it the ability not only to increase
its revenues to undreamed-of levels, but to give the
federal government direct access to, and direct power
over, the private financial affairs of every American.
Since then we have all become criminal suspects in the
eyes of the government. The Seventeenth Amendment
required the popular election of U.S. Senators; this
amounted to the abolition of the Senate, which until then
had represented the states and guarded their powers
against federal usurpation. Since this amendment did away
with that function, it made the Senate a redundant and
irrational institution. Instead of representing the
states equally, as it was meant to do, it now represents
the people unequally.
Could three such deadly blows to the old federal
system have been dealt accidentally? It seems unlikely.
They were the work of men who saw the Constitution as an
impediment, as Woodrow Wilson and his disciple Franklin
Roosevelt did. Though Wilson trampled the Constitution
during World War I, he didn't do it permanent damage. It
was Roosevelt who pretty much finished the job. With the
cunning of the true tyrant, he realized that the way to
consolidate a monolithic government once and for all was
by establishing a national welfare state with as many
dependents as possible. He knew that "my Social Security
system," as he called it, would be well-nigh irreversible
-- which is more than can be said for the Constitution,
alas.
During the twentieth century, the original federal
system was stood on its head. Those who did it must have
known what they were doing. But few others have noticed
that it was done at all.
NUGGETS
RAKE'S PROGRESS: Bill Clinton's life may be summed up as
an odyssey from draft dodger to war criminal. I don't
blame him for avoiding the draft, which is a form of
slavery; but, having saved his own skin from war, he
proved willing to use his power as president to distract
attention from his impeachment scandals, by bombing
innocent people abroad. By now Americans barely notice
when their government bombs a few foreigners here and
there, but it does matter, morally and practically. And
of course Clinton did so without the bother of a
declaration of war, which should have been grounds for
impeachment in itself. He turned out to be something
worse than a good-natured rogue. (page 9)
SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION: Bush says he wants to "reach
out," to be president of "all the people," not a
"captive of the far Right." Get it? He wants to show the
world that though he's a conservative, don't worry --
he's not an unduly *principled* conservative. (page 11)
GUEST EDITORIAL: In THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN
EMPIRE, the historian Edward Gibbon says of the first
Roman emperor: "Augustus was sensible that mankind is
governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation
that the senate and people would submit to slavery,
provided they were respectfully assured that they still
enjoyed their ancient freedom." (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
OUR LIVING LANGUAGE: "Can Bush Govern?" ask the think-
piece headlines. Of course "govern" doesn't mean what it
used to mean: enforcing existing laws. It now means
imposing ambitious *new* laws and programs, increasing the
centralization of political power, and steadily
diminishing the freedom of the individual. We must pray
that any attempt to "govern" in this sense will be
frustrated. Unfortunately, we face the threat of what is
pleasantly called "bipartisan cooperation," which Bush is
all too eager to foster.
HAPPY FOES: When a reputedly conservative politician
unexpectedly pleases the press, he is said to have
"surprised friend and foe alike." What this happy formula
forgets to mention is that the surprise is always a lot
more agreeable to his foes than to his friends. It means
he has double-crossed his friends. We can expect to hear
the phrase often over the next four years.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* The Democrats' Ethics (November 14, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/001114.shtml
* The Silent Revolution (November 21, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/001121.shtml
* Why Can't the Americans? (November 30, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/001130.shtml
* Accuracy and Other Illusions (December 5, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/001205.shtml
* Meet Your Enemy (December 7, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/001207.shtml
* Popular Election of Presidents? (December 14, 2000)
http//www.sobran.com/columns/001214.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
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[ENDS]