Sobran's --
The Real News of the Month
March 2001
Volume 8, No. 3
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
Subscription Rates.
Print version: $59.95 per year; $100 for 2 years;
trial subscription available for $19.95 (5 issues).
E-mail subscriptions: $59.95 for 1 year ($25 with a
12-month subscription to the print edition); $100 for
2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print
edition). Payment should be made to The Vere Company.
Address: Sobran's, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383
Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com
Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com
Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per
issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign
countries, add $1.75 per issue.
Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-493-3348. Allow
4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue
Features
THE MOVING PICTURE
(page 1)
Defying liberal opinion, George W. has begun his
presidency by cutting off Fedbucks to groups that promote
abortion abroad. Not that Bush has strong convictions on
the subject, but he may have felt he had no choice but to
act when his wife, on the eve of the annual January 22
pro-life march in Washington, told an interviewer that
she was against repealing Roe v. Wade. Unlike his
father, GHWB, GWB is wary of making his conservative base
feel betrayed.
* * *
Bush has also proposed education "reforms," meaning a
rearrangement rather than a reduction of the federal role
in public education. The Democrats found most of his
agenda acceptable, except for vouchers that would let
parents choose private schools, including religious ones,
for their children. Vouchers are a bad idea, but that's
not why the Hive hates them: it hates parental freedom
and especially Christian schooling. It regards children's
minds as state property, which the Constitution makes
off-limits to religion.
* * *
Wouldn't the privatization of education doom poor
children to illiteracy? The old-time libertarian Leonard
Read used to answer that statist cliché by saying that if
the state had always paid for our shoes, any proposal to
privatize shoes would have been denounced as dooming poor
children to go barefoot. Judging by the level of public
discourse in the early decades of the Republic, this
country was far more literate *before* education became
a state province than it is today. In fact, if education
had remained private, any proposal to turn it over to the
state would shock all lovers of liberty. But by now
Americans are inured to the intellectual serfdom of state
education.
* * *
Clinton's two terms have been like eight years of
FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF, with "adult content." So it was
wonderfully apt that his farewell address was upstaged by
a sex scandal involving his "spiritual counselor," Jesse
Jackson. The next day, with equal fitness, Clinton became
the first president to leave office with a plea bargain.
On his last half-day, with shameless crassness, he gave
presidential pardons to his half-brother and numerous
pals and cronies, notably the fugitive financier Marc
Rich, whose ex-wife Denise, a major Democratic donor, had
pleaded his case for a year during a hundred visits to
the Clintons. Even the NEW YORK TIMES took note with a
shocked editorial. Thus ended perhaps the most ethical
administration in our nation's history.
* * *
Jackson's penitential retirement from public life
lasted nearly a *whole weekend*. It was literally a
sabbatical: a single Sabbath. And the reason soon became
clear: he had a big Wall Street fundraising gala
scheduled for the following Thursday, organized by his
colleague-rival Al Sharpton. A day earlier, in fact, a
huge $7 billion bond deal had been closed by the Wall
Street Project, and "Jackson's cronies got a cut of the
action," according to the NEW YORK POST. Jackson's
specialty is the corporate shakedown, extracting big
bucks from businesses by pressuring them to hire his
racial-sensitivity "consultants." Neither the press nor
the government seems to want to investigate his curious
finances; he hasn't been audited since 1982, even though,
according to Bill O'Reilly, his Rainbow Push Coalition
claimed $1.2 million in travel expenses and submitted no
receipts. "You try that," suggests O'Reilly.
Exclusive to the electronic version:
SOBRAN'S has lost a dear and most delightful friend,
former Congressman John Schmitz, who died of cancer at
70. In 1972 John got more than a million votes when he
ran for president on the American Independent Party
ticket. His jaunty wit annoyed Richard Nixon and Ronald
Reagan, both of whom found him intolerably conservative;
he found them unbearably funny. Though John was a serious
and principled man, you couldn't talk to him for five
minutes without encountering his marvelous sense of the
ludicrous. Politics always made him laugh. He took a
merry pride in living in the Capitol Hill house once
occupied by Joe McCarthy. What great company he was! Our
deepest sympathy to those who will miss him even more
than we will, his wife Mary and his family.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: OUT OF GEAR WITHOUT SCHMITZ
(page 2)
In 1972 I helped to arrange a speech by Rep. John G.
Schmitz in Chicago for Illinois Young Americans for
Freedom. The 42-year old lame-duck congressman had
annoyed the Republican Party in Orange County,
California, home of Richard Nixon, by his staunch,
unwavering conservatism, and Nixon himself wanted him out
of the Congress. Inspired by Schmitz's speech to our YAF
convention, I cast my first presidential vote for him. He
received more than 1 million votes in 32 states, a very
large showing for a minor-party candidate.
John Schmitz died in January at the age of 70. He
had had prostrate cancer for eleven years, but it had
been in remission most of the time and he looked and felt
healthy up until the last few weeks of his life when the
cancer returned and spread uncontrollably.
Without ever asking him, I knew why he felt Joe
Sobran to be a kindred spirit: John was pushed out of the
GOP, and even out of some conservative circles, for being
too conservative -- and for telling the truth.
John was a SOBRAN'S Charter Subscriber and his
sparkling personality lit up our annual events. At the
celebration in 1997, he had the audience in stitches with
his wit: "There are right tackles, right corners, right
ends, and even right wings in hockey," he said. "My
position on the team, and yours, Joe, is that of 'right
but.' The way you play this position of 'right but' is to
speak the truth and say it like it is. Then your friends
come up to you and whisper in your ear, 'Joe, you're
right, but ...'"
John was also a devout Catholic who preferred the
pre-Vatican II Mass in Latin. The readings at his funeral
Mass, which he helped to select, were: Revelation 19:11-
16 describing the destruction of the pagan nations by a
rider called "The Faithful and True" on a white horse;
II Timothy 2:8-13 ("The Word of God is not fettered");
and Psalm 62 ("Only in God is my soul at rest"). The
Gospel reading was John 6:51-58 ("I am the living bread
come down from heaven").
Because he was a colonel and an aviator in the
Marine Reserves, John had a full-fledged military burial
at Arlington Cemetery, complete with a three-gun salute.
As a state senator, John helped to bring about the
conversion of a brilliant young staffer to Catholicism
(even serving as his godfather) and took him to
Washington when he was elected to Congress. That staffer
was Dr. Warren Carroll, who later founded Christendom
College and who has written a number of invaluable books
on the Catholic faith and history. Thus John is
indirectly responsible for the founding of Christendom
College. Warren Carroll, who gave the eulogy at John's
funeral, said that his former boss was "a great and
highly principled man" whom he was "proud to have
served."
The family has put up a website that includes his
complete bio, photographs, and other items:
www.JohnGSchmitz.com.
Schmitz's campaign slogan was "When you're out of
Schmitz, you're out of gear." SOBRAN'S and your friends
will be permanently out of gear without you, John. Our
prayers are for the repose of your soul and the
consolation of your family.
--- Fran Griffin
Publisher
EXIT CLINTON
(page 3; material exclusive to the electronic version is
included in curly brackets, { thus })
Are we really rid of him at last? Instead of moving to
Hollywood, where he belongs, it now appears that Bill
Clinton will reside in Washington as a Senate spouse,
relishing his celebrity until such time as he is run out
of town on a rail. We should have known we wouldn't be
rid of him without a struggle.
How will history rank Clinton among presidents? That's
easy: the funniest. He has no competition.
NBC's wee-hours wag Conan O'Brien has written a
hilarious piece for TIME magazine on Clinton's appeal.
Yes, he was great for business: O'Brien imagines a feast
at which comedians are glutted with the early Clinton
scandals, can't eat another bite, back away from the
table as they pick the last bit of Travelgate from
between their teeth, when suddenly Clinton reenters
"wheeling in the flaming Baked Alaska that is Monica
Lewinsky."
But Clinton's real interest, O'Brien says, isn't
limited to comedians. He is "our first cartoon
president." Like a cartoon character, he is totally
indestructible. No matter how many anvils fall on his
head, no matter how often he is dropped into the Grand
Canyon, no matter how many cigars explode in his mouth,
he always bounces back, unhurt, cheerful, and ready for
more. { He turns those around him into cartoon figures
too: Kenneth Starr becomes Yosemite Sam, complete with a
sword and a big hat with a buckle on it, eternally
frustrated in pursuit of his invulnerable quarry. }
No solemn analysis has captured it better. We've had
eight years of low -- very low -- comedy. Its legacy is
the word "Clintonian." Political theory and principle
stand speechless before this incredible character.
Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were serious
villains, and we can discuss what they did to this
country in terms of constitutional law and philosophies
of government. But Clinton makes it hard to keep a
straight face. After his two terms, one still wants to
say: "This is a joke, right?"
Not that there weren't serious moments and serious
consequences. Clinton contributed grandly to the moral
and cultural rot that afflicts this country, promoting
abortion, sodomy, and other vices, with corollary horrors
like government-funded experiments on dead fetuses. His
possible role in the death of Vincent Foster, his wife's
boyfriend, remains a mystery. He used the war powers of
the extraconstitutional presidency to bomb his way out of
impeachment, an act that should have resulted in his
removal by itself (if only Republicans didn't see bombing
a few foreigners as proof of executive mettle). Whatever
was wrong with the federal government when Clinton took
office, he aggravated it.
Whether cavorting with Monica on company time,
discussing his underwear preferences in public, or
sniping ungraciously at his successor in his final days,
Clinton conducted his presidency with a total lack of
dignity. Self-respect was alien to him. He { laughed
gamely (as Hillary smoldered beside him) when shock-jock
Don Imus, at a National Press Club banquet, made zipper
jokes at his expense; what else could he do? By then he
had } made decorum a thing of the remote past, bringing
tacky farce to the Oval Office and the Lincoln Bedroom.
Everything entrusted to him, possibly including nuclear
secrets, was for sale.
{ When President George H.W. Bush tried to raise "the
character issue" in the 1992 campaign, it sounded
grouchy. We soon learned how right Bush was. Clinton
predicted that his would be "perhaps the most ethical
administration in our nation's history" and called his
wife "the most ethical person I have ever met." As usual,
Clinton's words became memorable only when experience
cast its ironic light on them. He didn't inhale, he
didn't have sex with that woman, the era of big
government was over: he backed into BARTLETT'S. }
Then there was { his supporting cast of gargoyles:
Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright, Donna Shalala, James
Carville, Joycelyn Elders, Webb Hubbell, Dick Morris....
But above all, there was } Hillary, the most detested
first lady in American history, who owed her status as
the nation's foremost feminist entirely to the fact that
she was married to a president and stuck out a rotten
marriage only because she loved power as much as he did.
She not only got away with her own share in their crimes,
but wound up with a seat in the U.S. Senate to boot.
Clinton was an embarrassment for liberals and a
disaster for conservatives. He abandoned the conventional
left-wing postures of liberalism, giving the market
reasonably free rein, bucking the labor unions on free
trade, striking conservative attitudes here and there,
and proclaiming the end of "the era of big government."
He proved more venal than any Republican, raising funds
by hook and crook. His sexual scandals exposed feminists
as absurd hypocrites: faced with evidence of his serial
groping and even an alleged rape, they forgot about
"sexual harassment" (in which powerful white males prey
on women in the office), made excuses for him, and
attacked his accusers. All the same, he found ingenious
new ways to centralize power in the federal government
and the executive branch in particular.
But there was no particular theme in Clinton's
presidency, no guiding philosophy. His only consistent
concern was power, which he flagrantly used for his own
benefit. Right to the end he seemed to be an impostor in
the office. Somehow he made it to the finish line. Our
only consolation is that he won't be remembered for the
things he wants to be remembered for. He will be
remembered for ... the things everyone remembers.
AMERICA'S TRAGIC HERO
(pages 4-6)
In the evening of November 9, 1863, President
Abraham Lincoln went where he often went for amusement
and relaxation, to Ford's Theater. On this particular
evening he "rapturously" applauded a rising young star,
24-year-old John Wilkes Booth, performing in a revival of
an old hit called THE MARBLE HEART. One critic called him
a "popular young tragedian, who appears to have taken our
citizens by storm."
When told of Lincoln's admiration, Booth snarled
that he would "rather have the applause of a nigger."
This seemed unlike him; he was known to both family and
friends as a genial and light-hearted young man, handsome
and attractive to both sexes, something of a playboy. But
politics had embittered his temper. Not knowing this,
Lincoln sent word that he would like to meet Booth. Booth
ignored the invitation.
Lincoln was also to see the actor in HAMLET, RICHARD
III, and other Shakespearean roles. Fate smiles grimly
here; Lincoln was our most Shakespearean president in
more ways than one, and Shakespeare was his link to his
assassin. In killing Lincoln, Booth thought he was
reenacting one of his stage roles, that of Brutus
striking down the dictator Caesar: leaping from the
balcony to the stage, he cried Brutus's legendary (though
not Shakespearean) words, "Sic semper tyrannis!"
But Lincoln's favorite play was MACBETH. He had
read it often, he wrote to the actor James Hackett,
"perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader.... I
think nothing equals MACBETH. It is wonderful." He had
seen Booth in that role too.
Lincoln's fascination with this play is itself
fascinating. He knew that much of the country regarded
him as a Macbeth -- a tyrant, a usurper, a murderer, and
his conscience may have prompted him to ask whether he
could be reasonably seen in that light. He had expected a
quick end to the "rebellion," but the war had dragged on
for years, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. Many
Northerners clamored for a peaceful settlement. If the
war was not justified, Lincoln had much to answer for,
infinitely more than he could have imagined at the
beginning.
Apart from the scale of violence against the South,
including its civilian population and their property,
Lincoln aroused angry opposition in the North. "Saving
the Union" had required him to transgress against the
Constitution and civil liberties; he acted as a dictator,
assuming both legislative and executive powers. An
Illinois newspaper accused him of "seeking to inaugurate
a reign of terror in the loyal states by military arrests
... of citizens without a trial, to browbeat all
opposition by villainous and false charges of disloyalty
against whole classes of patriotic citizens, to destroy
all constitutional guarantees of free speech, a free
press, and the writ of habeas corpus." His biographer
David Herbert Donald notes: "Editors feared that they
might be locked up in Fort Lafayette or in the Old
Capitol Prison in Washington if they voiced their
criticisms too freely, and even writers of private
letters began to guard their language." (Addressing a
group of Indian chiefs in the White House, Lincoln urged
them to emulate white civilization: "We are not, as a
race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as
our red brethren." Donald says drily: "The irony was
unintentional.")
As the ghastly war continued inconclusively, Lincoln
must have pondered Macbeth's words:
I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Lincoln's conscience never became as hardened as
Macbeth's. He had never sought power out of personal
vanity; he always appealed to principle and tried to
justify his actions constitutionally. Still, he found
himself mysteriously enmeshed in evil and waste beyond
comprehension.
In scale of character, in eloquence, and in impact
on his country, Lincoln had the dimensions of a
Shakespearean tragic hero. Aristotle wrote in his POETICS
that tragic action must have "magnitude"; and Lincoln's
action certainly had that quality. He also displayed the
tragic flaw of rash judgment; despite his deliberation,
he had ignored the advice of his cabinet by launching war
over Fort Sumter, failing to foresee the madly
disproportionate violence that would ensue from a
legalistic dispute over secession.
Lincoln can be best understood in the light of A.C.
Bradley's great analysis of Shakespearean tragedy. The
tragic hero's "fate affects the welfare of a whole nation
or empire." Bradley adds: "The calamities of tragedy do
not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly
from actions, and those the actions of men." We feel, as
we watch, "that the calamities and catastrophe follow
inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main
source of these deeds is character."
The tragic hero is neither saint, villain, nor
passive victim: he is the cause of his own and his
society's ruin, in spite of his own intention. As
Aristotle says, the ruin of a purely innocent man is not
tragic; it is injustice. That of a purely evil man is not
tragedy, but justice. That of a passive victim is mere
accident, which isn't tragic either. But as Bradley says:
"That men may start a course of events but can neither
calculate nor control it, is a *tragic* fact."
Lincoln was driven to meditate on his relation to
the events he had set in motion. By the fall of 1862 he
was reflecting: "In the present civil war it is quite
possible that God's purpose is something different from
the purpose of either party." In 1864 he wrote: "I claim
not to have controlled events, but plainly confess that
events have controlled me." Was he trying to disclaim
responsibility? He always insisted that the South "began"
the war, which, even if true, would not necessarily mean
that the South bore the guilt for what the war became.
Perhaps sensing this, he referred the problem to
Providence, which had allowed the war to continue and
spread.
In his second inaugural address, in March 1865,
Lincoln said: "Both parties deprecated war; but one of
them would *make* war rather than let the nation
survive; and the other would *accept* war rather than
let it perish. And the war came." The balanced rhetoric
is used to express an imbalance of blame: the South
*made* war (to *destroy* the Union), the North merely
*accepted* war (to *save* the Union). "Neither party
expected for the war the magnitude, or the duration,
which it has already attained."
He went on:
Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same
God; and each invokes His aid against the
other. It may seem strange that any men should
dare to ask a just God's assistance in wring-
ing their bread from the sweat of other men's
faces; but let us judge not that we be not
judged. The prayers of both could not be
answered; that of neither has been answered
fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.
Here he frames the war simply as a war between freedom
and slavery, implying that God has mysteriously withheld
a quick and just victory from the evidently righteous
side, in contrast to the side that hypocritically prays
while exploiting slaves.
Finally, Lincoln offers a new theodicy: he supposes
that a just God "wills" that the war continue "until
every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by
another drawn with the sword" -- as if the number killed
by slavery matched the number of the war dead (more than
600,000)! Lincoln's pre-war words against slavery, which
he viewed as temporarily tolerable, had never suggested
that it approached such a level of atrocity. But the
scale of the war he had waged forced him to escalate his
rhetoric in self-justification. In Lincoln's mind, at
least, the horrors of slavery seem to have intensified
enormously during the "rebellion." That might explain why
what began as a debate should end as a holocaust.
Again let us hear Bradley on tragic action. He cites
a line from HAMLET as encapsulating Shakespeare's
philosophy of tragedy:
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our
own.
The words "their ends," Bradley explains, mean
the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and
these, says the speaker, are not our own. The
tragic world is a world of action, and action
is the translation of thought into reality. We
see men and women confidently attempting it.
They strike into the existing order of things
in pursuance of their ideas. But what they
achieve is not what they intended; it is ter-
ribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we
say to ourselves, of the world on which they
operate. They fight blindly in the dark, and
the power that works through them makes them
the instrument of a design which is not theirs.
They act freely, and yet their action binds
them hand and foot. And it makes no differ
ence whether they meant well or ill. No one
could mean better than Brutus, but he con-
trives misery for his country and death for
himself. No one could mean worse than Iago,
and he too is caught in the web he spins for
others. Hamlet, recoiling from the duty of
revenge, is pushed into blood-guiltiness he
never dreamed of, and forced at last on the
revenge he could not will. His adversary's
murders, and no less his adversary's remorse,
bring about the opposite of what they sought.
Lear follows an old man's whim, half generous,
half selfish; and in a moment it looses all
the powers of darkness upon him. Othello agon-
izes over an empty fiction, and, meaning to
execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and
strangles love. They understand themselves no
better than the world about them.... Every-
where, in this tragic world, man's thought,
translated into act, is transformed into the
opposite of itself. His act, the movement of a
few ounces of matter in a moment of time, be-
comes a monstrous flood which spreads over a
kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams of doing, he
achieves that which he least dreamed of, his
own destruction.
Both of Lincoln's inaugural addresses are attempts
at self-justification. But how different they are! The
first, in 1861, attempts to blame the coming war on the
South, but with no conception of what a vast convulsion
that war will become. Confining itself to secular
politics, it makes only a glancing reference to God;
there is no sense of providential mystery about it.
Lincoln hopes for a sensible settlement on both sides.
By the time of the 1865 speech, Lincoln has seen an
abstract argument over constitutional rights transformed
into true tragedy: a continent of groaning bodies,
severed limbs, rotting corpses, and sobbing widows. It is
God's will, he says, not my doing! But he can't forbear
repeating that the South, the slave states, started it,
and so bears any guilt that may be assigned to human
agencies.
Still, we realize that Lincoln had chosen a course
of action that became "terribly unlike" his intention. He
had "saved" the Union, but the Union that he saved had
turned into a very different thing from the Union he had
set out to save.
It was also a very different thing from the Union he
dreamed of, in which the "gradual" and "compensated"
emancipation of slaves would find its "glorious
consummation" in the colonization of freed blacks outside
the United States. Following Henry Clay, he had always
worked to spare the nation a permanent race problem by
"returning to Africa her lost children." Or, if not to
Africa, then to some tropical place in Latin America. In
1862 he had even proposed to Congress a constitutional
amendment to promote his plan. But the idea never caught
on, and emancipation came too abruptly for any such
protracted program as he had intended.
By July 1864 he had given the plan up. His secretary
John Hay wrote in his diary: "I am glad the President has
sloughed off that idea of colonization. I have always
thought it a hideous & barbarous humbug," and Hay added
that the "thievery" of those entrusted with establishing
a black colony in the Panama region had "about converted
[Lincoln] to the same belief." A new version of
reconstruction, coming to terms with the presence of free
blacks in the South, now had to be improvised. And
Lincoln's dream of a united white America had to be
forsaken.
Posterity, forgetting his dream, now treats the
result of the war as the *fulfillment* of Lincoln's
intention. The real result may be summed up as the
destruction of "that balance of power on which the
perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend"
-- the words of the 1860 Republican platform, quoted by
Lincoln in his first inaugural address. Whatever his sins
and crimes, and they were enormous, Lincoln never
intended the annihilation of the original constitutional
system.
Posterity has also misconceived Booth. He has been
treated as a lone and insignificant fanatic. He was not.
He was a citizen of Maryland, the victim of Lincoln's
greatest outrage against "government of the people, by
the people, for the people," when he destroyed its
elected legislature in 1861. Booth and his fellow
conspirators had reason to believe they were playing
Brutus to Lincoln's Caesar. Far from being irrational and
isolated, the assassination of Lincoln had the resonance
of classical precedent. It was the final and culminating
outburst of the violent passions he had unleashed.
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
NUGGETS
A DIFFERENT DOUGLASS-LINCOLN DEBATE: It is interesting,
in light of what I have said of Lincoln's dream, to read
the judgment of the noted ex-slave abolitionist Frederick
Douglass: "He was preeminently the white man's president,
entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was
ready and willing at any time during the first years of
his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the
rights of humanity in the colored people in order to
promote the welfare of the white people of this country.
In all his education and feeling he was an American of
the Americans. He came into the presidential chair upon
one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension
of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy
had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion
to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and
perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham
Lincoln was not less ready than any other president to
draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all
the supposed constitutional guarantees of the United
States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere
inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue,
recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his
master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty,
though the guilty master were already in arms against the
government. The race to which we belong were not the
special objects of his consideration." (page 6)
THE BLOODY SHIRT, AGAIN: John Ashcroft, Bush's choice for
attorney general, was exposed as a reb-symp when it came
out he'd said the Confederacy stood for some good
principles: states' rights, resistance to centralization.
Despite the predictable howls, it's good to know he has a
certain immunity to the prevalent propaganda. (page 8)
THE END OF THE BEGINNING? Most first couples, when their
time is up, leave the White House and return whence they
came, retiring with quiet decorum. But the decorum-
challenged Clintons will be sticking around, inhabiting a
big house in Georgetown. Hillaree will be in the Senate,
Bill will maintain high-profile celebrity. The soap opera
may be far from over. (page 10)
WHODUNIT? You know about the Shakespeare authorship
question. A new authorship question impends: Who will
actually write the book for which Hillary is getting
$8 million? What makes it such a rip-off is that Hillary
will make sure the book doesn't come clean on any of the
questions that pique public curiosity. Which means she
will have to study every page of it as a precaution.
Still, $8 million is probably the most anyone has ever
been paid to read a book. (page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
TOM DIEMER RIP: In early January, Tom Diemer of Cleveland
lost his long battle to cancer at 65. I had the privilege
of attending, in the room where he was to die, a Mass
celebrated by his son Father Michael Diemer, who also
anointed him. Tom endured pain and faced death with faith
and courage. Nobody who knew him will ever forget him.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Don't Cut Taxes -- Abolish Them (January 9, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010109.shtml
* The Cost-Free Smear (January 11, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010111.shtml
* Slavery, No; Secession, Yes (January 16, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010116.shtml
* Jesse Jackson's Contrition (January 18, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010118.shtml
* The Real Jesse Jackson (January 23, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010123.shtml
* None Dare Call It "Killing" (January 25, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010125.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran, except as noted.
You may forward this newsletter if you include the
following subscription and copyright information:
Subscribe to the Sobran E-Package.
See http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml
or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples
or call 800-513-5053.
Copyright (c) 2001 by the Griffin Internet
Syndicate, www.griffnews.com. All rights reserved.
[ENDS]