SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
January 2002
Volume 9, No. 1
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Moving Picture (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> Must We Make War?
-> Homage to Johnson
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
The Moving Picture
(pages 1-2)
A Massachusetts firm, Advanced Cell Technology, has
announced that it has successfully cloned human embryos.
Its curious justification is that the clones will be used
only for "harvesting" cells, not brought to term as
children. In other words, human lives are now being
created in order to be destroyed. This is surely the most
perverse advance of science since the atomic bomb; less
noisy, but even more eerie. The feat was achieved, and
received, with the sort of diabolical blandness C.S.
Lewis taught us to beware of.
* * *
Having survived a stabbing by an intruder in his
home two years ago, George Harrison, dead of cancer at
58, has become the first Beatle to die of natural causes.
Harrison wasn't much of a musician; his biggest post-
Beatle hit, "My Sweet Lord," resulted in a lawsuit for
copyright violation. But the Beatles were always
celebrities, not musicians, not even entertainers. The
violence they attracted, though of course undeserved, was
the obverse of the crazed idolatry they thrived on. An
older generation of pop singers -- Crosby, Sinatra, Cole,
Bennett -- never had much to fear from their fans. Yet
Harrison was a pleasant man who never enjoyed the
Beatlemaniacal frenzy, and we're saddened by his passing.
* * *
Liberals are exulting: new polls show that since the
9/11 attacks, Americans have a renewed faith in the
Federal Government's ability to solve problems. Odd,
since that selfsame government failed to protect us from
those attacks, and has by no means proved that it has
defeated, or *can* defeat, terrorism. Experience yields
many lessons, but not always the ones people choose to
draw from it.
* * *
One undrawn lesson would seem to be that the more
power is concentrated, the more inviting -- and
vulnerable -- to attack it becomes. If this country were
still decentralized as of old, it would probably not
provoke terrorism, and in any case wouldn't provide such
choice targets as a Pentagon. In their eagerness to
avenge the 9/11 attacks, many Americans are forgetting
that those attacks were themselves acts of revenge. Which
is not to say they were justified (revenge is usually
unholy), but only that they were a predictable reaction
to the current U.S. role in the world. The question is
not only whether the U.S. role is defensible, but whether
we really want to go on living like this.
* * *
Are there any real conservatives left? Attorney
General John Ashcroft, forgetting his notorious
Confederate sympathies, is eager to expand Federal
(especially presidential) powers for the sake of fighting
terrorism, the Constitution be damned. He has the support
of conservative publications like the WALL STREET JOURNAL
and THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The most amusing case is
NATIONAL REVIEW, which argues that we can have both
global empire *and* limited government; you wonder if
these kids have ever heard of James Burnham. Burnham, one
of the magazine's founding editors and its resident
geopolitical thinker, can be criticized on many counts.
But he always insisted on one principle: You can't have
it both ways. "Who says A must say B." You have to
choose, and you have to face the consequences of your
choice.
* * *
Sixty years after Pearl Harbor, pundit David Brooks,
writing in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, contrasts the upbeat
America of December 1941, eager to take on the "Japs,"
with the darker spirit of America in December 2001. But
the quotations Brooks cites from the 1941 press tell a
slightly different story. Among those most eager for war
were the pro-Soviet liberals; while the most reluctant
included patriots who were suspicious of Franklin
Roosevelt and his foreign friends. In fact, those most
desirous of sending American forces to fight abroad have
often been people with foreign sympathies -- for Britain,
the Soviet Union, and now Israel. And they always use the
language of American patriotism. Jonathan Daniels wrote
in the Stalinist magazine THE NATION, shortly after Pearl
Harbor: "Here is the time when a man can be what an
American means, can fight for what America has always
meant -- an audacious, adventurous seeking for a decent
earth." Sound familiar?
* * *
Even after 60 years, the U.S. Government hasn't
released the secret documents that might reveal how much
intelligence was gathered about Japanese intentions
before Pearl Harbor. What did Franklin Roosevelt really
know, and when did he know it? Did he even allow the
attack to occur, when he might have prevented it? The
facts are no longer being concealed from our Axis
enemies, or even from our Soviet allies, all of whom have
ceased to exist. They are being concealed from the
government's most dangerous potential enemy: the American
people.
* * *
The latest cliche has it that 9/11 "changed
everything." Well, it did change one thing: this isn't
Bill Clinton's world anymore. He instantly ceased being a
focus of interest, even for Clinton-haters (Rush Limbaugh
always excepted). His star has flickered out. He has
reportedly been telling friends that he wishes the
attacks had occurred on his watch, so that he could have
faced a challenge worthy of his talents, established his
place in history, and left a legacy of greatness.
Instead, he is being defined in retrospect by events he
failed to foresee or prevent, leaving a legacy of
frivolity. It all reminds me of Monica Lewinsky's
expressed hope that she wouldn't be remembered just for
you-know-what; to which a wag retorted, "Well, she'd
better start working on a cure for cancer." Maybe Bill
could help her.
* * *
John Walker Lindh, alias Suleyman al-Faris, has made
the cover of Newsweek and may face prosecution for
treason or something. As you know, he's the oddball
California boy, born a Catholic, who converted to Islam
and was captured while fighting among the Taliban in
Afghanistan. Nobody seems to be upset that he renounced
his Savior, Jesus Christ; no, his sin was renouncing his
nation-state. Meanwhile, the politicians who betray this
country every day of the week never make headlines; the
greatest traitor in American history, Franklin Roosevelt,
is still honored in word and monument. Lindh is a
powerless eccentric who could do his native country
little harm -- and therefore an easy target for
indignation. We don't get angry at the people who are
really in positions to hurt us, and who do it so
routinely that we no longer define their doings as
harmful. Lindh is a victim of religious persecution: he's
being punished for failing to worship our state.
Must We Make War?
(pages 3-4)
{{ Material dropped or changed solely for reasons of
space appears in double curly brackets }}
After the terrific shock of the 9/11 attacks, most
Americans felt we truly had no choice but to make war,
even if the enemy could hardly be identified. I tried to
resist the feeling, but there was no denying its power.
Say what you will against the "us-versus-them" mentality,
in moments of crisis it has a way of swamping all other
thoughts and feelings.
The trouble is that it's not only unclear who "them"
is; just who is "us"? Is the U.S. Government truly the
organ of the American people? Well, the overwhelming
majority of the American people think so. They believe it
so strongly that they are currently willing to allow the
government to claim new powers over them, in the faith
that it is thereby protecting them against the shadowy
enemy. It's a strange spectacle. As in World War II --
the glorious precedent that is being cited to justify
these doings -- the rulers are rallying their subjects to
surrender their freedoms. Why? In order to defend
freedom!
Deep and primitive passions are taking over, and the
government is making the most of them. So far its war in
Afghanistan appears fully successful, in that it is
routing the Taliban regime with celerity and ease and
without American casualties.
{{ Yet President Bush keeps warning us that this will
be a long, tough war. Will it? That depends on how the
war -- and victory -- are defined. We still don't know
whether Osama bin Laden has been weakened; for that
matter, we still don't know just what his relation to the
September 11 attacks was. Did he personally direct them?
Or were the agents who died during their crimes merely
his alumni, so to speak? If the latter, the war may be a
pointless exercise, rather like dropping bombs on Mrs.
O'Leary's cow to retaliate for the Chicago fire.
At any rate, }} we are seeing an awesome assertion
of might. U.S. military forces have already advanced far
beyond the capability they displayed during the 1991 Gulf
War. Their power and precision make the carpet-bombings
of World War II and Vietnam seem crude, sloppy, and
almost prehistoric. Critics who warned of a "quagmire"
have already been squelched.
The question now (as I write) is whether the next
target will be Iraq. Hawkish pundits are urging the Bush
administration to take out all of Israel's enemies in the
Middle East, though of course they don't quite put it
that way. Bush's father is still being blamed for failing
to "finish the job" by destroying Saddam Hussein in 1991;
whether the junior Bush will take this to heart by
widening the war remains to be seen.
No doubt about it, the war and its associated
measures have raised American morale. Already the menace
of bin Laden seems to have faded away. After a few jumpy
weeks, nobody now seems fearful that the alleged
mastermind is going to hit us with another horrible
surprise. The anthrax scare has passed; so has talk of
suitcase nukes. There is a quiet and perhaps premature
sense that the fiend has hit us with his best shot, and
now it's his turn to worry.
In short, the war has at least had one good effect:
it has made us feel better. It has relieved our hysteria.
Has it actually solved the problem, or even ameliorated
the real situation? Nobody knows. Nobody can know. But it
has given "us" the satisfaction of feeling that "we" have
taught "them" a lesson or two. Presumably bin Laden is
too busy ducking bombs and dodging from cave to cave to
order further strikes on targets in this country.
Would he have struck again by now if this war hadn't
begun? {{ As I say, we really don't know the extent of
his role in the first attacks. It's quite possible that
the 9/11 hijackers were more like graduates of the Osama
bin Laden School of Terrorism, acting on their own
initiative in this case, than agents under his direction.
We may never learn the truth. And since the hijackers
themselves perished, there may be no sequel. It may have
been a unique, one-time event, inspired but not
controlled by bin Laden.
If so, the whole war is in vain. }} In any case,
bombing Afghanistan won't prevent other terrorists,
already within U.S. borders, from striking here.
Still, maybe the war can be justified on the terms
of the Leviathan state and its requirements. Let's assume
that the 9/11 attacks were the work of bin Laden and al-
Qaeda, and that unless the U.S. Government retaliated,
more and worse would follow. How much damage could these
fanatics really do? The casualty toll at the World Trade
Center is now estimated at fewer than 4,000 deaths, fewer
than a tenth of the 50,000 or so who were employed there.
People tend to confuse horror with danger. In this case,
the horror was unsurpassed; but the danger has been
vastly overstated. Your chance of being killed by a
terrorist is like your chance of winning the lottery.
Even if the terrorists were running wild, unopposed, your
personal risk would be minute.
The precautions that are being taken against further
hijackings have passed the point of absurdity. Passengers
waiting in line in airports share wry jokes about the
excess. Billions are being spent to prevent a recurrence
of something {{ al-Qaeda (assuming its responsibility)
would be most unlikely }} to try again, since, in
terrorism, surprise is of the essence. But the U.S.
Government has seized the opportunity to expand its
powers, with little opposition; and the most aggressive
expander has been the allegedly ultraconservative
attorney general, John Ashcroft. Earlier this year, his
professed sympathy for the Confederate cause, which
alarmed liberals, led me to hope he would prove an
opponent of the centralized Leviathan state. Et tu,
Brute?
We Americans should be asking ourselves: Do we
really want to live like this? Permanently? Is life in
the Leviathan state, however prosperous, worth the price?
And how did our confederated Republic turn into this
consolidated Leviathan?
Instead of rehearsing the story of the Civil War,
the Wilson era, the New Deal, and all that, let me just
mention Switzerland. Happily, there is no prospect of war
between the United States and Switzerland. The Swiss
don't do war. They have no enemies, no allies, no empire,
and great wealth. They prize their neutrality (for which
they are roundly denounced as amoral). They passed
unscathed through two world wars (while the "victors"
lost millions); they have no armed forces abroad. {{ If
the Swiss have any ideals, they keep them to them-
selves; }} they know nothing of "the responsibilities of
world leadership," and don't even claim to be a shining
city on a hill. By the way, they have retained a federal,
decentralized system of government.
And for some reason Switzerland has no problem today
with terrorists. Naturally, we are urged to shun the
Swiss example and emulate the Israelis, who live in
constant turmoil. Is there a more dangerous place on
earth for Jews than the state that was founded as a
Jewish refuge? Doesn't having to be obsessed with
survival defeat the whole idea? Jews elsewhere in the
world are doing just fine; instead of seeing Israel as a
haven from persecution, they have to worry about its
safety!
Professor Donald Livingston of Emory University
recently gave an exceedingly wise talk on the difference
between the Hobbesian Leviathan state and the
Aristotelian polis. In the Leviathan, the state rules by
fear; there is no real community, and law is merely the
imperial will of the ruler, backed by raw force. In the
tiny polis, citizens know each other, and they obey the
law because it expresses their shared morals and customs,
not because the state threatens them.
The modern state is Leviathan. The history of the
United States is the story of the growth of centralized
power, devouring local communities and forcing them to
conform to its will. Even the U.S. Constitution, which
was originally designed to define and thereby *limit*
Federal powers, has been perverted into a tool by which
the central government, through specious interpretation,
imposes uniformity.
As the monolithic Leviathan has become more
aggressive internally, it has also come increasingly into
foreign collisions. It is equally the enemy of the
American Christian and the Arab Muslim. I think it is
wrong, but this would be just as true even if it were
right. In a purely objective sense, it puts itself in
opposition to every people whose traditions it despises.
How can it not?
In August 1945 the U.S. Government became,
undeniably, a terrorist state. It deployed a weapon that
changed not only the nature of war, but the nature of
governance. With the atomic bomb, the modern state could
say to large masses of people: "Obey me, or I will kill
you." This is the ultimate source of its authority: the
threat to kill. Most rulers have used this threat, but
never before could it be made on such a colossal scale.
Even Hobbes never dreamed that Leviathan would acquire
such power.
This poses a question that vexes many Americans:
Isn't it better that "we" should have gotten this power
before Hitler or Stalin did? And doesn't that in itself
justify the U.S. role in World War II?
Without the United States, the war would have ended
much sooner, Germany wouldn't have had time to develop
the bomb, and Soviet spies would have had no one to steal
its secrets from. It is conceivable that Germany might
have developed the bomb after the war, but conceivable
scenarios are infinite. The fact is that the United
States murdered countless people and launched the age of
nuclear terror. It crossed a moral threshold and cannot
be justified on grounds that someone else might have
crossed it later.
As a result, several other governments soon followed
suit. None suspected that miniaturized versions of these
weapons might someday become available to private forces
on the black market. Everyone assumed that the power of
mass murder would remain a state monopoly. In the age of
Leviathan, this seemed reasonable.
And the age of Leviathan is not over. Far from it.
Fewer and fewer of us remember anything else. And as a
result of the events of September 11, Americans'
allegiance to "our" Leviathan has been intensified. The
people trust their government, passively and eagerly
accept its new usurpations of power, and don't ask how it
came to this or how we can return to normal. For most
Americans, this *is* normal. To hope for a restoration of
older traditions seems, at this point, an idle dream.
Leviathan America has set a new example for the
world -- that is, for other states. They don't want to
emulate the U.S. Constitution; they only want to get the
weapons that make constitutionality, legality, pedigree,
succession, and conventional legitimacy irrelevant. "Obey
me, or I will kill you." Or, to borrow a line from THE
GODFATHER: "This is the life we have chosen."
Homage to Johnson
(pages 5-6)
The later eighteenth century in English literature is
called the Age of Johnson, after its greatest man of
letters. Scholars respect the achievement of Johnson's
Dictionary as much as ordinary literate people love
Boswell's LIFE. As Shakespeare gave the English language
its loveliest and most various adornments, Johnson
endowed it with new depth and precision.
But it is still odd that we think of Johnson as
typical of his time. For Johnson was above all a man who
strove to be independent of his time and its fads. His
more fashionable contemporaries regarded him as
hopelessly behind the times; and Boswell, to draw him out
and provoke him to memorable utterance, liked to adopt
the role of the average Enlightenment fool, voicing the
current attitudes that would vex Johnson most. Keeping
aloof from the "Age of Johnson" -- he would have been
amazed by the phrase -- was for Johnson a spiritual as
well as an intellectual necessity; as a Christian he knew
that to be a mere product of your environment, as we say,
is to be damned. So he consciously labored to make the
English language an instrument of salvation, for himself
and for his readers. His prose is an ark of reason
against the flood of sensation and temptation.
He was famous, and comically notorious, for his big
words. Goldsmith once joked that if Johnson had written a
certain fable of little fishes, the fishes would have
talked like whales. But Johnson in conversation, as we
all know, could be hilariously blunt, as when he said of
skeptics like Hume, "Truth, sir, is a cow that will yield
such people no more milk; and so they are gone to milk
the bull." He once counseled Boswell, "Don't use big
words for little matters." Johnson used them for big
matters.
Johnson the writer is anything but prolix. His big
words reveal not looseness of expression, as they
commonly do with most of us, but the strictest
compression of thought. He writes with a constant sense
of the English language's continuity with Latin, and his
meaning is always philosophically exact. The reader who
thinks of him as wordy should try to paraphrase any
passage of Johnson's prose in as few words. The
sturdiness of that prose can be mimicked; its subtlety
cannot.
Stephen C Danckert's collection redeems from
obscurity the Christian moral psychologist who used the
splendid Latinities of the English language to fix our
attention firmly on subtle truths about human motives.
But for his religious purpose, he might have been as
cynical as La Rochefoucauld, whom he matches in sheer
finesse of observation. This is not the Johnson Boswell
captures so brilliantly, but a Johnson who eludes him --
though Boswell assumed his readers would know Johnson
primarily as a great writer, and he would have been
dumbfounded to find his biography supplanting Johnson's
own works in the popular mind. The present book fully
explains why Johnson was so highly regarded before
Boswell made his entrance.
Johnson was both a great writer and a great talker.
Most of us have only enough patience for the delightful
talker and neglect the deeper satisfactions of his essays
and sermons. Johnson's gossip is great fun; but the real
Johnson can never be known without full awareness of the
piety that inspired and guided his work. Boswell gives
lip service to that piety, but he shows it most
memorably, alas, in Johnson's dark flashes of guilt and
fear. (We have grounds for suspecting that Boswell
himself regarded religion only as a source of dread.)
But when Johnson himself writes, we see the workings
of a mind for whom truth is above all nourishment and
consolation for the soul. He resolves his own
perplexities, and shares his hard-won realizations with
his public. His characteristic tone is solemn, but not
without a strain of subdued humor, though he usually
keeps a straight face. Before writing he prayed that his
words would lead no reader astray, but would assist
salvation. And his devotion to Christ, whose name he uses
sparingly, yields wonderful insights into the human
heart, a fine sampling of which is to be found in
Danckert's book.
Johnson's writings are the fruits of his struggle to
fortify his own mind; which is why we find them so
fortifying too. Like Boswell, we turn to him for guidance
against modern heresies, and he seldom fails us.
Yet Johnson did not live to see one of the chief
modern heresies, what may be called the Political Heresy;
he died before it erupted in the French Revolution, which
his friend Edmund Burke quickly recognized, even before
the Reign of Terror, as the harbinger of endless chaos
and tyranny.
In a famous couplet in THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES,
Johnson wrote:
How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Elsewhere he wrote: "The world has been governed in the
name of kings, whose existence has scarcely been
perceived by any real effects beyond their own palaces."
He habitually belittled "schemes of political
improvement" as "very laughable things," denying that
there were serious differences between forms of
government.
Had he lived a decade longer, he, like Burke, would
surely have had to change his tune. With the events in
France, politics would become an all-consuming force in
human life, usurping the place of religion itself. About
this volcanic change, Johnson has nothing specific to say
to us. The Whigs and radicals of his own day were mere
annoyances to him, the American Revolution no more than
colonial insolence. Neither threatened the very
foundations of Christian society.
If we seek Johnson's guidance against the modern
Leviathan state, we must not look for particular
pronouncements on the subject; we can only steep
ourselves in his thought, absorb his attitude, and find
our own way. The question becomes not "What did Johnson
say?" but "What *might* Johnson have said?" Our best
guesses must be lame approximations; but we can be sure
that Johnson would have hated the modern state with all
his pious, generous heart. We can no more imagine the
words his genius would have found for it than we can
imagine the next opera Mozart would have written, granted
another year of life; but we can safely assume that he
would have skewered it in unforgettable epigrams.
For Johnson society was an extension of the family,
and as a devout royalist he considered the king as a
paternal figure. He hated "whiggism" because it
depersonalized government; his own interview with
George III furnishes one of the most touching anecdotes
in English history. He allowed the king to outshine him
in wit, because, as he told Boswell with exquisite
delicacy, "It was not for me to bandy civilities with my
sovereign." From this we may easily gather how he would
have regarded the decapitation of Louis XVI. To Johnson
the atomic bomb would have seemed, morally speaking, a
short step from the guillotine.
Great as Burke was, Johnson makes him seem like a
facile optimist. Johnson had the tragic view of the true
reactionary: it is already too late. What was worth
saving is already irrecoverably lost. This realization
can only come when it can no longer avail. Burke was
trying to save what was gone forever even as he wrote; he
was right, but futile. Johnson did not share Burke's
faith in statecraft.
Yet should we wish that these great reactionaries
had been silent? Is it better not to know at all than to
know too late? No. Our souls demand the truth, however
hard. That is why they are souls. Calvary was the site of
man's greatest hope, but it was no place for optimism.
Hope and optimism are as easy to confuse as Christ
and anti-Christ. Hope is the active conviction that every
soul is worth trying to save, at any cost in suffering;
optimism is the mere wish that goodness will prevail,
whether or not we accept the burden of suffering.
Johnson was a man of stern speech, but tender heart.
His personal charity was great. He took derelicts into
his home and put up with their petty quarreling with each
other. He never forgot that every soul is precious in
God's sight.
For Johnson, charity was not a mere emotion,
sentiment, or mood, but a habit of the will, with its own
logic and rigor. As a personal moral duty, it could not
be shirked or referred to someone else; the modern
welfare state would have seemed to him a perversion of
charity.
We can only regret that Johnson did not live to
confront the Political Heresy in its full bloom; he would
never have gotten around to writing a full treatise about
it, but he would have found succinct words more memorable
than any treatise. He would have defined it for us, as he
defines so many other things, by stating the essence of
the thing in startlingly few words, perhaps in the
colorful animal imagery he loved.
In every age there are those who are impatient with
the follies and constraints of the age, and these, now as
then, are Johnson's readership. Johnson offers truth and
permanence. The Age of Johnson is always.
A shorter version of this essay
originally appeared as a foreword to THE
QUOTABLE JOHNSON, edited by Stephen C.
Danckert and published by The Ignatius Press
in 1992.
NUGGETS
WHY WE FIGHT: Of all the curious arguments for this war,
none can top that of former Attorney General Griffin Bell
in the WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Sixty years ago, Franklin
Roosevelt spoke of a world founded upon four essential
human freedoms. Chief among these was freedom from fear.
Terrorists now pose a dire threat to this freedom." To
paraphrase Roosevelt, the only thing we have to fear is
those who promise freedom from fear. (page 6)
COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS: Since the 9/11 attack, Americans
and their government have taken myriad panicky
precautions against further attacks. I don't know how
much these precautions have cost, but surely the sum is
many times the cost inflicted by the attack itself --
and, as we all know, it will keep rising indefinitely. Is
the price of global empire worth it? Would ordinary
Americans have acquiesced in this meddlesome foreign
policy if they could have foreseen 9/11? *Of course not.*
(page 8)
REHABILITATION? A new book by one Lothar Machtan, THE
HIDDEN HITLER, argues that Hitler was a homosexual. If
this thesis gains acceptance, the Fuehrer will be hard to
criticize: a nonsmoking vegetarian gay person. (page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
FDR EXPOSED (AGAIN): Warmly recommended is Thomas
Fleming's, NEW DEALERS' WAR: FDR AND THE WAR WITHIN WORLD
WAR II (Basic Books). Very readable and rich in detail,
it describes Roosevelt's duplicity and confusion,
confirming many dark suspicions of him. It also shows
that American foreign policy since the war has been a
long attempt to cope with the global mess he made. His
chum Joe Stalin somehow knew of the existence of the
atomic bomb before President Harry Truman did. The book
abounds in colorful characters and anecdotes. A great
corrective to pro-Roosevelt and pro-war propaganda.
THE MYTH OF TOKYO ROSE: History always looks different
when you look into the details, but there are some things
about which everything you remember is apt to be wrong.
Take the infamous Tokyo Rose. She never existed. "Tokyo
Rose" was a composite nickname applied to several
Japanese-American women who happened to be in Japan
during World War II and were pressured into making
broadcasts, which were actually pretty innocuous.
Nevertheless, anti-nisei hysteria was such that a
scapegoat was demanded, so after the war the U.S.
Government prosecuted one of these women, Iva Toguchi, on
trumped-up charges of treason. The government spent a
million dollars making its case but said it couldn't
afford to bring defense witnesses from Japan. The judge
was blatantly prejudiced; the prosecution testimony was
demolished by the defense lawyer. In spite of all this,
Miss Toguchi was barely convicted on one of the eight
dubious charges. (The real traitors, of course, were
never indicted.)
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Price Is No Object (November 13, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011113.shtml
* Hooray for Hollywood! (November 22, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011122.shtml
* The Monolithic State of America (November 27, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011127.shtml
* Celebrity and Mortality (December 6, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011206.shtml
* The Other Amen Corners (December 11, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011211.shtml
* Hail, Switzerland! (December 13, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011213.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]