SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
May 2002
Volume 9, No. 5
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Moving Picture
-> The Obsession
-> Wilder and His Betters
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
The Moving Picture
(pages 1-2)
Desperate, agonized e-mail messages from the West
Bank remind us that Christians are among the innocents
caught in the crossfire between murderous Israeli forces
and West Bank Muslims. Even the Church of the Nativity in
Bethlehem, one of the world's holiest sites, is under
siege; its Franciscan custodians, despite the danger to
themselves, are afraid to leave it temporarily, lest it
be destroyed. One priest has already been killed, several
nuns wounded. Apart from the Pope, Western Christians are
showing little interest in the plight of their co-
religionists.
* * *
Prematurely hailed as "a great wartime president,"
G.W. Bush has now shown that he isn't up to the job of
global emperor. (See below.) This may be a blessing for
the globe. Israel's crazed prime minister, Ariel Sharon,
is too much for him; it's like a dude ranch visitor
trying to ride a furious Brahma bull. Without Sharon's
cooperation in pacifying the Palestinians, Bush won't get
cooperation from the Arab states whose support he needs
for war on Iraq. So Sharon's belligerence may save us
from a disastrous widening of the "war on terrorism."
* * *
Bush, it appears, has no will of his own, or at
least no idea of how to impose it. He reacts to events
and does as little as possible. Like most American
Christians, he thinks the world can be ruled by sermons
-- banal, platitudinous, studiously "even-handed." His
Middle East policy seems to be guided by his hope of
carrying Florida in the next election. You have to feel a
little sorry for Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, NATIONAL
REVIEW, the WALL STREET JOURNAL, and other Republican
pundits who are duty-bound to pretend to portray Bush as
an avatar of American strength and savvy.
* * *
Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East mission was
a total flop: all the Arab governments were adamantly
opposed to war with Iraq. In fact, nearly all European
governments are equally opposed to it. In fact, of all
the governments on earth, only one would whole-heartedly
support the United States against Iraq.
* * *
Optimism is the mother of war. The hawks are all
assuming not only that the United States could defeat
Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, which is plausible, but
that this would settle everything, which is preposterous.
No U.S. puppet government would be legitimate or secure;
the Arabs have many faults, but stupidity isn't one of
them. The region's perpetual turmoil would merely move
into a new phase.
* * *
In his column for the New York DAILY NEWS, A.M.
Rosenthal has smashed his own record for ... well,
Rosenthalian excess: he suggests that France is preparing
concentration camps for Jews. You suspect exaggeration?
Here: "Jews, listen and you will hear the sound of
breaking glass.... Breaking glass, burning synagogues,
and diplomats making filthy anti-Semitic remarks mean
that a sickening number of people around the world, many
in high office, would have no great objections if the
concentration camps arrived again, and would even take
pleasure in speeding their coming.... This year, a French
ambassador to England described Israel as feces.... It
means the blueprints for the new camps are probably
already drawn."
* * *
Bill Clinton now tells NEWSWEEK that he regrets
pardoning Marc Rich: "It wasn't worth the damage to my
reputation." Well, maybe. But it was damaging because it
was so congruent with the reputation he'd already earned.
If he'd been known as an honest man, like Jimmy Carter,
it would have been seen as an anomaly -- well-meaning,
gullible bumbling, perhaps. The problem was that even
Clinton's most dogged defenders saw it as entirely
Clintonesque.
* * *
Yet another left-wing academic fraud has been
exposed. ARMING AMERICA: THE ORIGINS OF A NATIONAL GUN
CULTURE, by Michael Bellesiles of Emory University, made
a big hit with the gun-control crowd two years ago by
showing, contrary to popular belief, that gun ownership
was rare in the early days of the Republic.
Unfortunately, somebody checked Bellesiles's footnotes
and discovered -- get this -- that his sources didn't
even exist! He'd just made them up out of his haid!
Meanwhile, such heavyweight historians as Garry Wills and
Edmund Morgan had vouched for his scholarship and praised
him for debunking a right-wing myth.
* * *
As for gun control generally, the Second Amendment
is clear enough: it assumes that the "right" to keep and
bear arms is natural and inviolable, not created or
granted by the state. Alexander Hamilton speaks of self-
defense as the right that is "paramount" to all others.
But the Tenth Amendment should make all such arguments
needless anyway: it says that powers not "delegated" to
the Federal Government are denied to it, and the
Constitution gives that government no power to limit the
ownership of weapons.
* * *
The scandal rocking the Catholic Church has occurred
in part because Church officials chose to regard
homosexuality and pedophilia as sicknesses rather than
sins. They put their faith not in Christian doctrine, but
in psychotherapy, with its false promises of cures.
Penance? Grace? Reparation? No, they trusted modern
quackery, and they are paying the price.
* * *
Let's not overlook the media's role in pushing this
scandal. They are avoiding any reference to
homosexuality, preferring to call the problem
"pedophilia" -- though the great majority of the victims
have been teenaged boys. Church officials have allowed an
aggressive homosexual network to capture the seminaries
and infiltrate the priesthood. But as someone has well
said, this is a case where the media "love the sin and
hate the sinner."
* * *
Yasser Arafat is constantly told he must "renounce
terrorism." Fair enough. (Though he has done so several
times, only to be accused of lying about it.) But nobody
has demanded that Sharon disavow any purpose of expelling
-- or "transferring" -- all Arabs from Israel and the
occupied territories he claims for Israel. Far from
abhorring such a policy, Sharon has welcomed cabinet
ministers who openly advocate it.
The Obsession
(pages 3-5)
Now and then I get letters and e-mail messages
asking why I am so "obsessed" with Jews and Israel. The
question amuses me. It would be one thing if I often
wrote about Mali, or Honduras, or Borneo, or any other
nation or country most people remember only as a name
from geography class.
I should think it's obvious that I'm *responding*
to an obsession -- an obsession of contemporary culture,
politics, the media, the arts. We have been getting 24/7
coverage of Jews, the Holocaust, and Israel for years
now. The front pages, the evening news, the magazine
covers devote so much attention to Israel -- a country
the size of New Jersey on the other side of the world --
that you could get the impression that it spans several
time zones and includes much of the world's population
(plus a few gentiles). Many columnists write about it
more often than I do: Charles Krauthammer, William
Safire, Cal Thomas, Paul Greenberg, Mona Charen, and
George Will, to name a few. Of course they write
uncritically about Israel, so they aren't considered
obsessed; Eric Alterman of THE NATON has compiled a list
of more than 60 well-known pundits who "reflexively"
support Israel, while finding only 6 who are frequently
critical.
Every American president has to spend a
disproportionate amount of his time coddling Israel and
denouncing or actively fighting Israel's enemies. It's
become part of the job description, as much as if it were
written into the Constitution -- or more so, since
constitutional obligations have become optional and
*this* obligation is definitely not. At the same time,
no president or any other politician may suggest that the
American-Israeli alliance imposes undue risks, costs, or
burdens on the United States.
Journalism still devotes so much attention to the
Holocaust that, as I once quipped, "The NEW YORK TIMES
should be renamed HOLOCAUST UPDATE." Books and movies
about it continue to pour forth; bookstores have whole
sections on the Holocaust, and universities consecrate
entire departments to "Holocaust studies." Holocaust
memorials spring up everywhere. Elie Wiesel preaches that
we *should* be obsessed with the Holocaust, as he is.
Churches, accused of silent complicity in, and even
ultimate responsibility for, the Holocaust, do their best
to repent and atone.
Current Jewish sufferings are treated as specially
tragic facts, extensions of the Holocaust itself. When
Arab terrorists seized an Italian ship, the Achille
Lauro, and threw a Jewish passenger overboard, a leading
American composer, John Adams, wrote an entire opera, THE
DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER, about the incident.
"Anti-Semitism" has become the chief of sins. It's
seldom helpfully defined, but it seems to take a thousand
forms, from outright genocide to indiscreet bons mots
about Israel. Many gentiles live in dread of being
labeled anti-Semitic, a charge against which there is no
real defense or appeal: to be accused is to be guilty.
The burden of proof, as I've often pointed out, is on the
defendant -- and a difficult burden it is, since he
hardly knows what he's being accused of. How can you
prove your innocence of an undefined crime? By the same
token, there is no penalty for false charges of anti-
Semitism, since a meaningless charge can't be proved
false anyway.
No gentile is quite safe from the charge. The
Gospels, Catholicism, and the papacy have been indicted;
so have Chaucer, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Edmund Burke,
Dickens, Henry James, Henry Adams, Dostoyevsky, Mark
Twain, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, Hemingway. (So far Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson
seem to have escaped the accusation.) Then there are
whole anti-Semitic nations, among them Russia, Poland,
Hungary, Romania, Germany, France, and Spain, lately
joined by most of the Arab nations (thereby proving it is
possible to be Semitic and anti-Semitic at the same
time).
Billy Graham was recently roasted for anti-Semitism
when it transpired that he'd made a few disparaging
comments about Jews in the media during what he'd thought
were private conversations with President Richard Nixon
*30 years ago!* Perish the thought that there might have
been a grain of truth in what he'd said; Graham dutifully
groveled, then, when Jewish groups indignantly complained
that this was not enough, he groveled again. A few years
back, even that Hollywood icon Marlon Brando had to do a
tearfully groveling retraction of some mildly critical
comments about Jews in Hollywood.
And they wonder why I'm obsessed.
Of course I have my own special reasons. In 1986 I
had my own run-in with fanatical Zionists, earned the
dreaded label, and refused to perform the mandatory
grovel. I won't retell the whole story here, except to
say that my own ardent support for Israel had ended in
1982 when I realized what Israel's cruel invasion of
Lebanon, led by Ariel Sharon, meant for America and for
my family.
For America it meant that the Jewish lobby,
including some of my neoconservative friends (as I
thought them), had gotten this country into a sticky
situation: an alliance that was morally dubious and very
dangerous. We were being steered into a needless war with
the Arabs, hotly desired by Israel and its supporters but
contrary to our own real interests.
As for the Sobrans, two of them -- my sons Kent and
Mike -- were in their teens. If, as seemed likely, the
military draft was restored, they might be sent to fight
the war the Zionists were seeking. I began arguing in my
syndicated column for American disengagement from Israel.
Shortly afterward I ran into Ben Wattenberg, one of
my friends (I thought), who said he'd heard I'd "gone off
the reservation on Israel." It was the first time I'd
been informed that I was on a "reservation," but I soon
learned what he meant.
Despite various warnings and pressures -- veiled
threats, really -- I wasn't about to back down or retract
anything. As far as I was concerned, I was fighting for
my boys' lives. But if I wanted to thrive in journalism,
I was expected to put Jewish interests ahead of
everything, or at least keep quiet.
As I told Bill Buckley at the time, the Jewish-
Zionist interest amounted to an unacknowledged third
party in American politics. Though it had been
traditionally liberal, it had sprouted a
"neoconservative" wing since 1967. In truth, the
neoconservatives were hardly conservative at all. For
most of them, Israel was everything and overrode all
other issues. You could agree with them on nine out of
ten issues, but if the tenth was Israel the other nine
didn't matter to them. You were the enemy.
You couldn't really feel the power of the Jewish
Party until you ran up against it. With amazing speed it
had thoroughly satellized the largely Christian
conservative movement, thanks in large part to Buckley.
He wasn't about to let me imperil his position. He tried
to tell me so, in his indirect and avuncular way, but I
couldn't take a hint.
Luckily, I was a fairly small fry in the movement,
and the Jewish Party had far bigger antagonists to target
for destruction. I didn't get the full treatment Buckley
would have gotten if he'd said what I had said, or the
treatment Pat Buchanan did get.
Still, when the blowup came I felt deserted -- and
in some cases betrayed -- by my fellow conservatives.
Much as I wished they would rush to my defense, I also
wished that if this was too much to ask, they would at
least see the *meaning* of what was being done to me.
Put simply, I was paying the price for *defending
American interests* (and conservative principles). If,
as the neocons insisted, American and Israeli interests
were more or less identical, they should have called me
anti-American, not (or not only) anti-Semitic. But of
course they never did; they weren't that subtle, and in
some ways they were deeply confused.
Without realizing it, they were tacitly admitting
that I was right: that American and Israeli interests
were very different -- even conflicting -- things. Why
else would Israel need a lobby in America at all, except
to promote its interests to the detriment of our own?
This should be obvious, but most people don't get it.
Of course there is no American lobby in Israel to
look out for our interests, regardless of the impact on
Israeli interests. This is only one of the many unnoticed
asymmetries of the situation. Double standards can
succeed in their furtive purpose only when they pass
unobserved. But to call attention to double standards
favoring Jews is "anti-Semitism." According to Zionist
rhetoric, of course, only anti-Semites apply double
standards -- though in fact Zionism's first principle is
that ordinary standards of justice don't apply to Jews.
As one Israeli rabbi has put it, "A million Arabs are not
worth one Jewish fingernail."
That sounds like a defiantly brutal denial that "all
men are created equal." The rabbi may have meant that it
would be better to murder a million Arabs than to
tolerate the slightest Jewish loss. But he might have
meant something much less bellicose, something even
pacific: that the current tradeoff of Jewish and Arab
lives is a terrible thing for the Jews, even if far more
Arabs than Jews die. Nobody really wins a war that
diminishes both sides.
It may be said that all this amounts to a caricature
of the Jews. In fact, I'll say it myself. It's really a
self-caricature of the Jews, drawn by the prevalent part
of the Jewish community. It reflects neither the older
tradition of the Orthodox, which is rooted in the hard
objectivity of Mosaic law rather than modern sentimental
victimology; nor the immense variety of Jewish
intellectuals, who are as the sands of the sea but who
don't usually subscribe fully to the oversimplified myths
of the Holocaust and Zionism.
The Orthodox Jew, faithful to an ancient and
rigorous tradition, commands respect. So, in a different
way, does the nonobservant intellectual Jew, who greatly
enriches the life of the mind in the modern West; he
remains unobsessed by the Holocaust and skeptical of,
even embarrassed by, Zionism. In some cases, both the
Orthodox Jew and the unaffiliated intellectual Jew may be
downright anti-Zionist.
The plague-carriers, so to speak, are the
secularized, liberal, middlebrow Jews whose vulgarity
sets the tone for American politics, public discourse,
and popular culture. Some of them, like Steven Spielberg
and Barbra Streisand, have real talent, of sorts; most of
them are good at making money and aggressive in using it
for their pet causes. Above all, they have a low genius
for propaganda -- for shaping the popular mind and its
characteristic platitudes.
This is the prevalent body of Jews, our
unacknowledged third party -- the party of Zionism,
Holocaust promotion, secularism, sexual license
(including "gay rights" and legal abortion), and an
aggressive U.S. foreign policy (in the interests of
Israel, not the United States itself). The Jewish Party,
only a small fraction of the U.S. population, donates
more than half the money received by the presidential
candidates of the two major parties. It also dominates
the major news and entertainment media.
The Jewish Party's inordinate power, though
unmentionable in the major media, explains why gentiles,
especially the ambitious, dread the label of "anti-
Semitism." Some of the most perceptive, sensitive, and
effective critiques of Jewish power -- that is, of the
Jewish Party -- have been made by Orthodox and
intellectual Jews. One danger of the present situation is
that the Jewish Party will become synonymous with "the
Jews."
And this is exactly what the Party wants: to be
recognized as the only authoritative Jewish voice, with
all dissenting Jews marginalized. Under the brutal rule
of Ariel Sharon, Israel's image in the West is worse than
ever before. Today it's startling to remember the radiant
aura it enjoyed in the days when its chief international
spokesman was the urbane and eloquent Abba Eban. Those
days are gone forever. The old image of a humane,
democratic Israel was largely myth -- a myth Sharon
himself still exploits -- but at least the Israelis made
some effort to maintain its plausibility. Now, as Israeli
soldiers shoot Arab women in labor without official
rebuke or regret, the ugliness of Zionism has become
visible to anyone with eyes to see.
Shouting "Holocaust" and "anti-Semitism" can no
longer disguise the facts. Despite all the rhetoric,
Israel is a "democracy" only in a Pickwickian sense. It
began by expelling most of its Arab majority, seizing its
homes, and refusing it reentry. That created a Jewish
majority, which has been maintained and increased by
extending to every Jew on earth the "right of return" to
a land where few of those Jews (or for that matter, of
their ancestors) had ever lived in the first place. Yet
the fiction of Israeli democracy is still honored by the
United States.
The Great Obsession has become a huge embarrassment
for the Bush administration. It can't repudiate the U.S.
alliance with Israel, even as it needs international --
especially Arab -- support for the "war on terrorism." Of
course that war itself is a result of the Obsession,
which has shaped American foreign policy for decades.
The embarrassment is also a Laocoon-like
entanglement. Polite diplomacy flounders in the vain
quest for a peaceful settlement; Rome and Carthage are
trying to destroy each other, and both sides are invited
to a tea party.
As suicide bombings alternate with disproportionate
yet unavailing retaliations, the daily news from Israel
is so painful that we all yearn for a solution. But it's
probably too late. It has been wisely said that even the
greatest chess player can't take over a misplayed game
after 40 moves. This game is clearly destined to end --
or to continue indefinitely -- in tragedy. The only
question is how many millions of people will be engulfed
in its flames.
Wilder and His Betters
(page 6)
Billy Wilder's death at 95 summoned generous
eulogies, and most of them rang true. He was an excellent
writer-director, one of Hollywood's rare originals. At
his best -- in perhaps a dozen of his many films -- he
displayed a caustic wit unusual in that sentimental,
formulaic medium. And who else in the film industry could
have produced movies as different as DOUBLE INDEMNITY and
THE APARTMENT?
I use these two movies as illustrations for a
specific reason: both of them cast the same comic actor
as a villain, to brilliant effect. His name, of course,
is Fred MacMurray, best remembered for the warm sitcom MY
THREE SONS. In DOUBLE INDEMNITY he plots with Barbara
Stanwyck to murder her husband in order to collect on a
phony insurance policy; if there is anything implausible
about this red-hot plot, it's the idea that a man could
even imagine living happily ever after with Stanwyck. But
the plot twists make you overlook that; anyway, the
irresistible desirability of a wicked dame is a given of
the film noir genre, which Wilder never returned to
despite this great success. In THE APARTMENT, a
bittersweet comedy more in keeping with Wilder's other
work, MacMurray plays a philandering business executive
who cynically uses his mistress, played by Shirley
MacLaine, and breaks her heart. Would anyone but Wilder
have had the insight to see how perfect this light
comedian could be in both these heavy roles?
Wilder's other successes show his versatility: THE
LOST WEEKEND, SUNSET BOULEVARD, STALAG 17, SOME LIKE IT
HOT, and THE FORTUNE COOKIE. But his failures could also
leave a bad taste. IRMA LA DOUCE, an attempt at a
"sophisticated" European-style sex farce, is disgusting
in conception and made worse by Jack Lemmon's foolish
performance. Wilder, a European Jewish refugee, was
refreshing in his wry disdain for Hollywood banality, yet
he could sometimes combine cynicism with his own kind of
bathos -- an unhappy mixture.
Like most people I love movies; but just because
they are so popular we make too much of them as an art
form. We tend to forget that the very nature of the genre
is inhospitable to genius. The greatest painter needs
only a canvas and paint; the greatest poet needs only a
pen and paper. But a movie requires, in the first place,
a lot of money and so many talents that it's not
altogether clear who deserves chief credit for the final
result -- actors, director, writer, producer?
The public usually goes to see the actors, the
"stars." But among intellectuals, the fashion is to
credit the director, the "auteur." And some directors do
put their stamp on their films: Renoir, Welles,
Hitchcock, Capra, Lean, Kurosawa, Kubrick, and Spielberg,
to name the most obvious. But the writer may be even more
important, yet few screenwriters are known to the public.
The producer is the one who assembles all these diverse
talents, but he is regarded as a mere businessman, of no
artistic significance.
Wilder made the question of credit fairly simple: he
was usually producer, director, and co-author of the
script. That's as close to total control of the project
as one man usually gets.
He leaves no successor, as they say, but I like to
think there is one comparable talent in the American
movie industry: the Coen brothers. Joel and Ethan Coen, a
pair of Jews from Minnesota, write their own scripts,
Ethan produces, and Joel directs.
Their first film (nearly two decades ago already!)
was BLOOD SIMPLE, which was quickly hailed as the most
brilliant debut in ages. Debut or not, it's a terrific
thriller, done in a distinctive style of eerie wit, about
a man who hires a detective to kill his wife and her
lover. You don't know where it's coming from until the
very end; meanwhile, it delivers several shocking plot
twists. Despite its low budget and lowlife Texas setting,
the color cinematography is rich, verging on gorgeous.
RAISING ARIZONA, their second movie, is a comedy
about a childless couple who kidnap a quintuplet. Given
that premise, it's hardly necessary to add that the
comedy is offbeat. It's also hilarious and surprisingly
warm, full of funny menace and witty dialogue -- two
regular Coen touches.
My favorite remains their third film, MILLER'S
CROSSING, a neo-noir job roughly based on THE GLASS KEY.
Albert Finney is tops as a lovably growling gangster
betrayed but ultimately saved by his best friend. The
movie abounds in funny nostalgia, eccentric characters,
and period slang, none of which dissipate the electric
tension of the plot.
Since then the Coens have produced a half-dozen
films, diverse in genre and atmosphere, but all of them
bearing their unique style. BARTON FINK and FARGO have
been the most successful, but nearly all of them are
beautiful to watch and -- the rarer thing in movies --
delightful to listen to. It's far too early to sum up the
Coens' work, but for my money they have already surpassed
Wilder's lifetime achievement.
NUGGETS
HISTORY LESSON: In his pro-Israel history of Zionism, THE
SIEGE, Conor Cruise O'Brien mentions that the "moderate"
founders of Israel, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion,
viewed the proposed 1948 partition of Palestine as an
interim measure, not a final settlement; in other words,
a foot in the door. Ben-Gurion wrote privately that even
a small "Jewish State in part of Palestine is not the end
but the beginning. The establishment of such a Jewish
State will serve as a means in our historical efforts to
redeem the country in its entirety." Weizmann likewise
wrote (also privately), "The Kingdom of David was
smaller; under Solomon it became an Empire. Who knows?
C'est le premier pas qui compte." Remember that the next
time you hear that the obstinate Arabs missed their
chance to have a state when they rejected the 1948
partition. They apparently knew just what they were
dealing with. (page 5)
MORDANT REFLECTION: To think! Two of the Beatles are now
Dead White Males. (page 7)
ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG, R.I.P.: If cruelty to liberals were
a crime, Ernest van den Haag, who died at 87 in late
March, would have done life without parole. As I once put
it, at a roast for this great, grouchy logician: "Bill
Buckley gave us the romance of conservatism; Ernest gave
us the S&M." He was great fun, and he died in the
Catholic Church. He also had his faults, and I enjoyed
every one of them. (page 9)
ECUMENICAL NOTES: In Powhatan, Virginia, two private
schools -- Blessed Sacrament and Huguenot Academy -- have
merged to form, yes, Blessed Sacrament Huguenot School.
(page 9)
QUERIES: Why is democracy holy? Why did it take the human
race so many centuries to realize its self-evident
holiness? Why does only a small fraction of the human
race realize it even now? And, by the way, what *is*
democracy?
YOU CAN'T WIN: Conor Cruise O'Brien says that G.K.
Chesterton was a Zionist *because* he was anti-Semitic.
I know it's anti-Semitic to disagree with the Jews; but I
get confused when I'm told it's also anti-Semitic to
agree with them.(page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
DAREDEVIL: Bill Buckley has shocked some readers by
attacking (after a fashion) Ariel Sharonıs "crackdown on
terrorism." I am unshocked. In the first place, Bill has
always known what's what in Israel, even when he played
dumb. In the second place, his criticism is more tactical
-- the crackdown will hurt *Israel* -- than moral.
Still, he deserves credit for sticking his neck out: he
has risked being fired from the staff of NATIONAL REVIEW.
"WHIZZER" WHITE, R.I.P.: Former U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Byron White, a relic of the Kennedy years, has
died at 84. His occasional resistance to the Court's more
bolshevist rulings -- notably on abortion -- won him an
exaggerated reputation as a conservative. But he did give
us a memorable phrase: he called the Court's 1973
abortion ruling "an exercise of raw judicial power."
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Can This War Be Won? (March 19, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020319.shtml
* Bad Explanations (March 21, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020321.shtml
* Bad Hair Night (March 26, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020326.shtml
* Big Lies (March 28, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020328.shtml
* The Catholic Position (April 4, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020404.shtml
* Shakespeare and the Snobs (April 9, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020409.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
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