SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
July 2002
Volume 9, No. 7
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Conspiracy, Blackmail, and Politics
-> Wartime Journal
-> We the State
-> Convenient Thinking
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
Conspiracy, Blackmail, and Politics
(page 1)
Robert Caro's heroic biography of Lyndon Johnson
(MASTER OF THE SENATE, the third of four scheduled
volumes, has just appeared, at 1,167 pages) tells many
stories and offers many lessons, including one that seems
to go over its own author's head. True, Caro realizes
that Johnson was a scheming monster who amassed power in
large part by gathering dirt on his colleagues; but it
doesn't occur to him that this throws a strange light not
just on Johnson, but on democratic government itself.
Now, a generation after Johnson's death, we learn,
thanks to Caro, what was going on behind the scenes:
government by blackmail. We shouldn't have had to wait so
long for this insight, if the myths of democracy are
true. But that's a very big "if." In the nature of the
case, we can never know how large a part secret crimes --
blackmail, extortion, bribery -- play in public affairs;
but it must be a far larger part than we usually assume.
Most politicians, being human, have something to hide,
and they can be controlled by anyone who finds it out.
Bob Dole avoided raising the "character issue"
against Bill Clinton during the 1996 presidential
campaign; later we learned that Dole himself had once had
an adulterous liaison, and that others knew about it.
Either the Clinton people or the press or both had gotten
wind of it. We now know too that during the 1940 campaign
Franklin Roosevelt got word to Wendell Willkie that he
knew about Willkie's mistress; that may explain why
Willkie waged a feeble campaign. Roosevelt knew how to
use the FBI and the IRS against his opponents.
Though governments actually budget for "covert
operations," we are constantly warned against "conspiracy
theories." The public learns only belatedly of some of
the underhanded doings that shape political events, and
these revelations never seem to have any relevance for
the present: nobody seems to ask whether such things are
still happening today, though they surely are. The public
always votes in the dark. It never really knows who
controls the men it elects. It *can't* know. It will be
lucky if a significant part of the truth comes out
decades after the election, and much will remain hidden
anyway. Even so, we know some of the crimes of Presidents
Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton. (Some
would add Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, and the first Bush to
this list.)
And this doesn't begin to address the crimes of all
the politicians and government agents who operate below
the radar. We know only that what we call "public
service" attracts a lot of criminal personalities and
serves as a front for an incalculable amount of criminal
behavior. The state itself thrives on activities we
consider crimes in ordinary life: murder ("defense"),
robbery and extortion ("taxation"), counterfeiting
("inflation"), bribery ("entitlements"), and so forth.
And these are the things it does *openly.* What is it
doing behind the curtain?
Even under the most limited government, the powers
of the state are bound to be abused in ways the public
rarely suspects or discovers. All the more reason for
those powers to be as few as possible.
Wartime Journal
(page 2)
Let's not be conspiracy-minded, but isn't it
remarkable that an administration of oilmen should be so
eager to fight Evil in such oil-drenched countries as
Iraq and Iran -- as well as Afghanistan, such an apt
route for a pipeline to the oil-rich lands of central
Asia?
* * *
George W. Bush, like his father, aspires to be
remembered as an Education President. As a strict
constructionist, he might begin by showing us where the
Constitution authorizes the president, or the Federal
Government, to meddle with schools in any way. He also
raised questions about his own aptness for the role when
he asked Brazil's president Fernando Henrique Cardoso,
"Do you have blacks too?"
* * *
Post-9/11 security measures have been hobbled by
scruples about racial profiling. This is one of those
phony conundrums that bedevil American public discourse.
The solution is obvious. If (say) you own an airline,
it's perfectly sensible for you to be wary of any
category of people whom the U.S. Government has provoked
to hate Americans. If the government has a history of
annoying Arabs, you'd better keep an eye on Arabs. That's
a perfectly rational form of discrimination, and it's no
reflection on Arabs; rather on our own rulers.
Discrimination is only wrong when it's indiscriminate.
* * *
Some years ago Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor
of FIRST THINGS, accused me of "flirting" with anti-
Semitism -- an insinuation he also made against a number
of other conservatives he had fallen out with as he
ingratiated himself with wealthy Jewish neoconservatives.
Well, Father Neuhaus himself is now having his turn in
the dock: an article in the June issue of COMMENTARY,
"Israel and the Anti-Semites," by Gabriel Schoenfeld,
cites his "tortuous rationalizations" as an end-product
of "worldwide anti-Semitism." His offense? Mildly
critical remarks about Israel.
* * *
Michael Skakel, Ted Kennedy's kinsman, has finally
been convicted of murdering Martha Moxley when both were
teenagers. He probably did it, but after a quarter of a
century, could his guilt really be proved beyond a
reasonable doubt? At any rate, his conviction shows that
the Kennedy connection no longer protects the guilty, and
may even bring suspicion on the innocent.
* * *
Don't say they aren't making great movies anymore
before you've caught up with today's computer-animated
films. TOY STORY (and its sequel), A BUG'S LIFE, and
SHREK, to name but three of many, are not only visually
astounding; their dialogue and actors' voices are
wittier, and funnier, than those of any live-action films
I've seen in years. Genius turns up in the oddest places.
* * *
In answer to your many queries, yes, my grandson Joe
is still playing baseball. He's no longer the tiny boy on
the field, but a strapping 15-year-old who can throw a
fastball nearly 80 miles per hour and hit 350-foot home
runs. In his first appearance as a rookie in a league for
15- to 16-year-olds, he pitched a two-hitter with 11
strikeouts, getting two hits himself in a 7-2 victory.
And no, he swears he's not taking steroids.
We the State
(pages 3-4)
In October 1945, only two months after the nuclear
attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, George Orwell wrote an
essay titled "You and the Atom Bomb." He noted that
"curiously little has been said, at any rate in print,
about the question that is of most urgent interest to all
of us, namely: 'How difficult are these things to
manufacture?'"
At that time it was still widely believed that a
lone scientist might be able to make an A-bomb in his own
laboratory; but Orwell surmised, from some remarks of
Harry Truman and other officials, that "the bomb is
fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands
an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four
countries in the world are capable of making. This point
is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the
discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing
history, will simply intensify the trends which have been
apparent for a dozen years past."
This led Orwell to an interesting distinction.
Starting with the adage that "the history of civilization
is largely the history of weapons," he offered a general
rule: "that ages in which the dominant weapon is
expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of
despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and
simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for
example, tanks, battleships, and bombing planes are
inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets,
long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic
weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger,
while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to
it -- gives claws to the weak."
He added, "Had the atomic bomb turned out to be
something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle
or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back
into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have
meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-
centralized police state." But since only a few
centralized states could produce the bomb, he predicted
that these states -- probably the United States and the
Soviet Union -- would divide the world between them in a
frigid peace. (Here, as so often, Orwell's essays
foreshadow NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.)
Until September 11, Orwell's prediction seemed to
stand up pretty well. He hadn't foreseen the collapse of
the Soviet Union, but he had been right in principle: the
United States stood alone as the global superpower
because of its huge superiority in military technology.
But on that astounding day we realized that we were
vulnerable to a new kind of enemy: one who didn't have to
win on the battlefield, or conquer or occupy or destroy
or otherwise subdue us -- an enemy who, with modest
weapons of his own, was content to disrupt. Even
"terrorism" doesn't capture it.
Nobody knows what to expect of this ill-defined
enemy, or even who he is (or, if Osama bin Laden is the
key figure, whether he is still alive). The first attack
was a brilliant stroke, using minimal means. Even after
billions of dollars have been spent devastating his
suspected lairs in Afghanistan, nobody knows whether this
has crippled or even hurt his capacity for destruction --
though the Bush administration, for no clear reason,
wants to extend the war to Iraq. What that would have to
do with "defeating terrorism" is anyone's guess, but
President Bush has redefined the struggle as a war on
"evil." Bin Laden is already all but forgotten.
The great worry now is one Orwell couldn't have
foreseen: that the shadowy enemy will smuggle nuclear
devices into the United States, causing destruction and
disruption immeasurably worse than last September's. A
bin Laden doesn't have to manufacture nukes; he just has
to buy one of the thousands that have already been
stockpiled since 1945. He doesn't even need to detonate
it; merely releasing its radiation with conventional
explosives could effectively depopulate a major city and
ruin this country economically.
The administration doesn't know what to do. Three of
its top officials have now admitted as much. Vice
President Dick Cheney, FBI director Robert Mueller, and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld now say that more
terrorist attacks, possibly with nuclear weapons, are
"inevitable." They also admit that they can't do their
job, the supposed raison d'etre of any state: to protect
the population.
In a nutshell, the almighty U.S. Government has made
an enemy it can't handle. It has involved this country in
the endless Middle East War with no plan, purpose, or
goal. It makes blustering threats it can't carry out.
George W. Bush radiates inadequacy. Even in terms of
conventional statecraft, he is incompetent; in a crisis
he is simply hopeless. He is neither a thinker nor a re-
thinker. You can't imagine him asking the basic and
obvious questions that need to be addressed right now;
instead he leans on all the wearisome "lessons" of World
War II, taking his guidance from the dubious examples of
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, with Ariel
Sharon as his Stalin. He has learned nothing from history
except how the vulgar press expects a "great wartime
leader" to behave, and this war is like no other. For
Bush, common sense means cliche, and heroism means
overstatement.
The Middle East War is an unholy mess, in some
respects like World War I with its unpredictable
alliances and tangled tripwires. In large part this war
is a legacy of British imperialism, which left unstable
borders and unresolved disputes all over the place, from
Palestine to Kuwait. No single principle or American
interest is at stake, but the U.S. Government has meddled
its way into it aimlessly, with the usual slogans about
democracy and freedom -- the sort of official talk that
disgusted Orwell.
This has been going on for decades; September 11
merely served notice that the Middle East War will also
be fought on American soil. This caught the U.S.
Government by surprise, though it shouldn't have, and the
American reaction was not to ask whether all this
intervention was worth the price, but to redouble the
intervention, even at risk of redoubling the price as
well.
Now the truth that has been obvious all along has
been confirmed at the highest levels: the U.S. Government
has exposed the American people to terrible dangers, and
despite its enormous and stupendously costly "defense"
system, it doesn't know how to defend us against the
enmity it has provoked.
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a
constant struggle," as Orwell wrote elsewhere. (Compare
Chesterton: "Men can always be blind to a thing, so long
as it is big enough.")
In more than one sense, the enemy is already within
the gates. We don't know how many Islamic fanatics are in
this country, plotting further attacks; but the Bush
administration has secured easy passage of a "USA PATRIOT
Act" that greatly increases the arbitrary and
unconstitutional powers of the government. These powers
are said to be aimed at terrorists, but since a terrorist
isn't likely to be self-identified or easily detectable,
they may be used against anyone. In order to frustrate a
handful of criminals, the rights of a quarter of a
billion Americans have been abridged. Our rulers are
better at curtailing our freedom than at protecting it.
And of course -- to return to Orwell's point -- the
government's weaponry, nuclear and "conventional," has
reached a level of potency and complexity inconceivable
in 1945. Meanwhile, the government has been whittling
away "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." The
chief reason this right was acknowledged in the
Constitution was to ensure that the people would possess
the means of resisting tyranny. Even the statist
Alexander Hamilton called the right of self-defense
"paramount to all [other rights]."
But times have changed. In 1861 Southern Americans
could still believe they could secure their liberty with
rifles; a mistake, as it turned out, but they did hold
out for four years. Today that belief would be sheer
fantasy. Imagine Lincoln with modern tanks, helicopters,
jets, and nukes taking on the state militias.
Meanwhile, the government claims and spends more and
more of the wealth people produce; and more and more
people depend on others' taxes for their income. Both
classes, the taxed and the tax-consuming, are at the
mercy of the government. And nearly everyone accepts this
as a normal condition rather than a tyrannical perversion
of government.
So the disproportion between the government and the
individual has increased tremendously since Orwell's day.
At the same time, fewer and fewer people realize this or
find it alarming. Education, also provided by the
government, gives its pupils neither the historical
memory nor the power of analysis needed to appreciate the
political facts of life. When education means state
propaganda, the "citizen" becomes a product of the state
-- a system of coercion he feels all around him, but
can't comprehend.
According to our official mythology, "We the People"
create the government. The truth is that the government
is now creating the people. That is, it creates the kind
of people it wants: ignorant, docile, weak, dependent.
The kind Orwell noticed around him: Winston Smiths, who,
far from seeing the state as their enemy, identify
themselves with it.
Convenient Thinking
(pages 5-6)
In public debates I'm often struck by the prevalence
of a special form of wishful thinking -- what I call
"convenient thinking." This occurs when people assume
that all the facts are on their side, or try to make them
appear so. Convenient thinking spares them the trouble of
facing and sorting out complications.
We see this in the endless quarreling in the Middle
East, when Jews and Arabs hurl grievances at each other,
while ignoring each other's grievances. To the impartial
eye it's obvious that plenty of crimes have been
committed on both sides. What has this to do with the
question of who has a right to the land?
One absolutist position, held by many Christians as
well as some Jews, holds that God gave the land to the
Jews, forever, in the time of Moses. If so, it is
irrelevant which side has committed more crimes. Even if
the Jews had committed all the crimes, and the Arabs
none, the land would still belong to the Jews. Yet such
absolutists as Cal Thomas insist on enumerating Arab
crimes and ignoring Jewish ones, as if this fortified
their case. But why pile on the grievances? Isn't the
divine donation sufficient?
Not only that, but it seems that America must
support Israel to the hilt. Here the reason is not so
clear, since God, as far as we know, didn't command Harry
Truman to do this. Some absolutists -- presumably
including Thomas -- would say it's America's duty to save
the Chosen People, citing God's promise to bless those
who bless the Jews. (Never mind the U.S. Constitution,
which doesn't authorize foreign aid of any kind.)
But this is not enough: the absolutists argue that
Israel is also a valuable asset to the United States,
ignoring much evidence to the contrary. Again, why does
this matter? Do you count costs when doing your duty to
the Almighty? It should be possible to hold that the
United States must support Israel *regardless* of the
costs and dangers such support brings on this country.
Even if U.S. policy toward Israel helped provoke the 9/11
attacks -- and everyone knows it did -- it would be
America's duty to stand by Israel.
Then there is the George Will position, which makes
no appeal to the supernatural, yet somehow always finds
that the facts happen to be 100 per cent in Israel's
favor. Will, in all the years I have read him, has never
found Israel at fault, has never mentioned Palestinian
rights, and has never noticed any tension between
American and Israeli interests. How you account for this
remarkable coincidence of justification without believing
in divine providence is beyond me.
Of course Israel's partisans, religious and secular,
insist that 9/11 was completely unrelated to Israel. This
tacitly admits that if the truth were otherwise, some
second thoughts about Israel just might be in order. This
problem is averted by the simple denial of the obvious
relation between U.S. policy and Arab hostility to the
United States. Nobody dares to say, "Yes, the 9/11
attacks were, unfortunately, brought on by U.S. policy
toward Israel. But that policy is still, on balance, well
worth the price."
It seems rather improbable to hold at once that (1)
the Jews have every right to exclusive possession of the
Holy Land; (2) all the wrongs have been on the Arab side;
and (3) the U.S. Government's favoritism to Israel in the
bitter conflict yields pure profit to Americans. This is
an example of what I mean by convenient thinking. It's
all too good to be true. (I pass over the further
reinforcing assertions, such as that Israel is a
democracy and that the Arabs want to exterminate all
Jews.)
A more complicated but realistic position might hold
that even if the Jews' claim to the land is justified,
there is no particular reason for the U.S. Government to
enforce that claim, especially considering the problems
it raises for this country. Or one could even argue that
the Jews have no special claim to the land, but that the
U.S. gains more than it loses by taking Israel's side
anyway.
Another sort of convenient thinking may be found in
those who see nothing but evil in Israel. Now it's far
from an ideal state (if any state can be "ideal"); it has
blood on its hands; it treats its minorities shamefully;
yet it doesn't approach the world's many worse tyrannies
in scale of evil, and it's unfair to exaggerate its
crimes and to condemn it without a due sense of
proportion. My main objection to it is that it has been a
terribly costly *client* -- alias "ally" -- of this
country, as witness 9/11. Moreover, far from feeling
grateful for American support, it has behaved
treacherously to its only benefactor, from the 1954 Lavon
affair to the 1967 assault on the Liberty to the 1985
Pollard spy case (and these are only a few famous
highlights of its scandalous record).
There is an obvious way to resolve the Jewish-Arab
dispute, but few are willing to accept it. The solution
is property rights. No group can claim the land as a
whole, but everyone has the right to settle there
peacefully, including Norwegians and Tahitians if they so
desire. No state has the right to exclude anyone from the
land or to drive people from their homes. That is, under
a system of property rights there would be neither a
Jewish nor a Palestinian state. Instead, alas, both sides
assume that there must be one state or the other, and
this assumption leads inevitably to convenient thinking.
This mentality is typical of victim politics, but
other situations also generate similar thinking. In the
debate on the death penalty, the two chief positions
assume a happy convergence between principle and the
facts of experience. One side holds that (1) capital
punishment is justified, and (2) it "works" -- that is,
it deters crime. But surely you could argue that even if
it doesn't "work" in this sense, it's morally justified,
even imperative. Yet few advocates seem willing to admit
the possibility that killing criminals doesn't affect the
crime rate.
By the same token, opponents always seem to hold
that (1) the death penalty is barbaric, and (2) it
doesn't deter crime anyway. They seldom face the obvious
question: Would it be justified if it *did* deter? That
is, if every execution of a murderer resulted in fewer
murder victims, isn't it unjust to potential victims not
to kill killers?
A grimly amusing story. A few years ago the
WASHINGTON POST reported that the D.C. government was
finding it hard to prosecute drug dealers because people
were afraid to testify against them after several recent
witnesses had been shot dead.
A few days later, Richard Cohen, the POST's chief
liberal pundit (in recent years, I'm happy to add, his
lucid intervals have become more frequent), who
apparently hadn't been reading his own paper, wrote his
standard column denouncing the death penalty as legalized
murder or whatever, adding that all the evidence shows
that it has no deterrent effect anyway.
Well, I thought, Mr. Cohen should have a chat with
the drug dealers. *They* seem to think it has a
deterrent effect -- at least on witnesses. This may be an
area where the criminals are wiser than the
criminologists.
Obviously, death threats have *some* effect. As the
old saying goes, you can get a lot further with a kind
word and a gun than you can with just a kind word. Why do
people make *any* threats? You might as well argue that
fear plays no role in social life.
Needless to say, a threat must be serious to achieve
its purpose. A drug dealer who may shoot you tomorrow is
more credible than a state that may someday, years hence,
get around to strapping you into the chair. In the old
days, a criminal might be tried, convicted, and hanged
within a week of his crime.
Having said all that, I should state my own view. I
think many criminals richly deserve to die. For that
matter, some of them deserve lingering torture. And I'm
sure that if promptly administered, these punishments
would deter a great deal of crime. But I don't think the
state should have the power to inflict them, for the
simple reason that I doubt that the state should exist at
all.
Apart from that small reservation, it seems to me
monstrous to hire men to perform such acts -- to pay them
to kill or torture other men who have done them no
personal injury. Personal revenge I can understand;
though it has obvious dangers, it's natural and often
justified. But what sort of man could make a living
avenging wrongs he knows only by report?
Debates over historical questions tend to succumb to
convenient thinking. To hear the partisans quarrel over
the Civil War, either Lincoln was a saint and slavery a
diabolical evil, or he was a tyrant and slavery a humane
system. Any complications of these happily simple views
are unwelcome.
Yet all such simplifications deny the whole texture
of life, with its puzzles, rough edges, surprises, and
general messiness; in which horrible deeds are done in
good causes and men who are tragically wrong rise to
nobility and heroism. It's the willingness to face all
the facts without flinching that makes Orwell so
refreshing, and even oddly consoling.
NUGGETS
CANINE CIVIL SERVANT IN TROUBLE: A German shepherd police
dog in McKee's Rocks, Pennsylvania, may be executed for
racism. It seems that the dog, trained to sniff drugs,
has been attacking black people, several of whom were
found not to be in possession of illegal substances.
Apparently the dog was merely guilty of inductive
reasoning via his nose and had innocently drawn the wrong
conclusion from his olfactory experience. But one of the
town's councilwomen is demanding his death for
unauthorized racial profiling. Well, fair is fair: with
animal rights come animal responsibilities. (page 6)
HOLD THE MILLSTONES: The U.S. Catholic bishops have
adopted a semi-tough policy toward priests who prey
sexually on young people. Many laymen find the retention
of such priests, even those who have repented and
reformed, unconscionable. We can differ on that. What I
find most disturbing is that the bishops still haven't
confronted the real problem: the homosexual network in
the American clergy. Nor has the Vatican. (page 8)
PREDICTION: President Bush's "war on terrorism" will
match the triumph of his father's "war on drugs."
(page 9)
GRUDGING CONCESSION: Mirabile dictu, even some
neoconservatives are admitting that it's sort of, well,
irregular for the U.S. Government to detain a U.S.
citizen -- Abdullah al-Muhajir, born Jose Padilla --
indefinitely and without trial as an "enemy combatant,"
even though the United States isn't formally at war. The
Bush administration, says one neocon pundit, is "playing
into the hands of its most hysterical and malicious
critics" -- by which I guess he means folks who read the
Constitution. (page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGES: In his best-seller, BODY OF
SECRETS: ANATOMY OF THE ULTRA-SECRET NATIONAL SECURITY
AGENCY (Doubleday), James Bamford describes some hair-
raising secret schemes by the NSA under Presidents
Eisenhower and Kennedy, unknown to the public until now,
which might easily have led to war, even nuclear war.
I'll discuss this more fully in the near future. Without
judging the accuracy of Bamford's claims, we can say at
least that he tends to confirm one awful fact: that the
executive branch no longer regards itself as subordinate
to Congress or the laws on the books, and feels justified
in usurping power without informing anyone.
WHAT'S MORE: President Bush now claims the right of "hot
pre-emption" -- first strikes against evildoers suspected
of, you know, planning to make "weapons of mass
destruction." No need to let the Constitution get in the
way, of course. The good news is that such first strikes
will be authorized only in self-defense. The bad news is
that the perpetrators will define self-defense.
NEXT: Sir Ozzy? Days after the jubilee of Queen
Elizabeth II, during which Her Majesty was celebrated by
such certified creeps as Ozzy Osbourne, Buckingham Palace
knighted the original bad-boy rocker, Mick Jagger. So, 50
years after her coronation, the British monarch is
heaping honors on entertainers whose acts would have
landed them in prison when her reign began.
A KINDER, GENTLER CANNIBAL: After much bluster about
eating children, crushing testicles, and fornicating with
female interviewers, former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson
was finally destroyed by incumbent Lennox Lewis. Lewis's
piston-like jab frustrated and bloodied Tyson until the
eighth round, when a crushing right cross finished the
job. Tyson was so pathetically humble in defeat as to
excite suspicions of brain damage. If a good whipping can
change a man's personality within a half hour, maybe
boxing should be abolished.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Lowering Our Guard (May 14, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020514.shtml
* Your Friend, the State (May 16, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020516.shtml
* The Giant Problem-Solver (May 21, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020521.shtml
* Citing Scripture (May 23, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020523.shtml
* A Common Languatge? (May 28, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020528.shtml
* Minor Atrocities (May 30, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020530.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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