SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
October 2002
Volume 9, No. 10
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Hawks de Plume
-> Wartime Journal (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> Conservatism for Kids
-> History a la Horowitz
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
Hawks de Plume
(page 1)
As war with Iraq looms, I've been reading the battle
scenes in the ILIAD again. Homer's grim descriptions of
what men can do to each other with sword and spear are
nearly unbearable to read; and they prompt even darker
imaginings of what modern bombers and artillery can do,
not only to soldiers in the field, but to crowded cities
full of women and children.
If the pen is mightier than the sword, the United
States is assured of victory over Iraq, because the
hottest advocates of war have far more experience with
the pen than with the sword. As far as I know, none of
our leading warrior-pundits has ever set foot on a
battlefield or intends to grab a rifle and do so now.
These include George Will, William Safire, Rush Limbaugh,
Paul Gigot, Charles Krauthammer, Morton Zuckerman, Martin
Peretz, Cal Thomas, Andrew Sullivan, William Kristol,
Daniel Pipes, David Brooks, John Podhoretz, Fred Barnes,
Sean Hannity, and Richard Lowry, to name but a few.
All of these men passed up their chance to serve
their country in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, but that
doesn't mean they want to deny the heady experience of
combat to younger men today. They may be right in their
clamor for war, abstractly speaking; still, it's notable
that they avoid the subject of their own military
records.
You might expect some of them to begin their calls
for war with a personal admission: "Of course I myself
have never been a soldier, so it hardly becomes me to ask
others to sacrifice their lives and limbs. Even so, I
think the United States must stop Saddam Hussein, for the
following reasons ..." Or: "I should admit at the outset
that, to my shame, I managed to evade military service
when I was eligible. But having said that, I believe the
younger generation should stand ready to do the duty so
many of my own generation shirked, because ..." But no
qualms or pangs of conscience seem to afflict our
journalistic hawks. Their pacific personal lifestyles are
an embarrassing topic they prefer not to raise at a
moment when they strongly believe that their country has
need of their pens.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld likewise contrived to stay out of
uniform and out of harm's way, apart from some brief
flirtations with ROTC in college. In fact the only
prominent member of the Bush administration who is also a
combat veteran is Secretary of State Colin Powell -- and
he is well known for his reluctance to send American
troops into battle. The warrior-pundits, in fact, tend to
sneer at him for failing to share their belligerence.
Even if they don't want to discuss their own pasts,
these hawks might at least face up to the inevitable
horrors of war. Thousands of young men, American and
Iraqi, will be killed and horribly maimed; so will many
innocent noncombatants. Countless lives will by disrupted
in myriad ways. Homes will be destroyed, populations
impoverished, diseases spread. But the hawks will hardly
concede that there is anything regrettable in the course
they urge, even if the war is as successful as they
predict it will be.
As for their "courage," it is purely rhetorical.
They pose not as soldiers {{ -- which even they know
would be absurd -- }} but as Churchills, bravely opposing
the weak and cowardly Chamberlains who want to "appease"
{{ (the verb is omnipresent in their polemics) }} the
terrorists. They also serve who only sit and scribble.
Wartime Journal
(page 2)
Not only has President Bush failed to show any
connection between Iraq and 9/11; he doesn't dare predict
that making war on Iraq will in any way diminish acts of
terrorism. He may even have enough sense to know that his
war will probably bring on more of them.
* * *
To put it another way: by turning his martial
energies to Iraq, Bush is tacitly admitting that *his
"war on terrorism" has already been lost.* A year ago we
were all obsessed with {{ Osama }} bin Laden, al-Qaeda,
and Islamic terrorism. They were on every news broadcast,
every front page, every magazine cover. Now we hear
{{ almost nothing }} about them, especially from the Bush
administration, which has been using all its resources to
create a wholly different obsession with Saddam Hussein.
The American attention span is notoriously short, but
this is amazing.
* * *
Bush did warn us that we might never know when the
"war on terrorism" had been won. He left it to us to
figure out when he would give up on winning it. Turning
it into a war on something else, with no demonstrable
relation to the events of 9/11, is our best evidence of
his unacknowledged change of heart. So much for all those
brave words about "resolve." Bush is merely resolved to
find a foe he can defeat -- the one he wanted to attack
anyway, before 9/11. Al-Qaeda remains afoot.
* * *
Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish deputy defense
secretary, has ambitious dreams too. Bill Keller reports
in the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE that Wolfowitz "has an
almost missionary sense of America's role" and thinks
regime change could transform Iraq into "a democratic
cornerstone of an altogether new Middle East." Keller
deplores "the offensive suggestion of dual loyalty" made
by some of Wolfowitz's critics, but {{ on Keller's own
showing there are grounds for suspicion; and }} offensive
or not, we have to ask what interests are really served
by sending Americans to fight in Iraq. After all,
American politicians constantly seek Jewish votes and
money by campaigning on the assumption that most American
Jews put Israel's interests ahead of America's.
* * *
It's almost enough to make you pity Saddam Hussein.
Since when is refusing to give up all your military
secrets a casus belli? So the guy defies UN resolutions
and may be working on nuclear weapons. By these
standards, Bush should be threatening to make war on
Israel.
* * *
We are hearing demands that Congress "unite behind
the president." Pardon me, but isn't it the president who
is supposed to execute the will of Congress? And isn't
Congress supposed to impeach the president if he usurps
its powers? Or did all that expire back in 1865?
* * *
You don't have to be a football fan (I'm not) to
feel a pang at the sudden passing of Johnny Unitas, 69,
the Baltimore Colts' great quarterback who won perhaps
the most exciting pro game ever, the Colts' sudden-death
championship victory over the New York Giants in 1958. It
proved the precedent for countless gutsy performances.
Even if all his records are broken someday (fat chance!),
nobody who saw him play will ever forget the way he
combined finesse and courage. Even when his skills had
deserted him and Colts fans booed him without mercy, he
never flinched at tacklers. In retirement, he was
unfailingly gracious to anyone who approached him.
Exclusive to the electronic version:
People used to make sport of Gerald Ford's
intellectual and verbal clumsiness. Well, we now have a
president who makes Ford sound like a polymath. He should
at least acquire a smattering of Hebrew, so he can
understand his orders from Ariel Sharon.
* * *
The columnist Thomas Friedman of the NEW YORK TIMES
thinks "the Iraq debate is upside down." He agrees with
skeptics who think Saddam Hussein poses no real danger to
the United States. The real and lasting danger, he says,
will come from angry young Muslims in the Arab world who
won't be deterred by American military power, and will
become tomorrow's terrorists. The only solution -- and
Friedman admits it won't be easy -- is to change the
political climate of the entire Arab world. Wouldn't it
be simpler just to stop antagonizing that world?
Conservatism for Kids
(pages 3-5)
A conservative Rip Van Winkle who had fallen asleep
in 1965 and awakened in 2002 would be amazed on two
counts. First, the conservative movement, seemingly
whipped and marginalized when Lyndon Johnson crushed
Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, has
achieved startling political, cultural, and journalistic
power. Second, that power has been won at the cost of a
serious debasement of the movement itself.
No doubt the two facts are related. An intellectual
movement, in order to gain power, has to water down some
of its animating principles, usually to the point of
alienating many of its original members. Every such
movement is divided between the "pragmatists" who seek
success and the "purists" who see no point in success if
it comes at the expense of their core principles.
Of course the pragmatists always offer their own
principle, which is that half a loaf is better than none.
The question is, a loaf of what? And the real answer,
rarely admitted, is always: a loaf of power, with only a
slight leavening of principle.
Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, movement
conservatives have ruled the Republican Party and have
increasingly become Republican partisans, albeit hostile
to the Republican "moderates" who have also been hostile
to them. At the same time, the conservatives -- and
especially the largely Zionist "neoconservatives" -- have
become prominent in the media.
In fact, the old conservatism, the kind I knew in
1965, is pretty much gone now. Neoconservatism has
swallowed it up. It would take a keener eye than mine to
detect substantive differences between THE WEEKLY
STANDARD and NATIONAL REVIEW. Both are pragmatic,
obsessed with political victory and military power, and
oriented more to Israel than to Europe. Neither regards
Europe as very importantly related to America; both jeer
at Europe for failing to support American imperialism
("global leadership") and accuse Europeans of cowardice,
cynicism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism. Neither
really opposes the welfare state -- at least, not very
energetically.
Neoconservatism came into being in the late Sixties
when a group of anti-Communist liberals, mostly Jewish
and Zionist (though this was downplayed at first), broke
with McGovernite liberals. They thought the welfare state
had gone far enough, though they had no objection to it
in its essence; they merely doubted that any new
redistributive programs could work, and warned that they
might do more harm than good. But they had come to terms
with the New Deal and the Great Society. They had no
moral objections to democratic socialism, as long as it
was anti-Communist.
In 1965, the New Deal was still a recent horror, and
conservatives hated the memory of Franklin Roosevelt both
because he had created the American welfare state and
because he had formed an alliance with the Soviet Union
during World War II. The large agenda of conservatism in
those days was to defeat (not just contain) Communism and
to repeal New Deal legislation, though conservatives were
becoming more and more pessimistic about actually
achieving either goal. Given their defeats at the polls,
they were also pessimistic about democracy.
This may sound {{ like a gloomy outlook, }} but it
was actually invigorating. Conservatives prided
themselves on having no illusions about life. Expecting
no political victory in the foreseeable future, they
contented themselves with philosophical reflection of a
kind now absent from conservative journalism. Today it is
easier to imagine the editors of NATIONAL REVIEW
attending a Bruce Springsteen concert than reading Edmund
Burke.
That is what I am most struck by in the young
conservatives: the absence of meditation. In 1965
NATIONAL REVIEW was interested in more than the topical
and ephemeral. In its early years it featured such
reflective writers as Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, James
Burnham, Thomas Molnar, Henry Hazlitt, Whittaker
Chambers, Hugh Kenner, Willmoore Kendall, and the young
Garry Wills. They knew their Plato, Aristotle, Augustine,
Aquinas, and Burke. They discussed and debated first
principles; Frank Meyer once had an extended argument
over Lincoln with Harry V. Jaffa, and a similar one with
Brent Bozell over whether the purpose of government was
to preserve liberty or to promote virtue. As late as 1975
the magazine ran a long essay by the great British
political philosopher Michael Oakeshott.
Such thinkers probed endlessly for the roots of
conservatism and tried to define it. Many of their
answers were provocative, but they never fully agreed on
a definition. They differed on just what it was
conservatism was trying to conserve. British and American
conservatives wanted to conserve the old orders of their
own countries, but of course these were two very
different things, and defining either of them was hard
enough. Still, all of these men, in their diverse ways,
were earnestly and intelligently trying to purify
conservative thought -- something hardly anyone would
think to do nowdays. Such combatively principled
individualists, some of them seminal thinkers, have
vanished from the movement today; and they would be
unwelcome in it if they still existed. It is hard to
believe that NATIONAL REVIEW was once a magnet for them.
Politically, NATIONAL REVIEW stood for anti-
Communism and the free market. But anti-Communism came
first, and the magazine dropped such Old Right figures as
John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Frank Chodorov, and Albert
Jay Nock down the Memory Hole because they had opposed
the Cold War. It is reasonable to ask whether this purge
of the Old, anti-war, "isolationist" Right helped set the
stage for the later decline of the conservative movement.
{{ (We should note that Robert Nisbet, one of the most
trenchant American conservative thinkers of his
generation, never wrote for NATIONAL REVIEW; perhaps
because, as his book THE PRESENT AGE later attested, he
deplored the militarization of America.) }}
Still, the magazine, and conservatism generally, had
an openness, a depth, a readiness to entertain unresolved
questions, that were unusual in both politics and
journalism. Apart from agreeing on a few practical
issues, conservatives were a varied lot, and conservatism
was intellectually nutritious. Liberalism was gray and
dull by comparison; a program for power, nothing more.
Conservatives thought of society as a habitation for the
soul, formed by unfathomable history and tradition;
liberals thought of it as a product of calculation, a way
of regimenting soulless beings efficiently, with no need
of tradition.
Even so, liberalism pretty much enjoyed a monopoly
of public discourse, and conservatives were treated as
marginal, even slightly disreputable. According to
liberal mythology, conservatism was chiefly a
rationalization of atavisms which history had not yet
managed to eliminate.
I was ready to believe that conservatives were
fighting for lost causes, but I also felt deeply that a
good cause, even if doomed, was worth fighting for. What
I really hated about liberalism was that it was so
*ignoble.* As King Lear asks, "Is man no more than this?"
The very fact that man had imagined Lear contained the
answer. Even in my years of religious doubt and
confusion, I knew that conservatism, as a general outlook
on life, was on Shakespeare's side of the question.
Liberalism was basically crass, and in my mind its
crassness made it the enemy of everything that was really
human.
Aristotle says that man is a political animal.
Liberalism agreed, but saw man as *only* political. Its
whole tendency was to crush the private self -- the human
soul, whatever it might be -- out of existence. The more
it professed to liberate, the more it oppressed. If the
state was our savior, I preferred not to be saved, thank
you.
Mind you, in 1965 liberalism was still relatively
sane. It had not yet cut its moorings to the moral
traditions of the West as it since has. Even Communism --
the sincerest form of liberalism -- had not yet
discovered that sodomy was normal. Feminism was still
embryonic -- that is, not yet hostile to both the
feminine and the embryo.
But the further the Left moved leftward, the further
the Right moved leftward. Conservatives began conserving
less and less. Politically it was safer to move toward
the shifting center, under cover of conservative
rhetoric. The media kept saying, throughout the Reagan
years, that the country was moving rightward, but this
was the opposite of the truth. Conservatives were winning
more elections, but only by quietly abandoning
conservatism as it had been previously understood.
By the mid 1990s, leading "conservatives" --
NATIONAL REVIEW, Rush Limbaugh, Jack Kemp, George Will,
Cal Thomas, the neoconservatives -- were in perfect
alignment. It was said that the neoconservatives had
become genuine conservatives, when anyone could see the
obvious: that the so-called conservatives had become
neoconservatives.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberals who
had always jeered at anti-Communism now jeered that the
conservative movement no longer had an enemy to hold it
together. There was some truth in this, but the movement
responded by finding new enemies. Conservatism became
militarism. Without a principled creed to define it, it
was ripe for takeover by the neoconservatives whose only
principle was militarism.
And this is exactly what happened. New enemies,
potential mortal threats to the United States (or at
least its vaguely defined "vital interests"), were
sighted everywhere: Panama, China, Iraq, Iran, Syria,
even North Korea. At least the Soviet Union, a military
superpower, had been a plausible threat; its nuclear
arsenal could have destroyed several major American
cities. None of these new "enemies" could threaten
anything more than regional hegemony -- that is, taking a
chunk out of American global hegemony. The movement
press, led by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, frantically warned
that China was on the verge of achieving dominance in
southeast Asia, and throughout the 1990s wailed that the
Clinton administration was not only ignoring but abetting
this "threat" through lax security. The Chinese were
stealing our high-tech military secrets!
This alarmism never produced the hysteria it hoped
to inspire, but it did keep the Christian conservatives
distracted from their principles -- or rather, the
principles their forebears had espoused. It solidified
their merger with neoconservatism. Gone was any concern
with limited government or constitutional law. Gone too
was any sense of a vital connection with Europe and
European culture; the conservatives now ape the
neoconservatives in sneering at Europe, accusing it of
cowardice, cynicism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism.
Today NATIONAL REVIEW actually prefers Israel to Europe;
its editorials {{ simply }} repeat Zionist propaganda
about the Middle East, and many of its writers also
appear frequently in COMMENTARY.
This surprised me more than it probably should have.
I had always assumed that if the United States survived
and won the Cold War without serious material damage,
conservatives would favor a huge reduction in military
forces that were no longer needed for defense. After all,
there could be no new threat comparable to the Soviet
Union. If it was really necessary to fight lesser
enemies, that could be done with a fraction of the
military forces and spending we had become accustomed to
since 1945.
No such thing. By 1990 conservatives had become
addicted to foreign intervention. They would no longer
settle for mere defense, or even for American military
supremacy; they wanted global hegemony -- the very thing
they had accused the Soviets of coveting. So they joined
the neoconservatives in inflating every annoyance abroad
into a threat to America's "vital interests," defining
the term ever more loosely. "Vital" interests, after all,
are those that affect survival itself; and what on earth
could possibly threaten American survival after the
worldwide demise of Communism? Yet the conservatives
followed the lead of the neoconservatives like hounds at
a fox-hunt. Israel's enemies were now their enemies.
All this would have astonished James Burnham,
NATIONAL REVIEW's resident geopolitical thinker during
its first two decades. A brilliant Cold War strategist,
Burnham favored maximum American power to counter the
Soviet threat to the West; but for him the West meant
Europe as well as America and did *not* embrace Israel,
toward which he was always skeptical and suspicious. As a
former Communist of the Trotskyite school, he was also
well aware of the Jewish intellectuals who had
transferred their loyalties from Communism to Zionism,
and by the 1970s he felt that conservatives should be
wary of their new neoconservative "allies" whose real
allegiance was to Israel. The neoconservatives also
mistrusted Burnham; they knew he was on to them.
Yet Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor of NATIONAL
REVIEW, has recently called Burnham "the first
neoconservative." This is a gross falsification.
Brookhiser himself has assimilated to neoconservatism
without missing a step, but Burnham never did or would
have done so. If he were alive (he died in 1984), he
would still be opposing the Zionist subversion of the
conservative movement as strongly as he once opposed the
Communist infiltration of liberalism.
The Zionists have even tried, with considerable
success, to purge anti-Zionist conservatives from the
movement. Patrick Buchanan, Russell Kirk, Samuel Francis,
and I have been among their targets; no open critic of
Israel is now permitted in the conservative press. I know
many discreet heretics who have survived the Zionist
purge only by refraining from saying what they really
think.
Brookhiser's claim of Burnham for the neocons shows
how totally today's conservatives have forgotten not only
American history, but their own past. They see their own
Zionist-oriented militarism as a direct development of
conservatism, when it is in fact a total departure from
the old conservatism, which always placed American
interests ahead of any foreign interest. The America
First movement even saw World War II as a European fight
in which America had no dog.
In short, the conservative movement I knew in 1965
has all but ceased to exist. Fugitive remnants of it may
be found in a few journals like CHRONICLES and MODERN
AGE, but these have no real connection to the political
movement called conservatism, which is not interested in
conserving anything except American military power and
its own control of the Republican Party. Its style is not
one of aristocratic reflection and caution, but of crass
populist bluster. It has become as soulless as
liberalism.
In fact, as I wrote last year, today's conservatism
is hardly anything more than a variant of the liberalism
it pretends to oppose. It offers almost nothing to
attract a thoughtful young man, as witness the brash
{{ but timid }} young men who are now its spokesmen.
Nobody has ever accused them of being purists; lost
causes and defying prevailing trends hold little interest
for them. They are exactly the sort of men you would
expect to survive a purge.
History a la Horowitz
David Horowitz, I was advised, had attacked me. I
wasn't surprised at that, but I was slightly surprised to
hear that he'd done so in his book UNCIVIL WARS: THE
CONTROVERSY OVER REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY. That was one
debate I'd assumed we were both on the same side of.
Horowitz was one of the leaders of the New Left at
Berkeley during the Sixties. I'd hardly noticed him at
the time. I started paying attention to him during the
Eighties, when he and his pal Peter Collier had both
defected from the Left and became combative
neoconservative Reagan Republicans, exposing the Left in
brilliantly vitriolic polemics. {{ They also collaborated
on a series of best-selling, unsparing sagas of the
Rockefeller, Roosevelt, Ford, and Kennedy families. }}
More recently Horowitz has put himself at the center
of the debate over reparations. A couple of years ago,
with tactical shrewdness, he wrote a full-page, ten-point
ad blasting the whole idea, which he tried to place in
campus newspapers from coast to coast. It quickly became
notorious, at least to the campus Left. Most of the
papers he approached flatly refused to run the ad,
calling it "racist" and "bigoted." A few that did run it
also attacked it editorially. Horowitz contended that he
was being smeared and cited the reaction as proof of the
Left's refusal to debate. He was entirely right, of
course. UNCIVIL WARS is his account of his experience.
Like most neoconservatives, Horowitz is really an
old-fashioned liberal who deplores "McCarthyism" and
Communism, accepts the New Deal, is glad the United
States got into World War II, regards Martin Luther King
as a hero, {{ and knows }} and cares little about the
Constitution. But he favors "color-blind" law and regards
reparations as a vicious distortion of King's legacy.
So how do I come into this? On page 115 of UNCIVIL
WARS Horowitz cites Lerone Bennett Jr. and me as (in Jack
Kemp's phrase) "assassins of Lincoln's character." He
quotes Frederick Douglass's praise of Lincoln (ignoring
Douglass's more critical remarks about him) as sufficient
refutation of my (and Bennett's) views. He also
approvingly quotes Harry V. Jaffa: "One might epitomize
everything Lincoln said between 1854 and 1861 as a demand
for recognition of the Negro's human rights, as set forth
in the Declaration."
In other words, Horowitz implies, Lincoln stood for
a color-blind America, would have supported the civil
rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties, and would
oppose racial reparations today. This Lincoln saw only
individuals, not races.
In fact, Lincoln *did* favor reparations -- though
not quite the kind Horowitz has in mind. He wanted
"gradual" emancipation of the slaves -- but with
"compensation," paid by the government, to *their former
owners!*
{{ If Lincoln were among us today, his logic might
demand that reparations be paid to the descendants of the
slaveowners (at least those of the nonseceding border
states) who were so suddenly stripped of their property
by the Thirteenth Amendment. }}
Lincoln did offer reparations, of sorts, to the
former slaves. Horowitz may not know (though Jaffa surely
does) that Lincoln favored the voluntary deportation of
the freedmen outside the United States. From 1852 on, he
was a passionate advocate of "colonization," a cause
espoused by his hero Henry Clay. He also approved
Illinois's {{ notorious }} black code, which denied free
Negroes the right to vote, serve as jurors, or marry
whites. In his plan, the Federal Government would pay for
colonization; he even asked Congress to adopt a
constitutional amendment authorizing this.
Remember, Lincoln wanted a united *white* America.
He thought total segregation would be best for both
races, he spoke of the Negro as "the African," and the
only reparation he offered the freed slave was a free
ride to his "native land" or a reasonable facsimile
thereof -- provided it was outside the United States.
Color-blind he was not.
One may say that Lincoln shared some of the
prejudices of his time. {{ And so he did. }} But to admit
this is to admit that he didn't transcend those
prejudices; in some ways he took them further than most
whites of his time, who realized that colonizing four
million fast-breeding Negroes was a nonstarter. (So did
the Negroes, who had no intention of leaving their
"native land" -- America.)
Horowitz quotes only those historians -- Jaffa and
James McPherson, for example -- who suppress Lincoln's
actual views on race. He naively describes the Civil War
as a war against slavery, ignoring Lincoln's plain,
repeated denials that his purpose was anything but to
"save the Union" (as he stressed in his first inaugural
address and his famous letter to Horace Greeley).
Lincoln's target was secession, not slavery. He wouldn't
have called off his war if the South had freed every one
of its slaves while continuing to claim independence. He
spoke of "saving the Union" constantly -- hundreds of
times. He spoke of attacking slavery only as a possible
means toward that end, never as the purpose of the war
itself.
Horowitz is right to oppose racial reparations, but
his reasoning illustrates the neoconservative tendency to
reduce history to a few convenient slogans. He
misrepresents both the white supremacist Lincoln and the
Marxist King, supposing that they both shared his facile
color-blind liberalism. Neither would thank him.
NUGGETS
GERIATRIC NOTES: One sign you're getting old is that you
keep finding the records that once made you feel hip and
rebellious moved into the Easy Listening section.
(page 8)
QUERY: Are we fighting the Axis of Evil, or the Axis of
Oil? (page 8)
GAILY EVER AFTER: The NEW YORK TIMES has added a new
element to its society pages: formalized homosexual
unions are now being announced along with weddings. You
don't have to be "straight" to wish that the Paper of
Record would stick to the code of impartial reporting,
instead of sticking its oar into the culture war on
traditional institutions. (page 9)
WHY DO THEY THINK IT'S CALLED A *BIG* MAC? Fat people are
just like everyone else -- and equally litigious. Some of
them are now suing fast-food chains like McDonald's,
blaming them for their excessive avoirdupois. One wag has
noted that automobiles are already equipped with a
calorie-avoidance device. It's more commonly known as the
steering wheel. (page 10)
IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY? If Iraq is such a threat to the
planet, why are its immediate neighbors all begging
President Bush not to attack it? Europe agrees. The
Israelis are quick to react to any threat in the region,
real or supposed, yet even they (in striking contrast to
their Amen Corner in this country) aren't preparing for
war with Iraq. Draw your own conclusions. (page 11)
KEN BURNS, TAKE NOTE: Think how much trouble could have
been avoided if Lincoln had been impeached in 1861. It
could have averted the Civil War, saved the Constitution,
and prevented Lincoln's own violent death. (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
AT LEAST THEY'RE HONEST ABOUT IT: A Frenchman went into a
bookstore and asked for a copy of the French
constitution. "I am so sorry," he was told, "we do not
sell periodical literature."
YOU AGAIN! Alan Dershowitz, America's Number One Pest,
has written a new book on how to fight terrorism. Among
his recommendations: the government should issue "torture
warrants," authorizing such measures as sticking needles
under the fingernails of suspected terrorists. Yes, this
is "Alan Dershowitz, famed civil liberties activist." (At
least that's what the press called him when his chief
passion was defending pornographers.) It sometimes takes
an effort to remind oneself that under our legal system,
no defendant may be presumed guilty just because
Dershowitz is representing him.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Making the World Democratic (August 20, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020820.shtml
* Sticking with the Mets (August 29, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020829.shtml
* Bad News from Troy (September 3, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020903.shtml
* Anniversary Thoughts (September 5, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020905.shtml
* The First Saddam Hussein (September 10, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020910.shtml
* A Call for World War IV (September 12, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020912.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran.
Individuals may subscribe to the Sobran E-Package.
See "http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml" or
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call 800-513-5053.
Copyright (c) 2002 by the Griffin Internet
Syndicate, www.griffnews.com. All rights reserved.
[ ENDS ]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
You may forward this newsletter if you include the
following subscription and copyright information:
Subscribe to the Sobran E-Package.
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or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples
or call 800-513-5053.
Copyright (c) 2002 by The Vere Company -- www.sobran.com.
All rights reserved.
Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate
www.griffnews.com with permission.
[ENDS]