SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
February 2003
Volume 10, No. 2
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Legacy of Lies
-> The Moving Picture (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> Neos and Other Cons
-> Among the Bushmen
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
Legacy of Lies
(page 1)
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets. }}
For 30 years now, abortion has been legal --
allegedly by constitutional requirement -- in the United
States. Tens of millions of human lives have been
violently destroyed.
Though it has been a huge success, the pro-abortion
movement rests on lies. In 1964 Planned Parenthood still
insisted that abortion was absolutely different from
birth control, which, it pointed out, "doesn't kill a
baby." Today it abhors calling abortion "baby-killing"
and accuses those who want to ban abortion of wanting to
ban contraception too.
Early advocates of legal abortion agreed that
abortion was a bad thing, but argued that legalization
would make it easier to regulate. Then they adopted the
agnostic line: "nobody can say" whether abortion is wrong
-- it should be a matter of "individual conscience."
Finally they switched to the position that abortion is a
positive good, "a fundamental human [!] and
constitutional right," which taxpayers, no matter what
their consciences told them, should be forced to
subsidize. The more abortions, the better. From
pretending to want to minimize the frequency of abortion
-- since "it happens anyway" -- they quickly moved to
maximize it.
And so it goes, lie after lie. Refute one lie, and
two others spring up in its place. It's as tiresome as it
is futile to debate people who argue in such consistent
bad faith.
Some lies, of course, are more outrageous than
others. One of the worst is the calumny that pro-lifers
want to "impose their views" on others, as if banning a
form of murder were a form of narrow sectarian zeal. You
might think that killing a child is a pretty decisive way
of imposing one's will, if not one's "views," on the
victim. Millions of pro-lifers have made unselfish, even
heroic, sacrifices to protect the unborn, pleading only
that the old laws, struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court,
be restored. If this is a route to power over others, it
has proved a singularly fruitless one. But mindless
smears of pro-lifers have become a regular tactic of the
pro-abortion movement.
Support for abortion has actually become the central
tenet of one of America's two major political parties;
while opposition to abortion is weak in the other party.
That fact speaks volumes about the level of civilization
in America today. Not so long ago, pro-lifers used to
joke bitterly about the sort of Catholic politician who
would say, "I am personally opposed to abortion,
but ... " That feeble disclaimer is no longer necessary;
in fact, it's doubtful that any good Democrat would now
dare to express even his "personal" opposition. The
standard line today is "I support a woman's right to
choose." And this usually means her right to choose to
have her child horribly dismembered even in the birth
canal.
Some of the old lies and hypocrisies may now be
obsolete, but even today the abortion advocates must
still pretend that they favor only an abstract "choice,"
without specifying the content of what is chosen --
namely, the death of an innocent human being. {{ A case
can be made that abortion is none of the state's
business, if you hold that the state has no right to
exist in the first place; but this position in no way
means that the innocent may be rightfully killed at whim.
Be that as it may, the abortion advocates are generally
great believers in the state, even to the extent of
insisting that the state may authoritatively repeal what
many of us still believe is divine law. It would remain
true even if none of us believed it.
State or no state, THOU SHALT NOT KILL. }} Immortal
souls are at stake. The modern "liberal" state rests on
the denial of this fearful truth.
THE MOVING PICTURE
(page 2)
Suddenly, there is hope of peace -- in the unlikely
figure of Kim Jong Il, the world's ugliest, nastiest
tyrant. His nuclear threat has taken the Bush
administration by surprise: he doesn't mind saying he's
everything Bush accuses Saddam Hussein of being. And how
have our dauntless tough guys reacted? With notable
restraint, that's how. They insist this isn't a "crisis"
and they want to resolve our little differences through
negotiation. What happened to their refrain that "the
risks of inaction are greater than the risks of action"?
If Kim can save us from war with Iraq, he may deserve a
Nobel Peace Prize.
* * *
Partial to lobster, fine French wines, and
Scandinavian blondes, Kim has shunned the austere
Communist lifestyle that has starved an estimated two
million North Koreans over the last decade. If there is a
hell, he will spend eternity boiling naked in oil and
listening to Alan Dershowitz talk about the Holocaust.
* * *
Reflecting on how to handle North Korea, my old boss
Bill Buckley writes in his syndicated column, "In
straight-out wars, we happily engage in blockades. If it
had been established in the fall of 1944 that more and
more Germans were starving, we'd have put this down as a
great achievement. Starving people to death is slower
than bombing them to death, but still, it would have
meant fewer Nazis to deal with." So committing war crimes
is a legitimate part of waging war? Bill's latest novel
is a celebration of the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Go
figure.
* * *
Christopher Hitchens began his career as an ex-pat
Brit leftist two decades ago, loving to outrage everyone
with his naughty heresies. In one column in THE NATION he
even outraged his fellow leftists by questioning the
dogma of abortion rights. More recently he has been all
over the place, calling Mother Teresa a fraud, Henry
Kissinger a war criminal, Queen Elizabeth II a parasite,
the Clintons crooks. Of late he has surprised everyone by
breaking with the Left and supporting the War on Terror.
He has resigned from THE NATION, and the Right has warily
embraced him. His newest book, WHY ORWELL MATTERS,
invites the reader to compare him with his anti-Stalinist
socialist hero. Such a comparison does Hitchens no favor.
To see why, you need only read his essay on abortion in
the February issue of VANITY FAIR. He still admits that a
human fetus is human, but directs all his snotty Brit
sarcasm at "fundamentalist pro-lifers" and "Holy Mother
Church." In the end he ducks the real question with a
tony reference to Hegel's definition of tragedy: "the
irresoluble conflict of right with right." So it comes
down to a tie between the mother's right to convenience
and the child's right to live? Not exactly a performance
worthy of Orwell, if you ask me.
* * *
Another Brit writer of widely remarked conversion is
Jan Morris, author of well-received travel books. I say
"his," though he was formerly James Morris until he had
one of those operations. Without wishing to be unkind, I
refuse to recognize such a thing as a "sex-change"
operation. To equate a mutilated male with a woman is an
insult to women. It defines womanhood negatively -- as
the mere lack of male parts. And the whole idea is just
plain creepy. Nice though he seems to be (he is no
crusader for "transsexualism"), I wouldn't hold a door
open for Mr. Morris. I will however retract these
animadversions if he should become pregnant.
Exclusive to the electronic version:
Quick, how many Federal laws are on the books? I
have no idea either, but we're supposed to obey all of
them. The other day I was struck by these words of
"Publius" (in this case, Alexander Hamilton) in
Federalist No. 62: "It will be of little avail to the
people that the laws are made by men of their own choice,
if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or
so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be
repealed or revised before they are promulged [sic], or
undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what
the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law
is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a
rule, which is little known and less fixed?"
Neos and Other Cons
(pages 3-5)
"What the heck is a 'neocon'?" asks Max Boot of the
neoconservative WEEKLY STANDARD, writing on the editorial
page of the neoconservative WALL STREET JOURNAL. He
professes himself puzzled by the label and unable to
define it, and he claims that the neoconservatives are
"no less conservative than anyone else on the right,"
adding, "There's no 'neo' in my conservatism." True,
"support for Israel" is "a key tenet of neoconservatism,"
but he stresses that "many of the leading neocons aren't
Jewish" (though he lists only four Christian neocons).
Any suggestion that neoconservatism is essentially a
Jewish phenomenon is "a malicious slur."
Oh, come now. "Support for Israel" is what
neoconservatism is all about. This "key tenet" is, in
fact, its entire raison d'etre. And in practice, this
means urging the United States to make war on Israel's
enemies.
It also means smearing conservatives who oppose such
wars. Boot spends much of his long column sneering at
Patrick Buchanan, whose "paleoconservatism" he calls "a
poisonous brew." (He even lumps Father Charles Coughlin
with paleoconservatism, though Coughlin was a social
democrat.)
Am I suggesting that the neocons have "dual
loyalties"? Not at all. They have only one loyalty.
If their loyalties were divided, they might
sometimes -- even once in a great while -- put the
interests of the United States ahead of those of Israel.
Or they might occasionally admit that "support for
Israel" has cost the United States heavily and made it
countless enemies (as in 9/11). But their Niagara of
journalistic propaganda never does either. After the 9/11
attacks, neocons instantly took the party line that those
attacks were wholly unrelated to U.S. support for Israel
-- though they also, in the twinkling of an eye, called
the attacks a further reason for America to support the
Jewish state.
In practice, American politicians angling for Jewish
votes and money assume that most Jews give their first
loyalty to Israel. Democrats like Al Gore and Republicans
like John McCain tell Jewish audiences that the United
States should be ready to go to war for Israel. Are they
booed or scolded for casting aspersions on the patriotism
of American Jews? Not at all. They are cheered and
rewarded -- for presupposing what it would be strictly
taboo to say explicitly. In effect, they are affirming
what I've been accused of accusing Jews of!
But the real question is whether the neocons are
conservative at all. And the answer is that they are not
-- not in any important sense. Boot's entire essay makes
not a single mention of the U.S. Constitution or the need
to limit the powers of government. It celebrates "liberal
democracies" (including Israel under this heading) with
no hint that Madison, Burke, Dr. Johnson, Oakeshott, and
most other noted conservative thinkers (as well as
classical liberals revered by conservatives) have had
deep doubts about democracy. It says nothing about the
conservative virtue of prudence or the dangers of
"unintended consequences."
Boot follows the current neocon line in its least
conservative contention: that the United States must not
only defeat Iraq, but install democratic regimes in the
entire region: "We need to liberalize the Middle East."
Neocon Charles Krauthammer similarly says that the war
will not be about Iraq alone, but "about reforming the
Arab world." Neocon patriarch Norman Podhoretz has called
for "World War IV" for the same purpose: replacing
existing Arab regimes (and Iran's) with democracies.
All this assumes that "democracies" can be created
ex nihilo by American military force in an alien and
hostile region, and that free elections in these
countries would produce rulers congenial to the United
States and, more important, to Israel. The idea is so
absurd one can hardly believe its proponents are serious.
Truly popular governments in the Middle East would elect
radical Islamic rulers. An Osama bin Laden would vastly
outpoll any pro-American candidate.
Even the neocons admit that spawning democracies in
greater Arabia would be quite a chore -- for openers,
"occupying Iraq," as Boot puts it, "for an extended
period." Evidently this task would mean more than
toppling Arab despots, setting up voting booths, and
coming home as democracy worked its magical
transformation of Arab-Muslim culture. It would mean a
long U.S. occupation, at who knows what cost in American
lives and money. But price is no object when it comes to
"reforming the Arab world" to Israel's liking.
There is nothing conservative about such an agenda
of conquest and "nation-building." Conservatives used to
know that nations aren't "built." They grow gradually
from viable traditions, which we break at our own risk.
How did the neocons come to be confused -- and how
have they confused themselves -- with conservatives? In
the 1970s and 1980s they formed an alliance with
prominent conservatives, notably Bill Buckley, on one
chief issue: anti-Communism. Gradually the Jewish
"COMMENTARY crowd" began to merge with the more or less
Catholic "Buckley crowd," even socially. The latter
obligingly accommodated itself to Zionism, forgetting its
old suspicions of Israeli treachery and even its
principled opposition to foreign aid. Israel was now a
trusted ally of the United States.
Now that the two movements were as one, the neocons
moved boldly to take charge. They did their utmost to
excommunicate conservative critics of Israel, including
the venerable Russell Kirk, Pat Buchanan, and me.
Buckley, afraid to oppose them, actually lent them a hand
in this purge. They praised him for his "courage." My
shock and disgust were inexpressible.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of
the Cold War, conservative intellectuals lost their
bearings. They seemed to forget the principles that had
originally united them; they interpreted Republican
political victories, however compromising, as evidence of
their own triumph; and their agenda became little more
than supporting any war favored by Republicans. They
forgot their old hopes of repealing the welfare state,
the New Deal, the Great Society; and the further the
country moved leftward, the more they pretended it was
moving rightward, claiming a popular mandate for their
shrinking body of principles.
NATIONAL REVIEW degenerated accordingly. As Buckley
retired, the magazine fell under the management of young
men who were conservative only, so to speak, by apostolic
succession. They were pro-war and anti-Clinton, with
occasional lip-service to old conservative causes. They
were also unquestioningly pro-Israel, virtually endorsing
the Likud party in all its bloody excesses. They had seen
what happened to conservatives who expressed even
skepticism about our "ally." And they welcomed neocons
into their pages and even onto their editorial board.
These young conservatives were also ignorant of the
magazine's founding generation -- men like James Burnham,
Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, Brent Bozell, and the
others who often slugged it out over philosophical
questions in the magazine's pages. For the junior
conservatives, there are no philosophical questions.
There are only sides to be taken and poses to be struck.
The reason neocons like Boot can pass themselves off
as conservatives is not just that they have the
effrontery to do so; it's also that the young
conservatives don't know the difference. NATIONAL REVIEW
no longer espouses any principle or policy position that
significantly divides it from THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
To me this is the most amazing part of all. Today's
alleged conservatives believe the very things their
forebears rejected. Orwell once wrote that there are some
things so preposterous "that only an intellectual could
believe them"; and that now appears to be doubly true for
the conservative intellectual.
Far from believing in a limited, constitutional
Federal Government, today's "movement" conservative
believes in a centralized, militaristic state. He sees
war not as an occasional necessity, regrettable and full
of tragedy and peril even for the victors, but as a
positively beneficent thing, even for the losers. Annoyed
by constitutional restraints, he is a Caesarist, claiming
for the president (provided he is a Republican, of
course) a discretionary power to make war; and his
periodicals are full of personal adulation of President
Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, embarrassing in their celebration of these
men's heroism and wisdom.
In the starkest contrast to earlier conservative
thinkers, who heaped scorn on visionary central planning,
the new conservatives actually believe in war as a form
of social engineering! Never before has enthusiasm for
concentrated power and violent change been regarded as a
conservative trait. Nor has the belief that war can work
miracles.
In short, it's hard to find any continuity between
the older conservatism and the new. The older
conservatives were at least militaristic for a specific
reason: they saw Communism as a threat to America and
Western civilization. For them military power was never
an end in itself. The hubris of the new rationales for
war in the Middle East would have appalled them. The new
conservatives have done their best to make conservatism
synonymous with militarism -- a crass reduction.
When I worked at NATIONAL REVIEW, I used to stay
late at the office, reading bound volumes of the early
issues. I marveled at the variety and quality of its
infant years -- essays by Burnham, Kendall, Kirk, Richard
Weaver, Thomas Molnar, John Lukacs, Erik von Kuehnelt-
Leddihn, the young Garry Wills, and many others. They
were all different, but all originals. They taught me new
ways of seeing the world.
Burnham -- one of the most original -- still worked
at the magazine, and I was proud to be his intellectual
apprentice. Jim (as he insisted I call him, despite my
veneration) was a quiet, calm, kindly man, tall and
distinguished-looking, who loved shocking ideas. Speaking
just above a whisper, he even enjoyed shocking his fellow
conservatives, including Bill Buckley. A trained
philosopher and logician, he had been a leading American
communist of the Trotskyite persuasion (he'd always hated
Stalin) until he fell out with Trotsky. Trotsky had
insisted that good Reds must support the Soviet Union,
even under Stalin, and Jim wouldn't buy it. The debate
was interrupted when Stalin had Trotsky murdered.
Jim made many mistakes, but he always learned from
them. His errors became the steppingstones to new
insights. He had a rare ability to judge his own pet
ideas, as well as others', with merciless objectivity.
The very whiff of a conservative party line brought out
the maverick in him. I couldn't always follow his
thinking, but I loved his ruthless realism. He distrusted
the neocons because they were dishonest; they, in turn,
distrusted him because he was honest.
He particularly distrusted Henry Kissinger. When, as
Gerald Ford's secretary of state, Kissinger pompously
disowned South Africa, Jim remarked to me, "Sometimes, in
this world, you have to throw your friends to the wolves.
But you don't have to talk this s--- about 'democracy'
when you do it." I was more shocked by his mild vulgarity
than by his contempt for Kissinger. It seemed so out of
keeping with his exquisite refinement.
On the other hand, he was no admirer of South
Africa. It wasn't racism as such that repelled him; it
was the petty apartheid of such things as racially
separate drinking fountains: "You don't have to humiliate
people that way." Hard-headed as he was, he was also
humane. A true gentleman, was Jim Burnham. A complicated,
civilized man. I was blessed to know him.
Jim wasn't lavish with praise. One day, when he was
in charge of the editorial section during Bill's absence,
I was especially prolific in discharging my assignments.
Jim, in his laconic way, told me, "You've written some
good things today, Joe." I couldn't have been more
flattered if I'd won the Nobel Prize. On another occasion
a family emergency forced me to fly home to Michigan. As
I left, Jim shook my hand and wished me well. It was an
unexpected gesture from this unsentimental man, and I was
quite moved. He wasn't cold; he merely saved his warmth
for when it was really needed.
A stroke forced Jim to retire in 1978.
I missed him; the magazine missed him; Bill Buckley
no doubt missed him more acutely than the rest of us. Jim
was Bill's intellectual conscience, and when Jim was gone
Bill himself was never quite the same; his tendency to
excess unfortunately had nothing to restrain it. Bill,
with his impulsive hyperbole, was Bertie Wooster; Jim,
with his carefully measured words, was his Jeeves.
Though Jim was never an orthodox or "movement"
conservative, he supplied the movement with a note of
skepticism that was a valuable corrective to its
enthusiasms. I took his gentle rebukes -- and even his
noncommittal silences -- to heart.
Every movement needs its mavericks as well as its
leaders. Today the conservative movement has disowned its
mavericks. A recent article in NATIONAL REVIEW gloated
that three prominent mavericks on the 1991 Gulf war --
Buchanan, Sam Francis, and I -- have been "marginalized."
An odd thing to celebrate, given that conservatives still
complain that liberals try to marginalize them. The
author didn't realize that he was actually exulting in
the neocons' success in redefining conservatism; he
himself has survived the neocons' purge because he has
carefully avoided offending them.
Conservatism, I think, usually begins with an
inchoate feeling that the liberal order of unqualified
statism is wrong. Conservatism is less a specific
doctrine than a sense that we must retrace our steps
before it's too late. The neocons have made their peace
with modernity and the modern state; the conservative --
the genuine article -- is ready to insist that we can,
and must, "turn back the clock," if necessary. His mind
is so open that he will even entertain the unthinkable
idea that the reactionary may be right.
Among the Bushmen
(page 6)
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets. }}
Bob Woodward's latest book, BUSH AT WAR, (Simon &
Schuster), is the sort of thing we've come to expect of
Woodward: a narrative culled from interviews with top
Washington insiders, without footnotes and often without
attribution. Woodward's methods have often been
criticized for violating scholarly proprieties, but in
this case it's pretty clear whom he has been talking to.
{{ He's an honest and workmanlike reporter with a gift
for getting powerful people to speak frankly. His methods
are justified by his results. }}
BUSH AT WAR concentrates on the first phase of the
"war on terrorism." We see the Bush team -- the president
(amply quoted throughout), Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice,
Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and many others --
planning, or plotting, war on Afghanistan in the wake of
the 9/11 attacks.
To my surprise, the book has increased my respect
for George W. Bush. His public utterances -- with their
garbled syntax, malapropisms, and gauche grandiloquence
-- often make him sound foolish. But in private, both in
his inner councils and in his explanations to Woodward,
he seems far more intelligent, reasonable, aware of
complexities, even morally sensitive (or at least
sensitive to moral appearances). He wants to avoid
seeming to be at war with Islam or Muslims as such; he
takes pains not to bomb civilians or mosques. He wants to
arouse the American public without causing panic or, on
the other hand, raising false hopes of a quick victory.
He repeatedly says he trusts his "instincts," which,
pragmatically speaking, are pretty good: "We don't want
to define [the terrorist threat] too broadly for the
average man to understand."
We see the tussling between those who, like Cheney
and Rumsfeld, are eager to get on with combat and Colin
Powell, who, though hardly a dove, wants to lay careful
diplomatic groundwork before the shooting starts. Bush
takes all their views into account without becoming
indecisive. He is definitely in charge. It's a relief to
know that at least we aren't being ruled by a fool or
fanatic.
Still, Bush is not a man to examine his own
premises. He views "terrorism" as a discrete and concrete
enemy, isolated from any historical background. He never
questions America's role in the world, never asks whether
terrorism is part of a much broader, and understandable,
reaction against U.S. global hegemony. He thinks sending
"humanitarian" aid to Afghanistan, along with bombs, will
demonstrate America's good intentions sufficiently.
Here Bush shows the sad inadequacy of his
"instinct." {{ One is reminded of Lord Keynes's remark
that men who fancy themselves pragmatic are usually
guided by outworn theories of which they are unaware. }}
He assumes all the conventional wisdom of yesteryear; he
sees Lincoln, Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt as model
wartime leaders, though all he seems to know of them is
their reputations, the shallow "lessons of history" they
represent. Pointing to Lincoln's portrait in the Oval
Office, he remarks, "He's on the wall because the job of
the president is to unite the nation." Well, that's that!
Less than a year and a half after 9/11, these White
House inner councils already seem to belong to another
era. They occurred at a time when the shadowy al-Qaeda
was felt to be more menacing than it has since proved.
Nearly everyone, including me, expected and dreaded an
equally spectacular encore of 9/11. The anthrax scare
added to the general panic. Yet there has been no such
follow-up, only a few scattered terrorist acts of what I
suppose we must now call the routine sort, and we don't
really know whether any of them are the work of al-Qaeda.
So all the inner-circle discussions Woodward
recounts -- focusing on the details of the Afghan phase
of the war -- now sound rather like a group of elephants
planning to do combat with hornets. The little critters
can be nasty, but they aren't really formidable. Bush is
at his silliest when he speaks of al-Qaeda as seeking
tyrannical power, like the Hitlers and Stalins of
yesteryear; he forgets his own insistence that this is "a
new kind of war."
Woodward's favorable (and largely plausible)
portrait of Bush fails to explain Bush's obsession with
Iraq. The book deals with the period before this
obsession came to the fore, when Afghanistan was still
the immediate target. But the reader is left to wonder
how the book's reasonable Bush could become so
irrationally preoccupied with Saddam Hussein, despite the
absence of evidence that the Iraqi strongman had anything
to do with al-Qaeda and 9/11 (and despite many
indications to the contrary). Woodward also deals only
glancingly with Israel and its American supporters,
saying next to nothing about their pressure on the United
States to knock off Israel's chief enemy.
BUSH AT WAR went to press before North Korea caught
Bush flat-footed by defiantly announcing its possession
of nuclear weapons and its determination to build more.
Its mad ruler, Kim Jong Il, is everything Bush has
accused Saddam Hussein of being, and he doesn't bother
concealing it. Bush's only response has been to belittle
the North Korean threat as bizarrely as he has
exaggerated the Iraqi one.
NUGGETS
THE ONE AND ONLY: My favorite contemporary artist, Al
Hirschfeld, has died at 99. For seven decades his
brilliantly simple, yet utterly elegant, caricatures were
a regular feature of the theater section of the Sunday
NEW YORK TIMES. Nobody could capture a face, or a total
physical presence, with fewer lines. He made it look so
easy; but, as his many imitators proved, he was
inimitable. (page 5)
COUNT ME OUT: I skipped the anti-war march in Washington
on January 18. It was Communist-sponsored and the whole
event had the aspect of a New Left class reunion. I felt
that by attending I'd be letting myself be dragooned into
the ranks of the terminally "progressive." These are the
people who are forever prating about "diversity" and
"inclusiveness." But they don't seem diverse enough to
include the likes of me. (page 8)
MASS PRODUCTION: One reason I can no longer keep up with
popular culture is that half the hot young chicks in show
business today are named Britney, or Britany, or some
similar variant. What's more, they are physically
indistinguishable. Who can keep track of them all?
Obviously some inexplicable craze swept over the nation's
maternity wards two decades ago, and we are now reaping
the awful harvest. (page 10)
MURDERERS ROW: All six of the announced candidates for
the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination marked the
30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade by reaffirming their
support for feticide. These include the Democrats'
senatorial "conscience," Holy Joe Lieberman. (page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
ROOTS: David Tell, writing in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, offers
some interesting facts about Margaret Sanger, founder of
Planned Parenthood: "She turned women seeking abortions
away from her clinics: 'I do not approve of abortion.'
She called it 'sordid,' 'abhorrent,' 'terrible,'
'barbaric,' a 'horror.' She called abortionists 'blood-
sucking men with MD after their names who perform
operations for the price of so-and-so.' She called the
results of abortion 'an outrageous slaughter,'
'infanticide,' 'foeticide,' and 'the killing of babies.'
... [She added that] birth control 'has nothing to do
with abortion, it has nothing to do with interfering with
or disturbing life after conception has taken place.'" So
the mother of Planned Parenthood was "anti-choice"!
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* The Regime of the Sneaky (December 24, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/021224.shtml
* The End of Bush the Bold (December 31, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/021231.shtml
* "The Economy" and the Taxpayer (January 7, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030107.shtml
* History and Miss Couric (January 9, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030109.shtml
* Loose Lips (January 14, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030114.shtml
* White Supremacism, Liberal Style (January 16, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030116.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]