SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
September 2003
Volume 10, Number 9
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Bomb and Moral Clarity
-> Peacetime Notes
-> War and Worship
-> Sodomy and the Constitution
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
As I noted recently in THE WANDERER, an old
controversy has taken a new turn: Did the United States
really have to use nuclear weapons against Japan?
Contrary to a consensus that has grown over the past
few decades, Nicholas D. Kristof of the NEW YORK TIMES
says yes. He cites the work of Japanese historians
themselves, who have found that the militarist faction of
the wartime Japanese government opposed surrender even
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated. In fact,
these fanatics were willing to continue the war at all
costs: even though they expected Tokyo itself to be nuked
next, even though they believed the United States had a
hundred more A-bombs ready for use, even though it might
mean 20 million more Japanese deaths. Still, the Japanese
peace faction, which included the emperor, Hirohito, was
able to prevail after the first two nukings, with the
prospect of many others to come.
As Kristof puts it, "Restraint would not have worked."
Victory would have required an invasion, at a cost of
untold American casualties. I'm surprised to find this
view in the liberal TIMES, but then World War II is still
liberalism's holy war. Thus Kristof concludes that "the
greatest tragedy of Hiroshima was not that so many people
were incinerated in an instant, but that in a complex and
brutal world, the alternatives were worse." Ah, good old
complexity -- liberalism's warrant for state power.
Actually, the situation seems simple enough to me:
mass murder is not an option. A few years earlier,
Japanese mass murder in China, including the aerial
bombing of cities, had revolted the civilized world and
fed the calls for U.S. intervention. But soon the Allies
themselves were bombing German and Japanese cities with a
deliberate cruelty far surpassing Axis bombing. It was
part of the strategy of demanding unconditional surrender
-- and it didn't "work."
But even if it had worked, it was a complete violation
of all principles of civilized warfare. And the
development of the atomic bomb was only a cold-blooded
extension of this monstrous policy. The whole idea of
rules of warfare is to rule out certain atrocities,
whether or not they achieve their goals. If they didn't
sometimes "work," it wouldn't be necessary to ban them.
The rule against attacking civilians means that it is
forbidden even if it's the only way to win a war. Why is
this so hard to grasp? At any rate, the United States had
long since won the war by August 1945, even without a
formal Japanese admission of defeat. Pearl Harbor had
been avenged many times over; it couldn't be repeated.
The Japanese had lost their conquests in Asia and the
United States ruled the South Pacific. They no longer
posed any threat to the United States.
All that remained was a total U.S. conquest of the
Japanese mainland itself. This was a long step beyond
conventional military victory, but it was the way the
U.S. Government had chosen to define victory in this war.
The war would not be considered "won" until the enemy
surrendered without conditions, throwing itself entirely
on the mercy of the victors. Its reluctance to do this
was quite understandable, given the devastation of its
cities already. But the United States would settle for
nothing short of enslaving Japan, no matter what the cost
to both sides. Such mercy as it did show after the war
must have come as a pleasant surprise to the Japanese.
All this casts a strange light on recent American talk
of "moral clarity." World War II is still called "the
good war," one in which good and evil were clearly
defined. But the continuing debate about whether mass
murder was warranted for the sake of total conquest, as
distinct from mere victory and defense, shows that
Americans are still far from achieving moral clarity
about themselves.
Peacetime Notes
(page 2)
{{ Material dropped solely for reasons of space appears
in double curly brackets. Emphasis is indicated by the
presence of asterisks around the emphasized words.}}
Arnold Schwarzenegger has my good will, but I'm
afraid I must deny him my coveted endorsement. He
forfeited that when he said he was seeking the
governorship of his state because California has been
good to him and he wants to "give something back." People
who want to give something back should get *out* of
politics, not *into* it. Arnold was making an honest
living until he decided to get on the public payroll.
He's already talking about creating new state programs
for kids.
* * *
Columnist Thomas Sowell wins this month's Wish I'd
Said That award for calling gun control "OSHA for
criminals." By depriving us of the means of self-defense,
he explains, it guarantees safety in the workplace, as it
were, for violent predators.
* * *
"A new form of McCarthyism"? Not another one! This
time the Democrats are being accused of anti-Catholicism
for their opposition to Catholic judicial nominees who
oppose legal abortion and consider Roe v. Wade bad law.
Peter Beinart of THE NEW REPUBLIC scoffs at the charge,
noting triumphantly that most of the Democrats on the
Senate Judiciary Committee are themselves Catholic.
Beinart is a clever lad, but he doesn't grasp that nobody
hates a faithful Catholic like a liberal Catholic.
* * *
Who needs a new form of McCarthyism, anyway? What
was wrong with the old one? Such is the theme of Ann
Coulter's new bestseller, TREASON, an all-out attack on
liberalism that seems to excite special horror among
neoconservatives: she has come under fire from Paul
Greenberg, Arnold Beichman, and Anne Applebaum (and won
praise from Pat Buchanan). I admire her pluck in
defending McCarthy, but smoking out the neocons is a
timely public service.
* * *
As I write, the sex life of Jennifer Lopez is
featured on the covers of several tabloids and gossip
mags; {{ her nearly naked form adorns the cover of
Esquire;}} and she's also the subject of an edifying
success story on the cover of -- yea, is't come to this?
-- the new, semi-hip, neoconservative READER'S DIGEST.
That weird noise you're hearing may be the souls of the
Wallaces squeaking and gibbering.
* * *
THE PASSION, Mel Gibson's movie about the
Crucifixion, is already the most harshly reviewed film of
2003, and it won't even be released until 2004. It's
suspected of -- what else? -- anti-Semitism. How can that
be, you may ask, when it's an attempt to recreate, as
literally as possible, the events narrated in the
Gospels? Well, in case you haven't noticed, current
Jewish ideology considers the Gospels themselves the fons
et origo of anti-Semitism. That ideology's more
uninhibited spokesmen blame Christianity itself for
Nazism and the Holocaust. Ultimately, the term
"anti-Semitism" *means* Christianity. Anti-Semitism, on
this view, is the "original sin" of the West, staining
its religion, culture, and literature.
* * *
The aforementioned Arnold arrived in this country
with a huge ambition for stardom and a genius for
self-promotion. Not only did he develop an amazing set of
muscles and parlay them into a sensational movie career;
he also dealt shrewdly and energetically with the
potential problem of a family embarrassment: back in
Austria, his father had been a minor Nazi official. So a
large part of Arnold's campaign for fame and fortune has
consisted in getting right with the folks who count: he
has been a generous donor to the Simon Wiesenthal Center
and other Jewish causes. It worked. Result: today Arnold
is completely kosher.
War and Worship
(pages 3-4)
The Iraq war has produced no heroes. There were
brief attempts to elevate General Tommy Franks to that
status (I pass over the embarrassing Jessica Lynch
episode), but it was hardly appropriate: he was more
manager than warrior.
For this was a modern war. It was won by superior
machinery, not valor. Any courage on the American side
was shown by obscure privates, not by officers. The
outcome was never in doubt. Heroism wasn't going to make
the difference. The United States in our time isn't about
to wage wars that require heroes. Stonewall Jackson is as
remote as Achilles.
President Bush, distinctly unheroic himself, paid
the usual homage to "our brave men and women," but the
phrase itself is a giveaway. If women's contribution to
victory equals that of the men, war isn't what it used to
be. Bush himself was cheered and praised for celebrating
the victory in the garb of a fighter pilot. Why not? If
we're going to pretend that this war needed heroes, we
may as well go ahead and pretend that its commander in
chief was one of them. In fact the civilian leaders,
especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, struck more
tough poses than the military men (and women).
Most wars do require courage, and usually it makes
some kind of sense to honor those who even set foot on a
battlefield. Soldiers have to be tough, as a rule, and we
can understand the cult of the individual warrior, even
if we doubt that even an Achilles {{ or Hector }} would
have counted for much in any real war. The ancient
celebration of the hero at least reflected the truth that
the qualities ascribed to him were important and worth
emulating. The possibility of earning glory made death
seem worth risking, and the shame of cowardice to be
avoided at all costs.
If the traditional honors of war were absent this
time, so were many of the traditional horrors. The
victorious American soldiers didn't enjoy the immemorial
spoils of victory, such as rape and looting; these have
become unthinkable. For better and worse, the Iraq war
was quite impersonal for the American participants. It
wasn't even very clear what they were supposed to be
fighting for, or against. Nobody took the official
slogans -- about terrorism, freedom, democracy -- very
seriously. Only the very unlucky shed blood, either
during or after the war.
Since Vietnam, no American politician has dared to
take military action risking large numbers of American
casualties or requiring serious sacrifices. It's only the
propagandists and journalistic hawks who still pretend
that the new, risk-free wars are heroic enterprises as of
old.
In an obvious sense, the United States is in an
enviable position. Its military superiority to the rest
of the world is so absolute that it can afford to wage
war almost entirely on its own terms. For the time being,
at least, war has ceased to mean great loss and
suffering. As one hawk put it, it's now a "cakewalk."
The pretext for the Iraq war was that unless an easy
war was fought sooner, we would face a much harder war
later. That is what the words "preventive" and
"preemptive" meant. When there was no real danger, Bush
and the "intelligence community" would decide what was a
"potential" threat.
One of the stranger features of recent American
political history is that conservatives have become
synonymous with "hawks." In the age of Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt, liberals waged wars in the name of
utopian goals of which conservatives were strongly
skeptical. But after World War II, the Cold War persuaded
most conservatives that military power and outright war
were necessary to defend America -- and the entire West
-- from the Communist threat. Liberals, many of them
pro-Communist, became "doves" during the Vietnam war.
The two sides had traded postures, with
conservatives even hurling the old charge of
"isolationism" -- one of Roosevelt's pet epithets -- at
liberals. In fact conservatives adopted what had
previously been the staples of liberal rhetoric in order
to justify military intervention around the world:
Hitler, the "lessons" of Munich, the evils of
dictatorship and genocide. They even adopted the Jewish
state of Israel as their favorite ally. Most recently,
Bush became a new Churchill, courageously standing up to
the Arab-Muslim Hitlers of the Middle East.
For the new, hawkish conservatism, war became much
more than an occasional necessary evil; it became a test
of patriotism, an opportunity for "national greatness."
And therefore a positive good.
This change was reinforced by a new component of
conservatism, largely Jewish and pro-Israel
"neoconservatism," which saw the power of the United
States as a huge asset for Israeli interests.
Neoconservatism was hardly conservative at all; it had
little interest in any conservative philosophy or
principles -- traditionalism, constitutionalism, limited
government, free-market economics, or Christian
civilization itself. It proved surprisingly easy for the
neoconservatives to distract the bulk of Christian
conservatives from their traditional causes by making
jingoistic appeals to the martial spirit.
Personally, I was amazed by this. I was totally
immune to the militarist appeal, but I'd never realized
how unusual this was for a conservative. It had always
seemed obvious to me that war, even when necessary, meant
not only tragedy, but the interruption of civilized life
and all the activities that made that life worthwhile. It
was nothing to celebrate, and the evils it brought
required strict justification. Among other things, it
expanded the power of the state and endangered the
liberty even of the victorious side.
Modern war practically required the state to assume
dictatorial authority over all of society. Everything
that could be said against socialism applied with even
more force to war: it was the ultimate in big-government
spending programs. Even readiness for war was a huge
expense, diverting and wasting huge amounts of wealth
that might have been spent on productive, artistic, and
charitable activities. When the Cold War ended {{ with
the collapse of the Soviet Union, }} I rejoiced: America
could finally, after two generations of military
hysteria, return to normal.
In particular, conservatives could resume their
mission of restoring the limited federal system of
government that had been so severely damaged by Wilson,
Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, with plenty of help from
Republicans. We could focus our attention and energy on
the huge task of repealing the New Deal and the Great
Society.
I assumed that other conservatives would -- of
course! -- see it this way too. I couldn't have been more
mistaken. They had been transformed, emotionally and
philosophically, by the habits of the "activist" state,
or what Michael Oakeshott called "teleocratic," as
opposed to "nomocratic," government. They had no
objection to the activist state, as long as it was
shooting and bombing.
It was as if we could no longer choose between
statism and liberty. The only options, as far as most
conservatives were concerned, were the warrior state and
the socialist state. Peace was for "peaceniks." So
conservatives, with the Soviet enemy out of the way,
reflexively supported war against new enemies, such as
Manuel Noriega of Panama and Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Nasty little fellows, to be sure, but war propagandists
quickly promoted both of them to the rank of Hitlers. It
was absurd.
Conservatives, if you could still call them that,
had abandoned a whole deep-rooted understanding of
healthy and normal society. They had adopted the statist
premises of their enemies, differing only in the style of
statism they preferred: where liberals wanted to beat
swords into socialist plowshares, conservatives wanted
the state to keep -- and wield --- the swords.
The new generation of conservatives -- and neocons,
if there's still a difference -- are improbable warriors.
Despite their verbal enthusiasm for war, few of them,
particularly the desk-bound hawks of NATIONAL REVIEW and
THE WEEKLY STANDARD, have ever seen military service, let
alone combat. They compensate for this with their
vociferous celebration of the martial virtues, of which
they write with an air of battle-hardened authority. If
this war produced no real heroes, it produced plenty of
heroes manques, for whom war was not an interruption of
civilized life but its fulfillment.
What is most striking about this generation of
conservatives is their thorough immaturity. Nobody who
remembers Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and Richard Weaver
can fail to be amazed by the falling-off to the boorish
frat-boy tone of Richard Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, David
Frum, and Mark Steyn. None of these new intellectual
spokesmen displays anything like a coherent conservative
philosophy; they and their peers don't seem to realize
how remote they are from their forebears. In them
conservatism has collapsed into a simplistic militarism.
(War is fun!)
As much as any socialist, these conservatives have
an essentially militaristic conception of society. They
think of the state as, ideally, in charge of social
arrangements -- provided, of course, that people on "our"
side, rather than liberals, are in charge of the state
itself. They've never asked themselves the most basic
questions, much less studied the answers earlier
conservatives have given. They have no idea whether they
are "teleocrats" or "nomocrats"; such categories mean
nothing to them.
But they feel that "we" are winning, and that's what
counts. Never mind just who "we" are, or just what is
being won.
Sodomy and the Constitution
(pages 5-6)
Suddenly, in midsummer, everyone from USA TODAY to
the Vatican is talking about the same topic: homosexual
marriage. This is a little strange, since nobody, give or
take an eccentric Roman emperor or two, has ever talked
about it before. It threatens to eclipse the war in Iraq.
I feel a certain sympathy, almost a sense of
solidarity, with sane homosexuals -- the silent majority,
as it were. From time immemorial there have been men who
have been chiefly attracted, erotically, to other men or,
more commonly, boys. I don't quite get it, I can't regard
it as anything but abnormal, I suppose one should
disapprove of it, but there it is. I agree with C.S.
Lewis, who, when asked about it, declined to discuss it
at length because it wasn't among the temptations that
assailed him.
Of course this isn't necessarily rational: I'm not
especially tempted to commit ax murder either, but I'm
quite willing to condemn it, if anyone doubts that I
oppose it in principle. I wouldn't want everyone to be an
ax murderer, and if pressed I'll admit that I wouldn't
want everyone to be homosexual. Our Creator has disposed
most of us otherwise, and that's fine with me. As the
woman in a James Thurber cartoon effuses to a startled
male, "I just love the idea of there being two sexes,
don't you?" Amen, lady. Where the opposite sex is
concerned, I've always been inclined to swoon a bit.
But even if I were otherwise inclined, I would
still, I trust, see the point of there being two sexes.
I'd recognize it as a shortcoming in myself that I was
unable to respond to the other sex -- viz., the female --
in the way that nature seems to have ordained. And here,
if I may presume to say so, I think that I speak for most
sodomites.
In the "gay marriage" debate, American public
discussion has maintained its usual wretched level. And
as usual, the liberals don't realize how silly they
sound. There have been the routine complaints about old
men in the Vatican trying to control others' sex lives,
refusing to adapt to the times, lacking the charity
enjoined by Christ, hypocritically ignoring the Church's
own problem with pedophile priests, et cetera, et cetera.
All this is miles off the point. Homosexuals already
have the right to marry, even if they can't or won't
exercise it -- that is, the right to marry someone of the
opposite sex. This is supposedly a heartless thing to
say, but what is being demanded now is not the extension
of a right, but the total redefinition of a thing that
existed long before the Catholic Church came along.
The basic reason for marriage is neither religious
nor romantic; it's practical. It connects a man with his
children (and their mother), providing for their support,
clarifying property rights, establishing inheritance, and
so forth. Every society has some version of it.
Every society also has homosexuality, especially
pederasty, but even those societies most tolerant of
different sexual practices have seen no need for same-sex
"marriage," simply because it's an absurdity. To put it
clinically, children are seldom conceived in the lower
end of the digestive tract.
So as not to prejudice the case, think only of
non-Christian cultures: Chinese, Japanese, African, Arab,
Viking, Aztec, Greek, Roman, Inca, Babylonian, Indian,
Persian, Apache, Sioux, Eskimo, Hawaiian, as many as you
like. Has the notion of same-sex marriage ever occurred
to even *one* of them? Of course not, because it's a
contradiction in terms. Which is really all there is to
say about the matter.
It isn't even necessary to disapprove of
homosexuality in order to see that it can never have
anything to do with marriage. This is where conservatives
are getting as confused as liberals. Both sides think the
issue is basically a moral one; a question of what kind
of sexual behavior society is going to bless or condemn.
But the case would be just the same if homosexuality
were regarded as the healthy norm and heterosexuality as
a shameful deviation. It would still be necessary to make
arrangements for the offspring of all those filthy
"breeders." It would be a question not of rights, but of
responsibilities. In that case marriage might be
inflicted as a sort of penalty, but it would be
indispensable anyway. "You have to teach these people the
consequences of their behavior."
So why, after so many millennia, has this weird
subject suddenly come up now? Only in America, one sighs.
For one thing, there are many material incentives --
employees' benefits and government entitlements for which
spouses are eligible -- to get married, and these are
also incentives to broaden the definition of marriage;
that is, to apply the word "marriage" to domestic
partnerships that aren't really marriages at all.
And in today's liberal culture, any basic social
distinction can be stigmatized as "discrimination" -- not
discrimination in the old and sane sense of keeping
unlike things separate, but in the current punitive sense
of discriminating "against." If you suffer any
disadvantage from the ability of others to tell things
apart, you now become a "victim" of discrimination, and
the state must do something about it.
Which brings us to the practical nub of the present
issue. It can be summed up in two words: Anthony Kennedy.
When Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S.
Supreme Court wrote the majority opinion striking down a
Texas sodomy law at the end of the Court's last term,
liberals and conservatives alike saw the handwriting on
the wall. Kennedy objected to that law on grounds that it
"discriminated" against homosexuals as a class or group.
It didn't take a wizard to foresee the next step:
Kennedy and his colleagues will very likely rule, in the
fairly near future, that all laws based on the
traditional and universal definition of marriage are also
unconstitutionally "discriminatory."
Kennedy may not think very clearly, but nobody can
deny that he thinks big. Overthrowing marriage itself
would be a "historic" judicial act, sure to win liberal
applause.
Naive people may wonder just where the Court gets
off, redefining marriage. Well, why not? The Court has
already redefined human life.
And how do such things come about? We owe it all to
the Fourteenth Amendment. And thereby hangs a tale.
Ratified under duress after the Civil War, the
Fourteenth forbids any state to "deny to any person ...
the equal protection of the laws." These few words have
produced more judicial mischief than all the rest of the
U.S. Constitution.
Originally their meaning was narrow and specific.
After the war, the Republican Congress wanted to pass a
civil rights act to protect Southern Negroes, newly freed
from slavery, from being denied the normal rights of
citizenship. But the Federal Government had no authority
to pass the act: under the federal principle as laid down
in the Tenth Amendment, this was an area reserved to the
separate states. The Fourteenth would provide a
constitutional basis for the act.
There is a huge historical irony here. The
Fourteenth was necessary because Congress and the Federal
judiciary still took the Tenth seriously. But over time,
the judiciary has used the Fourteenth to nullify -- and
in effect repeal -- the Tenth. To adapt a phrase of
Justice Antonin Scalia, the Equal Protection clause is
the clause that devoured the Constitution.
The first great milestone in the Supreme Court's
liberal activism was its 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of
Education. There it held that there can be no such thing
as "separate but equal": "Separate facilities are
inherently unequal." Logically, this was dubious (it
would rule out separate restrooms for the sexes, for
example). But the Court was feeling its oats, and ever
since then it has constantly broadened the meaning of
"the equal protection of the laws." Countless state and
local laws have been struck down on this pretext -- so
many that we can safely say that *all* state laws now
exist only by sufferance of the Court. Today, no powers
are firmly "reserved to the states, or to the people,"
because there is no effective check on the judiciary. The
other two branches have abdicated.
The Tenth Amendment was finally destroyed in 1973 by
Roe v. Wade, which announced -- again citing the
Fourteenth Amendment -- that the states didn't even have
the constitutional authority to protect unborn children
from violent death. If the Court could strip the states
of even that basic power, federalism in America was truly
defunct. But though the ruling spawned a powerful
anti-abortion movement, nobody proposed to discipline the
Court itself. Everyone saw the moral and practical upshot
of Roe, but hardly anyone saw the constitutional
implications.
Thanks to its expansive interpretation of the
Fourteenth Amendment, the Court's most arbitrary word is
law. And Americans have passively accepted this. The
Court routinely usurps vast powers without resistance or
opposition.
Now Justice Kennedy has served notice that the
Fourteenth can be invoked to redefine marriage itself,
under the Equal Protection Clause. He and perhaps a
majority of his colleagues are plainly disposed to find
traditional marriage laws unconstitutionally
"discriminatory."
Republicans in Congress, apparently supported by
President Bush, want to amend the Constitution to define
marriage as a union between a man and a woman. That is,
they want to amend the Constitution to *anticipate* a
grotesque misinterpretation of it and *prevent* an
assault on marriage overwhelmingly opposed by the
American people. But this approach is totally
wrong-headed and inadequate. It accepts the Court's
usurpations as legitimate, without challenging the
Court's authority to commit them.
Now, if ever, is the time to hit the Court where it
lives. Kennedy and his colleagues must be told that they
are flirting with impeachment and removal from office, if
they dare to tamper with the institution of marriage.
Nothing less will do; the rule of law itself is at stake.
It's long past time for the Court to be stripped of its
immunity from constitutional remedies.
NUGGETS
RACIAL NOTES: In California, Arnold's toughest rival may
be Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamente. Pundits assume
that Bustamente will enjoy virtually unanimous support
from his fellow Hispanics. Not that there's anything
wrong with voting by race! Unless, of course, you're
white. Then it's called "hate." (page 8)
THE STATE'S NEW CRUSADE: "Public Policy Targeting
Obesity," the local rag informs us. "We have focused on
smoking; now it is about time we fight obesity," says a
New York assemblyman who wants to tax fatty foods, movie
tickets, video games, DVD rentals, and other forms of
sedentary enjoyment in order to fund nutrition and
exercise programs. Is there anything left that *isn't*
the state's business? (page 9)
EQUAL BUT SEPARATE: I've always been amused by the
self-segregation of the American liberal. Writing in THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY, neocon David Brooks agrees. For all the
pious cant about "diversity," he notes, "people want to
be around others who are roughly like themselves"; and
this is as true of liberal academics as of rednecks:
"elite universities are amazingly undiverse in their
values, politics, and mores." Brooks's solution?
"National service." My solution? To recognize that
there's no problem. (page 11)
ON THE OTHER FOOT: Regrettable as the Northeast Blackout
undoubtedly is, at least it gave a lot of New York hawks
a healthy taste of what life is like in liberated
Baghdad. I never saw the hand of Allah so clearly in
anything. (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
MEANWHILE, BACK IN IRAQ: The NEW YORK TIMES reports that
Iraqis took a bit of glee in our blackout. Of course ours
lasted for only a few hours in 90-degree weather; they've
been without electricity for months, with some days as
hot as 125. One Iraqi urged Americans not to expect much:
"If the American government is involved, you must be
prepared to be patient. They work very slowly." The
cruelest cut came from another: "Saddam had the
electricity back two months after the last war." How do
you like that? We save these people from the world's
worst tyrant, and we only make them miss him! Next
they'll be building new statues of him.
A LITTLE TOUCH OF HARRY: The September issue of VANITY
FAIR features a profile of Britain's Prince William with
a touchingly funny anecdote. When William was 7, he told
his mother, Princess Diana, "Mummy, when I grow up I want
to be a policeman so I can protect you." His little
brother, Harry, 5, crowed, "You can't! You have to be
king!"
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* The Meaning of Brotherhood (July 24, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030724.shtml
* A Gay Man's Manifesto (July 29, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030729.shtml
* Bush, Sodomy, and Marriage (July 31, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030731.shtml
* Is the Pope Square (August 5, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030805.shtml
* No Respect (August 7, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030807.shtml
* The New Rules of Usage (August 14, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030814.shtml
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[ENDS]