SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
November 2003
Volume 10, Number 11
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Neocon Heresy
-> Current Notes (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> The Jackson Heresy
-> Recognizing Evil
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets.
Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks around
the emphasized words.}}
The Neocon Heresy
(page 1)
In ROGUE NATION: AMERICAN UNILATERALISM AND THE
FAILURE OF GOOD INTENTIONS (Basic Books), Clyde
Prestowitz argues that the United States has needlessly
alienated much of the rest of the world, including its
traditional allies. He thinks the problem has gotten
worse during the Bush administration, particularly with
its misguided war on Iraq, the occupation of which should
be terminated as soon as feasible.
We're used to hearing this sort of talk from
liberals, but Prestowitz is a self-identified
conservative who believes the U.S. Government has
permitted "its view of reality to be distorted by
intensely self-interested groups ... [and] key positions
[to be] occupied by dedicated minorities that are
sometimes heavily influenced by foreign elements whose
interests are directly at odds with those of the United
States."
Chief among these foreign interests are those of
Israel. "Unless the lobbies and the Congress and the
White House wake up," he warns, "the prospect is for the
United States to pour more billions of dollars into
expansion of Israeli settlements. This policy will
catalyze violence and lead to brutal reprisal that will
bring more global disdain for the United States."
"The imperial project of the so-called
neoconservatives," Prestowitz goes on, "is not
conservatism at all but radicalism, egotism, and
adventurism articulated in the stirring rhetoric of
traditional patriotism. Real conservatives have never
been messianic or doctrinaire." The neoconservative
foreign policy, resulting in bigger government and
stupendous spending, "is neither conservatism nor
liberalism but simple irresponsibility."
The Iraq war has been a mixed blessing for the
neocons. The very fact that it occurred is a mark of
their success and inordinate influence, in the media and
in government. But this has also brought them publicity
and unaccustomed scrutiny. As the occupation has gone
sour and the official reasons for war have been exposed
as dubious or worse, much of the blame has fallen on the
small cabal of pro-Israel neocon intellectuals who were
pushing for war on Iraq long before 9/11 and all that.
{{ As Prestowitz suggests, the term
"neoconservatism" is misleading. Neoconservatism has
little to do with traditional conservatism; in fact, the
two things are almost opposites. The neocons aren't
interested in such conservative principles as prudence,
limited government, and constitutional order. I learned
long ago that the quickest way to get yawns and puzzled
stares at neocon gatherings is to mention the Tenth
Amendment. }}
{{ What the neocons *are* interested in is power. I
don't just mean that they want it for themselves,
ambitious as they are; I mean that they exemplify the
type Michael Oakeshott warned against when he said that
some people can only see government as "a vast reservoir
of power," which inspires them to use the state for pet
projects (such as war). Oakeshott contrasted this view
with conservatism, which sees governing as disinterested
umpiring between clashing desires. }}
Within the conservative movement, the neocons are
like those liberals and pragmatists within Christian
churches who want to ignore or even discard ancient
dogmas. For "progressive" Christians, the old doctrines
-- the Redemption, the Resurrection, and the rest -- are
inessential and disposable; the real action is elsewhere,
in current concerns, and the Church must be where the
action is. But for the orthodox, those doctrines are the
very essence of Christian faith, and without them there
is no point in calling yourself Christian. The two sides
have opposing, and irreconcilable, views of the Church's
raison d'etre.
In the same way, the neocons deny the centrality of
the values conservatives have generally seen as defining
and indispensable. They don't so much reject those values
as fail to see why anyone should attach much importance
to them. It's not as if any principle were at stake, is
it?
So we have the oddity of two sides talking at cross-
purposes and imagining they're the same side.
Current Notes
(page 2)
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a baptized Catholic, is
married to Maria Shriver, niece of the first Catholic
U.S. president. Yet nobody thinks it's noteworthy that
he's pro-abortion and generally liberal on "social
issues." Hard to recall that John Kennedy's religion was
the most intensely discussed topic of the 1960 campaign.
Many Protestants feared that the Vatican would rule
America through the Kennedys. Yet as Arnold's
gubernatorial candidacy and win show, the real effect of
the Kennedy era was not just to promote tolerance, but to
trivialize religion in American public life. The real
Kennedy legacy is that nobody now need worry that
Catholic politicians will stand for any Catholic
principles.
* * *
We can go further. To read any current textbook,
you'd never guess that religion had ever played an
important role in American history, society, or culture.
Because today's secularism ignores it, you get the
impression that Americans have always ignored it. Most
people would be amazed to learn, for example, that many
of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century were
volumes of sermons. Until the 1960s, even lots of
Hollywood's biggest hits were films with religious
themes: GOING MY WAY, THE SONG OF BERNADETTE, QUO VADIS,
THE ROBE, THE NUN'S STORY, A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, and
several versions of BEN-HUR, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, and
KING OF KINGS, not to mention many others with Christian
undercurrents.
* * *
Case in point: ON THE WATERFRONT, directed by the
recently deceased Elia Kazan, starring Marlon Brando as a
young dockworker who wrestles with his conscience over
whether to testify against a corrupt labor union. The
film is a melodrama, but it's full of religious symbols,
and Brando's better angel is a priest, forcefully played
by Karl Malden. Kazan, widely hated in Hollywood for
testifying against his own Communist former friends, had
the audacity to portray informing as a courageous -- and
Christian -- act.
* * *
Less than six months after a popular military
victory, George W. Bush's approval ratings are plunging
and Iraq has become a tar baby. The reasons he gave for
going to war now ring so hollow that he has been forced
to change his tune somewhat; those Iraqi WMDs still
haven't been found. Nor has the rest of the Axis of Evil
been deterred: Iran still has a nuclear program, and
North Korea says it's stepping up its own nuke
production. Meanwhile, as attacks on occupation troops
increase, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander
of U.S. forces in Iraq, says, "The enemy has evolved -- a
little bit more lethal, a little more complex, a little
more sophisticated, and in some cases a little bit more
tenacious. The evolution is about what we expected to see
over time." Maybe so, but that's not what the American
public was led to expect. It sounds as if the "evolution"
really means that the resistance is something quite
distinct from the original enemy -- neither Saddam
Hussein's loyalists nor al-Qaeda, but a popular movement
that didn't exist when all this started.
* * *
So once again our government has succeeded in making
itself -- and us -- new enemies. It defines these enemies
as "terrorists," then cites them as justification for the
"war on terrorism."
* * *
Don't forget to tell your friends about SOBRAN'S! May
we also suggest gift subscriptions for Christmas or
Kwanzaa?
Exclusive to the electronic version:
Rush Limbaugh may have been wrong, unfair, and out
of line in charging that the media have been overrating
quarterback Donovan McNabb because he's black. I can't
judge. But the National Football League has invited such
suspicions with its affirmative action program, under
which the Detroit Lions were fined $200,000 for hiring a
white coach without interviewing a black candidate first.
If you make race a job qualification, what is more
natural than for others to wonder whether people are
being favored because of their race? As usual, liberals
want to have it both ways.
* * *
Limbaugh also got in trouble on another front:
purchasing prescription drugs illegally. Zev Chafets of
New York's DAILY NEWS scores him for supporting the
Federal Government's War on Drugs, which is currently
incarcerating more than 400,000 people in the United
States. Most of these are "luckless nobodies," Chafets
observes -- not violent criminals, but young black and
Hispanic men who can't afford good lawyers. Few whites
who violate drug laws (and the majority of offenders are
white) face prison sentences. He hopes Limbaugh will
learn from his own experience and pipe up against this
iniquity. I heartily agree.
The Jackson Heresy
(pages 3-5)
What most Americans call the Civil War, many
Southerners still prefer to call the War Between the
States, since it wasn't a civil war in the sense of a
struggle for supremacy between two rival factions. Others
call it the War of Northern Aggression; still others, the
War for Southern Independence. It might also be called
the War *Against* the States, since its ground and result
was the denial of state sovereignty. Most Northerners
failed to see that if the Union won, their own states
would lose the status of "Free and Independent States"
claimed for them by the Declaration of Independence.
The stage was set for the war by an unlikely figure:
Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory was a fierce, Jeffersonian
advocate of states' rights who took a severe view of the
limits of Federal power. One of his chief presidential
accomplishments was the abolition of the first national
bank of the United States, which he believed (as
Jefferson had) to be beyond the constitutional power of
the Federal Government.
In his first inaugural address (1829), Jackson
promised, "in regard to the rights of the separate
States," that he would be "animated by a proper respect
for those sovereign [!] members of our Union, taking care
not to confound the powers they have reserved to
themselves with those they have granted to the
Confederacy" (a synonym, then, for the Union). In his
second inaugural address (1833) he pledged to veto
measures which threatened to "encroach upon the rights of
the States or tend to consolidate all political power in
the General Government." The Federal Government, he
emphasized, should exercise "those powers only that are
clearly delegated [to it]."
How, then, could Jackson pave the way for Abraham
Lincoln's war on the states? Well, he did so. During the
Nullification crisis of 1832, he set forth the doctrine
that Lincoln would invoke in his own first inaugural
address in 1861.
Bitterly angry at the "Tariff of Abominations,"
which protected Northern industry at the expense of
Southern cotton interests, South Carolina threatened to
resist collection of the tariff within its borders. This
step was the brainchild of Senator John C. Calhoun,
formerly Jackson's vice president. Calhoun adopted the
logic of Jefferson's 1798 Kentucky Resolutions, which
asserts the right of any state to declare any act of the
Federal Government null and void on its territory if the
state deems the act unconstitutional.
If the Federal Government tried to enforce the
tariff, South Carolina warned that it would resist with
force. Then it would leave the Union.
Jackson was not a man to take this sitting down. He
was the most autocratic of American presidents, and a
remarkably tough hombre before whom hardened criminals
quailed. He had fought more than 70 duels; once a doctor
had cut a bullet from his shoulder (this was before
anesthetics, of course) and he had returned immediately
to work.
Whatever his abstract principles, Jackson would hear
none of this secession talk. He announced that he was
prepared to invade South Carolina to compel submission.
But there was more. The issues at stake aroused the
country. A memorable debate was held in the U.S. Senate.
Robert Hayne of South Carolina made the Jeffersonian case
for states' rights and secession. Daniel Webster of
Massachusetts, the most powerful orator of the time,
answered with a resounding pair of replies, the second of
which became a classic for its great peroration, "Liberty
and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!"
Northern schoolboys would declaim these words for
generations.
But eloquence is not logic. Jackson made his own
reply in a proclamation denying the state sovereignty he
had once acknowledged. Contrary to Jefferson, he argued,
the Union was no mere agreement among the states; it was
the creation of the American people as a whole, and no
state could break it. The Union was older than the
Constitution itself -- a theme Lincoln would later adopt.
Sovereignty belonged to the people, not to the individual
states. The Union was "indesoluble" (Jackson, like
Lincoln, was an erratic speller), unless the people as a
whole chose to dissolve it. South Carolina's threatened
resistance to the laws of the Union was "treason."
The Constitution, Jackson asserted, "forms a
*government,* not a league." It makes the United States
"a single nation," whose member states do not "possess
any right to secede." The states gave up "essential parts
of sovereignty" in "becoming parts of a nation."
Jackson was rejecting the whole states' rights
philosophy Jefferson had set forth in the Kentucky
Resolutions. He was also adopting the nationalist or
"consolidationist" philosophy of Jefferson's enemies,
Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, according to which
the American people had, in ratifying the Constitution,
bestowed irrevocable sovereignty, including vast "implied
powers," on the Federal Government. Jackson took a
narrower view than these men had of the implied powers,
but when push came to shove, he thought, the Federal
Government had to be boss.
Jackson was enraged when he learned that Calhoun,
even as his vice president, had secretly led the
nullifiers and secessionists. He privately roared that he
should have hanged Calhoun. Soon the breach became open,
and Calhoun emerged as the great Southern spokesman of
the age, carrying the torch of Jefferson for the
sovereign states.
Robert V. Remini, Jackson's recent biographer,
writes, "[Jackson] was the first American statesman to
offer the doctrine of the Union as a perpetual entity.
His arguments and conclusions provide a complete brief
against the right of a state to secede. In terms of
constitutional arguments, Jackson's statement is far
greater than Daniel Webster's more famous reply to Hayne.
Webster relied on a sentimental appeal, arguing for the
Union 'as a blessing to mankind.' Jackson went beyond
sentiment. He offered history and a dynamic new reading
of constitutional law."
Remini adds, "President Jackson marks an important
break with the past. He is the first and only statesman
of the early national period to deny publicly the right
of secession. Secession was a doctrine no longer in
keeping with a democratic society, no longer congenial to
the idea of 'a Federal Union founded upon the great
principle of popular representation.' Whether at some
point in time secession had any validity no longer
mattered. It was a dead issue as far as Old Hickory was
concerned, annihilated by the historical evolution of a
democratic society."
It was a break with the past, all right. Remini's
words -- "new," "dynamic," "first," "no longer," "at some
point in time," and "historical evolution" -- admit,
approvingly, that Jackson's doctrine was an innovation, a
departure from the original consensus. He was asserting
that the states were not, and never had been, the "Free
and Independent States" Jefferson had insisted they
continued to be under the Constitution.
Jackson would have disdained Remini's defense of
him. That defense rests on the modern view -- variously
called historicist, relativist, et cetera -- that
principles "evolve," so that what is "true" for one age
may be false for the next, and no truths can be
self-evident, permanent, or eternal. Jackson was still
Jeffersonian enough to reject this confused nonsense,
which hardly deserves to be called a doctrine. He didn't
think the right of secession was outdated; he denied that
it had ever existed, or could exist, at all.
Jackson's position split his own party, and even
Webster was shocked by his threat to make war on South
Carolina. As Hamilton, no champion of states' rights, had
said, "To coerce the States is one of the maddest
projects that was ever devised." Late in his life Webster
went back on his own arguments, agreeing that if the
Northern states should violate the Constitution
"deliberately, habitually, and of fixed purpose ... the
South would no longer be bound to observe the compact. A
bargain can not be broken on one side, and still bind the
other side."
Congress obliged Jackson by passing a Force Bill
authorizing him to coerce South Carolina, if necessary,
but both sides backed away from a bloody settlement and
reached a compromise on the tariff. Still, in point of
history, Jackson's idea of national sovereignty was
wrong. Sovereignty belonged, by general agreement, to the
people of the separate states. Madison, even when he
shared Hamilton's hope for a stronger central government
and weaker states, spoke of the states as "thirteen
sovereignties." In the political literature of the
founding period, the Union was usually called a
"voluntary confederation" (or "confederacy") and the
states were almost monotonously described as "free,
sovereign, and independent." America might be spoken of
as "the nation," but the United States were merely a
limited confederation, each member retaining its
sovereignty.
The Constitution itself had never referred to the
United States as a nation or denied state sovereignty. As
an agreement between the states, it was often called a
"compact" -- even at times by Webster, who later forgot,
when attacking the compact theory, that he himself had
used the term. As Jefferson Davis would point out, the
Constitution stipulated that ratification would make it
binding "between" the states, not *over* the states. The
Federal Government was not endowed with sovereignty;
that, the states kept.
As Davis and others argued, sovereignty was crucial,
and it couldn't be surrendered by mere implication. The
Tenth Amendment made plain the principle that the states
gave up *nothing* by implication. This was to be a
central issue in the controversies leading up to the War
Between the States.
Jackson's most important disciple would be Abraham
Lincoln. Before becoming president, Lincoln was guarded
in his views on secession. He created a nationwide agony
of tension with his four-month silence on the subject
between his election and his inauguration. But as he
prepared his first inaugural address, he studied
Jackson's words on sovereignty and secession with the
utmost care.
The result was not Lincoln's greatest speech, but it
was certainly his most significant. Despite its
conciliatory and euphemistic expression, the South
correctly took it as a threat of war. It was the full
fruit of Jackson's heresy.
Echoing Jackson, Lincoln held that the Union was
even older than the Constitution -- older than the
Declaration of Independence itself -- and was "perpetual"
and indissoluble. No state could secede from it under the
Constitution. There could be no compromise on that.
Still, he promised not to invade the states, not to
interfere with slavery where it existed already, and not
to take any military action beyond what was necessary to
secure Federal property. But, he warned, he was bound by
his oath of office to preserve the Union.
In fact, he was not. His oath required him to uphold
the Constitution; it said nothing about preserving the
Union. The Constitution granted no power, either to
Congress or the president, to prevent secession. Federal
forces could be sent into a state only if the state
requested them.
Lincoln committed the fallacy of confusing the
Federal Government with the Constitution. For him,
abiding by the Constitution meant maintaining, or
submitting to, the government. He thus identified the
Constitution with a concrete body of power, regardless of
whether that power was actually being used according to
the terms of the Constitution.
By this Jacksonian logic, "saving the Union" might
justify or require *violating* the Constitution. Lincoln
later came close to saying as much: "Are all the laws,
*but one,* to go unexecuted, and the government itself go
to pieces, lest that one be violated?" One Ohio
congressman ridiculed this question by quoting an Irish
politician who said, "We must stand prepared to sacrifice
a part of the Constitution, or even the whole of it, in
order to save the remainder!"
Lincoln stood prepared to sacrifice as much of the
Constitution as necessary. Here were "implied powers"
with a vengeance. If his highest duty was to "preserve
the Union" -- by preventing secession -- then he might
have to assume any powers necessary to that end, no
matter what the Constitution itself said.
In the name of saving the Union, the Constitution,
self-government, and liberty itself, Lincoln, in the
words of Harry V. Jaffa (quoted here last month),
"discovered the reservoir of constitutional power
contained within that presidential oath." He
"discovered," inter alia, his power to arrest state
legislators and other elected officials; to suspend
habeas corpus; to raise, deploy, and finance an army
without consulting Congress; to postpone elections
indefinitely; to close hundreds of dissenting newspapers
and arrest thousands of critics; to install puppet
military governments directly answerable to himself; and
to rig elections to ensure the victory of "loyal" forces.
Jaffa thinks that all these measures were not only
justified, but fully consistent with Jefferson's
principles! They may not look much like constitutional
rule or self-government, but at least they are logical --
if you accept the premise that the Federal Government is
sovereign and a president's supreme duty is to prevent
secession.
The problem is that this proves far too much. The
supposed duty to prevent secession -- which can only be
an *implied* duty, since the Constitution says absolutely
nothing about it -- can obviously generate an indefinite
number of "implied" powers for that purpose. The powers
in Lincoln's "reservoir" are already far broader, and far
more numerous, than the presidential powers expressly
granted in the Constitution. As his critics observed in
his own time, they are arbitrary and dictatorial, often
directly transgressing the Constitution's letter.
In effect, Lincoln claimed a constitutional power to
suspend the Constitution. In his inaugural address, he
remarked that no government had ever provided for its own
termination. Yet he thought the Constitution virtually
provided for its own destruction; which is what he
finally achieved. Lincoln's administration brought to an
end the voluntary confederation of sovereign states. Here
was the answer to Webster's cry: liberty and Union proved
anything but "inseparable."
Jefferson Davis called his memoirs THE RISE AND FALL
OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT. His treatment of secession
amounts to a full and brilliant expansion, a hundred
pages long, of the Kentucky Resolutions, one that
Jefferson would have been proud and grateful to have
inspired. An equally apt title would have been THE RISE
AND FALL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Recognizing Evil
(page 6)
Orson Welles once recalled meeting Adolf Hitler at a
dinner party before Hitler came to power. Asked what
impression the future dictator made on him, Welles said,
in effect, None at all. Hitler struck him as a totally
uninteresting personality, a blank.
Welles's remarks came to mind when I heard that the
legendary film director Leni Riefenstahl had died at 101.
Her death was greeted with predictable sermons asking how
she could have lent her great talent to glorifying evil.
This is of course a reference to her most famous film,
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, an ecstatic record of the 1934
Nuremburg Party Convention that is widely considered, as
one film historian puts it, "the most powerful propaganda
film ever made."
Riefenstahl insisted to the end that the film was a
documentary, not propaganda. She denied that she was ever
a Nazi or (as sometimes rumored) Hitler's mistress. After
World War II she spent four years in and out of prison on
various charges, chiefly supplying Nazi propaganda --
never mind that her two films that became notorious (the
other was OLYMPIA, a brilliant documentary of the 1936
Berlin Olympic Games) were produced long before the war.
She was eventually exonerated, but her career in film was
over. (She did make a final short documentary shortly
before her hundredth birthday.)
There is no use denying that TRIUMPH OF THE WILL is,
and was meant to be, a thrilling piece of work. It
conveys Hitler's appeal to a Germany still recovering
from the defeat of World War I; yet it's not at all what
we expect Nazi propaganda to be like, after decades of
fanatical anti-Nazi propaganda (which has never
relented). There is no Jew-baiting in it; in fact, no
mention of Jews at all. Instead, there is an impression
of innocence, of ordinary Germans letting their hair down
and having a lot of fun. The early reels, for example,
show men in bathing suits playfully squirting each other
with hoses, to background oom-pah music. When the
ceremonies begin, we see Nazi dignitaries giving speeches
whose theme is national regeneration and hope. The dark
side of National Socialism is yet to emerge.
Subsequent history has made it hard to see the film
in the spirit in which Riefenstahl made it. She shows
Hitler and his ensemble as they must have seemed to their
adherents at the beginning -- not so different from the
way Franklin Roosevelt must have seemed to Democrats at
the same time, as they hailed him with "Happy Days Are
Here Again."
Which raises the question, What if Hitler had won
the war? What if Germany had devastated, conquered, and
occupied America and Russia? What if Joseph Goebbels had
controlled the postwar propaganda that saturated the
Western world?
In that case, Roosevelt and his cronies, not the
Nazis, might have become the symbols of ultimate evil.
Roosevelt's bombing of cities, his efforts to develop
nuclear weapons of mass destruction, his filthy alliance
with the unspeakable Stalin, and much more would have
made this view plausible. The world would have seen
grisly photographs not of German concentration camps, but
of the Gulag Archipelago. The great lesson would have
been not the horrid effects of racism, but those of
worshiping the idol of equality.
And the postwar purges would have targeted the
followers of Roosevelt and Stalin. How, men would ask,
could anyone have supported these manifest monsters? We
can imagine aging liberals, Communists, and
fellow-travelers being hunted to their graves. Popular
movie directors like Frank Capra might have been hanged
as "war criminals" for producing American propaganda.
Ordinary Democrats would tearfully confess their guilt,
insist that they never knew what Roosevelt was doing, or
deny they'd ever really been all that enthusiastic about
him anyway.
But as Welles's words imply, evil men aren't always
easy to pick out at their first appearance. In fact, they
may give no outward indication of their latent capacity
for evil. In 1935 there was no reason to suppose that
Hitler would be remembered as an ogre; Roosevelt struck
his early critics as no more than a cheerful mediocrity.
Nobody could imagine what he would later do. Much the
same is true of Stalin. He was able to succeed Lenin
because he didn't inspire the kind of fear the dynamic
Trotsky stirred in their Communist colleagues. {{ (Nikita
Khrushchev would later succeed Stalin because his peers
regarded him as a harmless buffoon.) }}
Today Hitler and Stalin are infamous, but a new book
by the publisher Conrad Black bears the title FRANKLIN
DELANO ROOSEVELT: CHAMPION OF FREEDOM. Nearly 60 years
after his squalid death, Roosevelt is still lionized.
Liberal historians like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and
Doris Kearns Goodwin hail him as the greatest man of the
twentieth century.
If World War II had ended differently, the world
might still have lost all sense of proportion -- it
generally does -- but it would probably have done so in
an entirely different way. And Leni Riefenstahl might
have gone on to make dozens of other brilliant films.
NUGGETS
AS OTHERS SEE US: Maybe it isn't Puccini or Wagner, but
JERRY SPRINGER -- THE OPERA is packing 'em in over in
London. And it says here it's soon coming to Broadway.
According to one witness, it "mercilessly satirizes
Americans as grossly fat, oversexed, foul-mouthed
exhibitionists." (page 7)
HE MADE 'EM LAUGH: Death can be such a damned shame,
especially when it strikes down the young. But also when
it takes someone like Donald O'Connor, who, though
technically 78 when he died, will live forever as Gene
Kelly's madcap youthful pal in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN. Who
next? Mickey Rooney? Heaven forbid. (page 8)
EXPLAINING TERRORISM: A suicide bomber in Israel has
killed 19 people, in addition to herself. The killer was
a 29-year-old woman who had just graduated from law
school. Israeli authorities are blaming Yassir Arafat for
the incident. There may be another explanation: in June
she watched as Israeli troops killed her brother and
cousin at her family home. (page 8)
TRUE ENOUGH: "There are no affairs which men so much seek
to cover up as public affairs." -- G.K. Chesterton
(page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
READY FOR HIGH OFFICE? On the eve of California's recall
vote, allegations that Arnold Schwarzenegger groped lots
of women decades ago brought gasps of horror from
Democrats who were recently forgiving Bill Clinton for
groping women in the Oval Office. Such behavior is
outrageous, but at least Arnold wasn't carrying a Bible
when he did it.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* A King in Close-up (September 16, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030916.shtml
* Lowly Origins (September 18, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030918.shtml
* The Night I Met Gwyneth Paltrow (September 23, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030923.shtml
* Nutty Patriotism (September 25, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030925.shtml
* A New Constitution -- Coming Up! (September 30, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030930.shtml
* Looking Back at Reagan (October 2, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/031002.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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