SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
February 2004
Volume 11, Number 2
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Defining Conservatism Down
-> National Security Notes (plus Exclusives to this
edition)
-> America's Hector
-> Remembering Hugh Kenner
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.}}
Defining Conservatism Down
(page 1)
{{ "The era of big government is over," said the
liberal Democrat Bill Clinton, failing to foresee his
conservative Republican successor. The NEW YORK TIMES
observes that it's hard to locate the philosophic center
of the George W. Bush administration. That may be because
there isn't one, unless trying to please everyone is a
philosophy. }}
Conservatives love to imagine that they've won
("We've Won!" gloated THE WEEKLY STANDARD after Clinton's
requiem for big government), and liberals are smart
enough to let them think so. But the {{ NEW YORK TIMES
also }} purrs that the Republicans, in the Bush era, have
lost their allergy to big government. Federal spending is
smashing all records. And you can't blame the Democrats.
"Please Nominate This Man!" pleads a NATIONAL REVIEW
cover story on Howard Dean, the Democrats' former
front-runner. Why? Because Dean, the loopy liberal, would
be easy for Bush to crush next fall, allowing Bush to
move even further leftward and capture the middle -- Wait
a minute! Is this the conservative magazine that sprang
into existence in 1955 to oppose Eisenhower's
unprincipled middle-of-the-road Republicanism?
Yes, it is. Today it will settle happily for a
Republican landslide on any terms. Beating the Democrats
is enough now, it seems.
Another sign of the times: the allegedly
conservative WASHINGTON TIMES recently ran a rave review
of Conrad Black's 1,280-page paean, FRANKLIN DELANO
ROOSEVELT: CHAMPION OF FREEDOM. Pardon me, but as I
recall, the American conservative movement, as we now
know it, arose precisely in opposition to the entire
Roosevelt legacy: befriending the Soviet Union, crumpling
the Constitution, building the welfare state, debasing
the currency, lying us into war, and generally despising
every principle of limited government.
So now Roosevelt himself is a conservative icon? Has
it come to this? Can you remain a conservative in good
standing if you *don't* admire Roosevelt?
Well, if conservatism can assimilate Lincoln, maybe
it can also incorporate Roosevelt. In the real world, it
keeps changing its mind about what it wants to conserve,
as well as what it's willing to discard. It's a stance
vis-a-vis current pressures rather than a timeless
philosophy, even if "timeless philosophy" sounds like a
characteristic conservative slogan. This year's timeless
philosophy, a cynic might say, isn't necessarily
identical with last year's. After all, noted
conservatives have rhetorically embraced Harry Truman,
John Kennedy, and Martin Luther King without being
defrocked.
When even "same-sex marriage" can be proposed not as
a radical but as a *conservative* cause (by David Brooks
as well as Andrew Sullivan), then both marriage and
conservatism are being, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's
famous phrase, defined downward. Or rather, they aren't
being defined at all; they are merely being verbally
associated with arbitrary referents, Humpty Dumpty-style.
Politics by its nature always has a high tolerance
for nonsense, but conservatism used to mean, among other
things, an insistence that even political speech retain
some responsibility to moral reality. But today
conservative intellectuals, like nominally conservative
politicians, and like liberal sophists, can be located
among the avatars of flux. Like paper money, their words
have no stable value.
National Security Notes
(page 2)
The year 2004 began, as all years must, with news of
Michael Jackson, who denied all charges and displayed
bruises he accused the police of inflicting during his
arrest. One doesn't know what to believe, as usual with
Jacko, but it does seem a pity for a man to suffer such
ugly marks when he has gone to such lengths to be white.
* * *
Columnist George Will assures us that "the welfare
state is here to stay," and nobody can doubt that
George W. Bush is doing his best to make it so. Those who
doubt it, Will says, aren't "serious," and the task
facing our rulers now is to figure out how to handle the
77 million Baby Boomers who are near retirement age.
Indeed. The realists, the presumably Serious People, have
overloaded a system that is not only unconstitutional and
immoral, but unworkable. Hilaire Belloc saw it coming
long ago; he called it the Servile State.
* * *
By the way, how "serious" is a president who has
never vetoed a spending bill?
* * *
Serious People agree that the government has a duty
to protect us. From what? Well, from criminals and
foreign aggressors (that is, other governments). But
that's just the beginning. The Modern State also protects
us from, let's see, "discrimination" (that is, other
people's free choices not to associate with us); tobacco;
market forces in general (through farm subsidies, for
example, including tobacco-farm subsidies); terrorism;
unsafe autos; and on and on, without limit. It protects
labor from management, consumers from manufacturers, the
earth itself -- the "environment" -- from property
owners. It protects the arts from philistines (that is,
from market decisions to support other arts). It protects
women from men, children from parents, animals from
humans (and, to be fair, humans from animals). It
protects us from evils our ancestors never even heard of,
such as "homophobia." It protects us from the food we
eat, the water we drink, the very air we breathe. Through
Social Security (which no Serious Person thinks of
eliminating), it even protects us from our own
improvidence! In other words, it protects us from
ourselves. Nobody knows what else it will be protecting
us from in the future, but it will surely think of
something -- many things, in fact.
* * *
Bush, with the help of the Department of Homeland
Security, has protected us from the Axis of Evil, even as
his predecessors protected us from Communism. Franklin
Roosevelt protected us from Nazis and Japs (adding to our
security by developing nuclear weapons); Woodrow Wilson
protected us from the Kaiser (making the world "safe" for
democracy); Lincoln protected us from Jefferson Davis. At
home, the Federal Government protected us from the Robber
Barons, and Prohibition protected us from alcohol.
Meanwhile, overseas, Churchill protected England from
Hitler, who was in turn protecting Germans from Jews. And
a new state was created to protect Jews from
anti-Semitism, while communism protected the working
classes in much of the world from capitalism. By now, the
world should be pretty secure.
* * *
Oh, there's one thing the government doesn't protect
us from, as old Juvenal pointed out millennia ago. When
the Internal Revenue Service presents you with the bill
for all this protection, you're on your own. But who
needs protection from what is, after all, a "service"?
Exclusive to the electronic version:
Howard Dean's nonstop embarrassing blurts are
alarming his fellow Democrats. I especially like James
Carville's comment about the garrulous front-runner: "He
seems to not appreciate the glory of the unspoken
thought."
America's Hector
(pages 3-4)
The Civil War is often called America's Iliad. If
the story were told by a Homer, I suppose Lincoln would
be its Achilles and Jefferson Davis would be its Hector,
the noble but doomed hero.
According to one familiar myth, at every crisis in
American history a great leader will miraculously emerge
to rise to the occasion. During the secession crisis, we
are told, it was Abraham Lincoln. Perish the thought that
it might have been Davis!
I often reread Davis's long, dry memoir, THE RISE
AND FALL OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT. It's still in
print, in a Da Capo two-volume paperback edition with a
foreword by the Princeton historian James M. McPherson.
McPherson begins by observing, "History has not been kind
to Jefferson Davis," and he, McPherson, evidently means
to keep it that way, for he immediately continues, "As
head of a rebellion to preserve slavery, he led his
people to a disastrous defeat that destroyed their
society and left the South in poverty for generations."
This sentence does its author little credit as a
historian. For one thing, it begs the question whether
secession was "rebellion" and ignores Davis's careful
argument that it was not. Nor is it fair to say that its
purpose was simply to "preserve slavery," since "the
abolition of slavery," contrary to McPherson's
implication, was neither the intent nor the effect of
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which merely sought
to emancipate slaves within the Confederacy as a military
measure. Lincoln consistently said that his sole aim was
to "preserve the Union," and that anything he did with
respect to slavery was merely a means toward that end.
As for the main body of the sentence, Davis was
hardly responsible for the South's "disastrous defeat"
and subsequent suffering. Whatever his faults as a
wartime leader, the South faced overwhelming odds from
the beginning, which is why Davis had actually urged the
Southern states *not* to secede. To be sure, he believed
that secession was the right of any state; but as a
former secretary of war (under Franklin Pierce), he knew
in concrete terms that if war came, the North held
crushing advantages in numbers, wealth, geography, and
sheer power. Nevertheless, when the South seceded, he
loyally stayed with the side he knew was doomed to lose.
McPherson, however, is relentlessly belittling,
derisive, sarcastic. Davis had an "oversized sense of
honor," was "legalistic," "repetitious," self-righteous,
self-contradictory, incompetent, even dishonest. In
essence the historian merely repeats Northern propaganda
and can't find any redeeming or admirable qualities in
his subject. Worse yet, he fails to acknowledge the
logic, force, and merit of Davis's argument. The South
was in rebellion, its motives were simple and evil, and
there's an end on't.
Pretty sorry stuff. The historian's first duty is to
understand the past as it understood itself, and any
candid historian would recognize all this as mere
partisan caricature. After all, Davis's views on state
sovereignty were so widely shared in the North that
Lincoln found it necessary to abolish freedom of speech
and press *within the North itself* for the duration of
the war. Under Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson's views on
secession would have gotten him arrested (and probably
summarily punished by a military court) for treason, and
Davis's memoirs are in large part a careful elaboration
of what Jefferson wrote in the Kentucky Resolutions of
1798.
But there is more to the story. Davis was too modest
to say it, or perhaps even to be aware of it, but his
life was marked by a heroic pathos. The more I read of
him, the more deeply I find myself impressed by it.
Like Lincoln, Davis was born in Kentucky in 1809.
Unlike Lincoln, he had a happy boyhood and received an
excellent education. His father and older brothers
cherished him. He went to West Point, where he was a
surprisingly prankish youth (and undistinguished
student), narrowly escaping expulsion. Upon graduation,
he became a military officer and served with distinction;
it's likely that he personally swore Lincoln in during
the 1832 Black Hawk war. He was also a romantic young
man, who fell in love with a young woman and married her
against her father's wishes. Her father was an older army
officer, Zachary Taylor, who would later become president
of the United States; but neither Davis nor Taylor could
have suspected what the future held for them.
Davis's bride died suddenly only months after their
marriage. He grieved for ten years before marrying again.
This second marriage, a happy one, lasted the rest of his
life. Meanwhile he served with distinction in the Mexican
War, as Taylor did. Taylor's famous role in the war led
to his election as president; but he died after two years
in office. (Lincoln admired and eulogized him.)
Davis too went on to political success after the
war, as secretary of war under Franklin Pierce, then as
senator from Mississippi. When his state seceded upon
Lincoln's election in 1860, Davis delivered a powerful
farewell address and wept as the Senate applauded
thunderously. In spite of his misgivings, he accepted the
presidency of the Confederacy.
It was of course Davis who ordered that Fort Sumter
be fired upon in April 1861. The war was on. Davis would
complain that the South had been deliberately misled
during negotiations by Lincoln's secretary of state,
William Seward; and he always suspected that this had had
to be done with Lincoln's connivance. In his memoirs he
would argue that Lincoln was morally and legally
responsible for what Seward did, pointing out that
Lincoln never disowned, fired, or even disciplined Seward
for his role in bringing on the war. It was hard to
believe that Seward had acted against Lincoln's wishes.
The long and frustrating war damaged Davis's health,
costing him his sight in one eye. After the war he was
captured, charged with treason, and held in harsh
solitary confinement for two years. His treatment was
carefully designed to humiliate him. At all times a light
burned in his cell and he was allowed no privacy. The
only book he was permitted was a Bible, his only visitor
his wife (and she was permitted to see him only when he
had already been confined for a year). His captivity
itself was meant as punishment. If there was such a thing
as Northern chivalry, he saw very little of it.
Facing trial for a capital offense, Davis, refusing
an offer of clemency because accepting it would imply his
guilt, was nevertheless eager for his day in court. But
it never came. With Lincoln gone, the Johnson
administration's lawyers feared that if it came to a
public trial, Davis would refute the charge of treason by
making a powerful constitutional case for secession. This
would be a disastrous propaganda defeat for the North. If
he was acquitted, the country would be rocked. But once
he'd had his say, even his conviction and execution might
backfire. His courage had created a no-win situation for
the victors. So the charge was dropped and Davis was
released.
During his cruel imprisonment, Davis had attracted
widespread sympathy and admiration, even in the North and
Europe. The abolitionist editor Horace Greeley offered to
put up $100,000 to bail Davis out of prison. Pope Pius IX
sent a crown of thorns, made with his own hands, as a
gesture of compassion.
Ten years later, Davis was still determined to
vindicate the Southern cause. He began work on his
massive memoirs, which were finally published in 1881.
When he died in New Orleans in 1888, even his former
slaves made the journey from Mississippi to join the
hundreds of thousands of mourners who turned out to honor
him.
Most Americans still think of Lincoln as both the
hero and the martyr of the Civil War. But Davis was more
nearly a true martyr. He had been willing to die in order
to bear witness to the truth. When I read his memoirs I
can't help remembering that however abstract the words,
the flesh-and-blood man who wrote them had already defied
death, a fact which he himself never mentions.
Davis's memoirs have an implicit sense of
desperation. He hardly expects to reach an unprejudiced
audience. The court of public opinion in which he makes
his case is already rigged. The cause he pleads for is
defeated and discredited; popular history and official
propaganda have cast him in the role of villain, enemy of
Progress. His enemies have triumphed, Lincoln has been
canonized, and his country has mistaken its most tragic
error for its greatest victory.
For all that, Davis insists that the Confederate
cause was, and is, no mere "Southern" cause, but the
cause of America's deepest principles. And he assumes, if
only because he can't bear to assume anything else, that
his country will still listen to him with an open mind.
For his country is not just the South, but America.
More than a century later, the "impartial history"
Davis appealed to for final judgment remains a little
tardy in putting in its appearance, while his reputation
is still in the hands of highly partisan historians like
James McPherson. In that sense Lincoln, with his
undoubted rhetorical genius, remains history's darling,
whereas Davis's patient logic and his austere belief in
the nobility of his reader may sound "legalistic." I can
only say that to me it does seem almost miraculous that,
at such a moment of crisis, even part of America should
produce such a leader as Jefferson Davis.
Remembering Hugh Kenner
(pages 5-6)
Hugh Kenner, who died this past November at 80, had
the most fascinating mind I've ever encountered. He was
best known as a literary critic, author of the
magisterial THE POUND ERA (1971), but even that
magisterial book didn't begin to exhaust his gifts.
Biography? Biography doesn't explain Hugh, but he
was born in Ontario in January 1923, his father was a
schoolmaster who taught the classics, his early friends
and mentors were Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, and
nothing was lost on Hugh, who'd follow a fertile idea
wherever it led. I suspect that McLuhan, guru of "media,"
didn't imagine what he'd got hold of until he saw what
Hugh could do with it.
I met him in 1975, when I was writing a biography
(never finished) of his friend Bill Buckley and
interviewed him at his Baltimore home, a large hilltop
house guarded by daunting dogs (whose patriarch, Thomas,
had the legs of a grand piano and combined German
shepherd, malamute, and wolf). I shudder, now, to think
how callow I was then, but Hugh and his dear wife Mary
Anne welcomed me genially, and my own friendship with
them began.
Those dogs! Hugh loved them tenderly, Thomas above
all. He had no fear of them. When he'd acquired Thomas,
he'd turned him over to an expert trainer, a big man of
Negro and Indian blood, who had quickly taught the
snarling demi-wolf who was boss by swinging him around by
the forepaws. The paradox of great Thomas on that
occasion -- dizzy, limp, and subdued like a puppy --
tickled Hugh and Mary Anne. As long as you were their
friend, Thomas was your friend too. (Thank heaven.
Thomas's daughter Belle once gave me a low growl I'll not
forget; Hugh came back into the room just in time.
Belle's sister had all but severed a woman's arm.) Hugh
explained how a wolf's psyche -- and jaw muscles --
differ from a dog's.
Bill had been best man at the Kenners' wedding
(Hugh's first wife had died of cancer) and they both
loved him. Hugh always spoke fondly of Bill; once in a
while, especially in later years, permitting himself a
faintly exasperated "Oh dear!" when he thought Bill had
done something silly. Once he complained, "Bill doesn't
*listen* anymore," and he shared the widespread view that
Bill's prose had gone slack. Which Hugh's prose never
did. "Verbal energy is the one thing you can't fake," he
observed, in the days when Bill's sentences still
crackled. And in those days Bill was almost a match for
Hugh, who could turn the faintest intuitions into smartly
articulate formulas, crisply expressing things you
wouldn't have thought expressible until he said them. He
was a bit like Shakespeare that way. Witty, yes, and then
some.
Politics, a business of monotonous petty patterns,
didn't interest him much. He and Bill were joined by
other interests, and Bill must have been troubled by
Hugh's contempt for Ronald Reagan, another Friend of
Bill. Unlike many people, Hugh had no awe of Bill's
intellect, which in a way made his affection for him all
the more impressive. Even Hugh's gossip was penetrating;
he was a superb judge of character, and he thought highly
of Bill. I've written sharply of Bill at times, and I
hereby retract nothing; but in justice I must record that
he held the love and esteem of the most discriminating
man I've yet to meet.
Hugh was intellectually fearless. Though he made his
name as a leading explicator of the most challenging
modernist writers -- Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce,
Samuel Beckett -- he also commanded higher mathematics
and the sciences, writing books on geodesic math and
fractal geometry, as well as a magically charming study
of Buckminster Fuller. As he once put it, "I do not live
in a box labeled 'Eng. Lit.,' out of which I occasionally
climb. My subject is the life of the mind in the
twentieth century." And he tackled the whole thing,
because he *saw* it as one thing, a dynamically expanding
whole. He saw a web of relations -- "patterned energies,"
in his phrase -- among literature, physics, technology,
and pop culture. His grasp of these disparate things was
both profound and whimsical. Hilarity, for Hugh, was an
aspect of truth itself, as the derivative "exhilaration"
suggests.
Take cartoons. In CHUCK JONES: A FLURRY OF DRAWINGS,
his little 1993 appreciation of Chuck Jones, creator of
Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner, Kenner shows how art and
technology converged in the business (few thought of it
as Art) of producing funny images of sheer motion, the
illusion of *energy.* To write a hundred short pages
about this, Hugh surveyed the economic history of movies,
technical problems of drawing prowling fauna, practical
problems of assigning labor (Jones couldn't draw every
frame himself; he had to integrate the efforts of lesser
draftsmen), arcane details of production (cel-washing,
for instance), and analogous functions of computers (one
of his great loves: he built his own personal computer
long before you could just buy one at Radio Shack).
Eliot, Joyce, and Niels Bohr pop into the book too,
always pertinently. And every witty sentence of this late
masterpiece shows Kenner's undiminished verbal energy.
"Critic" hardly seems the word for a mind that could pack
so much, and so amusingly, into a tiny volume.
But the reader sees how one gifted cartoonist did
his bit for the life of the mind in the twentieth
century. Hugh once proudly showed me some sketches (of a
stalking mongoose) Jones had given him, explaining how
they conveyed the illusion of animal motion through
visual exaggeration. Literal copying wouldn't have
created the same effect. On the same principle,
caricature, imitating perception rather than reality, is
more "recognizable" than photography. Following (and
surpassing) McLuhan, Hugh explained that the experience
of a medium was far more basic than any content it
imparted; the medium was *more* than the message. The
newspaper itself was more important than the specific
information it conveyed. Money was more interesting than
any particular commodity it bought.
And you thought Bugs Bunny was just an idle
amusement? Well, so did Chuck Jones, who never thought he
was creating Art. Nor did most artists, who thought they
were doing something else. Only posterity would come to
see something higher in ancestral entertainments.
My kids loved Hugh too. He was a born teacher, alive
to a child's delights and interests. His favorite movies
included KING KONG, STAR WARS, and BLOOD SIMPLE, as well
as anything with Buster Keaton. "Art" films didn't
especially interest him, and compiling Top Ten lists just
wasn't his style, but his attention was arrested by
movies that did something new with the medium, if only
with special effects. ("What do you mean *only?*" I can
imagine him retorting. McLuhan was in his bones.) Those
dogs terrified me, but to the kids they were part of the
fun of visiting the Kenners. We all went to an Orioles
game once, where Hugh slightly shocked me by repeating a
cliche from the sports pages. I forget what it was, but
it was the only time I ever heard him say anything trite.
That in itself was startling.
Fun? The late hour's drive home from Baltimore to
northern Virginia was indescribable elation. I'd just
spent an evening with the world's chief authority on
Pound and Joyce and countless other topics, feeling as
privileged as Boswell must have felt on taking leave of
Dr. Johnson, to spend the rest of the night mentally
turning over pregnant moments of matchless conversation.
But Boswell had the good sense to write it all down while
it was fresh; I, alas, didn't.
It's impossible to sum up a mind so rich, alert,
agile, profound, and playful. A mere journalist can offer
only impressions. But Hugh chiefly taught me one useful
thing: that the real news isn't to be found in headlines
of wars, elections, scandals, and business mergers, but
in deeper patterns that usually pass unobserved. "The
style of your own period is always invisible," as he put
it. When computers still seemed a sideshow for nerds,
Hugh saw that they would change everything -- including
wars and elections, which are now unthinkable (and
unwinnable) without them.
Tall, with unruly hair and thick glasses, Hugh had a
slight speech impediment (at age six the flu had left him
partly deaf) that I found oddly charming. But his damaged
hearing, far from disabling him, forced him to listen to
others with extraordinary keenness: he learned to read
lips, but also to intuit what others meant even when he
heard them imperfectly. This made him preternaturally
perceptive, and uniquely alive to the elliptical
qualities of modern poetry that most readers found
baffling. I never had to explain to him what I was trying
to say; on the contrary, he often finished my hesitant
sentences for me, making my intended point with
surprising concision. He read minds as well as lips.
When bored -- as when feminists told him off (why
had he neglected *female* poets?) -- Hugh was known to
turn off his hearing aid, deafness being a refuge from
nonsense. For many years he refused to get a hearing aid;
but here again Bill Buckley proved a friend. He chewed
Hugh out after watching him struggle to hear Charlie
Chaplin explain his comic technique one evening in
Switzerland. One of the world's great comics trying to
reveal his secrets to one of the world's great critics --
it was *criminal* for Hugh to risk missing a syllable of
that, Bill scolded. He had a *duty* to get a hearing aid!
Hugh did so, and years later was still grateful to have
had one friend candid enough to insist on it. Most people
were too polite. But Bill needn't have worried: Chaplin's
insights weren't lost on him, and they showed up in his
later writings.
I was immensely flattered that Hugh liked some of my
own articles and often quoted an epigram of mine, though
he scolded me sharply for a review of one of his own
books. He called my praise "excessive." The hell it was.
Inept, probably; inadequate, no doubt; but not too high.
Many people praised him; nobody ever overpraised him.
Hugh died on Bill Buckley's 78th birthday.
NUGGETS
MISSION STATEMENT: The affairs of Britney and Jacko are
hard enough for the NEW YORK POST to keep abreast of, let
alone SOBRAN'S. But we do our best, in our humble way, to
keep you up to the minute. In an election year it's
especially vital that the public be well informed on the
great issues before us. This is why I buy at least six
papers every morning. Journalism is the soul of a vibrant
democracy, you know. (page 7)
CONGRATULA--- SAY WHAT? Faster than you can say, "Britney
is married!" Britney got an annulment. Wise career move.
After all, getting hitched on impulse in Vegas at 5 A.M.
seems a somewhat inauspicious way to start a family.
Maybe there's something to be said for arranged marriages
after all. (page 9)
FLASH! In foreign news, it appears that Di was preggers
by Dodi at the time of the alleged accident now widely
thought to have been arranged by HRH himself. At least
this is my general recollection of a radio news item
summarizing what the London tabloids are saying these
days. You have to allow for a certain gap, of course,
between journalism and rigorous epistemology. (page 10)
THE DECLINE OF REALITY: David Brooks, settling right in
as a NEW YORK TIMES columnist, moans that we now live in
"the Era of Distortion": "Improvements in information
technology have not made public debate more realistic. On
the contrary, anti-Semitism is resurgent. Conspiracy
theories are prevalent." Et cetera. The Internet, you
see, allows you to "choose your own reality," however
wacko. Ah, for the good old days, when the TIMES, soberly
quoting Official Sources, defined Reality!
(page 11)
THE BIG QUESTION: The Bush administration is now
preparing constitutions for both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ah, but will they be *living* constitutions? (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
OSAMA THESE DAYS: Government officials put out another
holiday terror alert, apparently tipped off that al-Qaeda
was planning to spoil our Kwanzaa. Nothing happened, and
we were somewhat confusingly advised, by those same
officials, to go about our festivities as usual. They
were only doing their duty, crying "Wolf!" to prevent
wolf attacks.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* The War We Are In (December 9, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/031209.shtml
* Israel and Rape (December 11, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/031211.shtml
* Triumph! (December 16, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/031216.shtml
* Scenario for a Comeback (December 18, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/031218.shtml
* The Mahdi's Revenge (December 30, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/031230.shtml
* Purging the Neocons (January 6, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040106.shtml
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