SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
June 2004
Volume 11, Number 6
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Dying in Vain
-> The Passing Scene (plus electronic Exclusives)
-> King of the Subneocons
-> Snow White and Anarchism
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
{{ Material dropped solely for reasons of space appears
in double curly brackets. Emphasis is indicated by the
presence of asterisks around the emphasized words. }}
Dying in Vain
(page 1)
In Ernest Hemingway's World War I novel A FAREWELL
TO ARMS, an Italian soldier says, "We won't talk about
losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been
done this summer cannot have been done in vain."
This moves the American narrator-hero, Frederick
Henry, who has deserted the Italian army, to a famous
reflection: "I did not say anything. I was always
embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice
and the expression in vain.... I had seen nothing sacred,
and the things that were glorious had no glory and the
sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing
was done with the meat except to bury it.... Abstract
words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were
obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the
numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of
regiments and the dates."
The passage may be taken as Hemingway's deflating
answer to all official grandiloquence about war, from
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the Gettysburg
Address onward. The words Hemingway mocks never sound
more threadbare than when President Bush assures us that
hundreds of brave men and women in Iraq have not died in
vain. But what else can a man in his position say?
Denying that any American soldier has ever died in
vain is one of the perennial tasks of the politicians who
send young men to die in the course of killing. Physical
and moral horror must be transmuted into glorious
sacrifice. Imagine a president saying, "All these young
people died for nothing. It's all my fault."
Ever since Homer's ILIAD, frank observers of war
have been stunned by its sheer waste; that is, the
overwhelming sense that the great majority of the dead
*have* died in vain, for other men's causes. The common
soldier who challenges Shakespeare's disguised Henry V on
the eve of Agincourt realizes that many (including, very
possibly, himself) are about to die in agony for Henry's
flimsy title to the French throne. Later, alone, Henry
muses, with exquisite self-pity, that kings have a tough
row to hoe: they try so hard to keep peace, then get
blamed for starting wars! (This subtly ironic play is
traditionally mistaken for a celebration of Henry's
heroism. In his wartime film version, designed to boost
English jingoism, Laurence Olivier had to invent
sequences of Henry in combat that weren't in the play,
where Henry is conspicuously absent from the battle
scenes.)
A politician's occupation is to waste his country's
resources. As he spends its wealth in vain, we should
expect that he will also spend its lives in vain. What
have we to show for the trillions of dollars the U.S.
Government has taken from us in taxes over the last
generation? But taxes arouse relatively little
indignation; wars are another matter, and rulers must
fend off the angry suspicion that they have caused our
boys to die in vain.
{{ Surely this suspicion underlay the fury of the
McCarthy era. After countless boys had died to defeat the
Axis, Americans realized that these lives had been
sacrificed for a treacherous "ally," the Soviet Union,
which had now emerged as a deadlier enemy than Japan or
Germany. }}
To put it briefly, is there any reason to suppose
that our wasteful rulers spend our lives any more
carefully, or scrupulously, than they spend our money? As
a Shakespearean character might say, "It doth not
appear."
The Passing Scene
(page 2)
Which of the world's countries has the worst problem
with illegal aliens? That's easy: Iraq.
* * *
The War on Terror took yet another remarkable turn
when the Bush administration decided to let former (that
is to say, recent) members of Saddam Hussein's feared
Ba'ath Party help restore order against the New Enemy in
Iraq. This is getting good.
* * *
Meanwhile, our Reliable Ally continues adding to the
excitement in the Middle East. Ariel Sharon, a genius at
causing and capitalizing on turmoil, has ordered the
assassination of the new Hamas leader (killed after less
than a month on the job), while announcing that he no
longer feels bound by his pledge to President Bush not to
kill Yasir Arafat. Abandoning decades of U.S. policy --
including his own father's! -- Bush pronounced himself
mighty pleased by Sharon's decision to dump Gaza while
keeping as much of the West Bank as the cunning Israeli
brute cares to retain. Bush's peace plan for the region,
such as it was, is now reduced to utter rubble. Once
again Sharon has exposed this swaggering coward to the
world. More important, he has the United States right
where he wants it: isolated, with Israel, against the
whole enraged Muslim world.
* * *
Has Bush noticed that his neoconservative friends
aren't lifting a finger to help him with Sharon?
* * *
Despite his floundering, Bush has had one undeniable
piece of great luck: John Kerry. It seems Electable John,
after the glory of the primary season, just can't get any
traction. Even the bad news from the Middle East isn't
helping him in the polls. No matter how deplorable the
condition of the country gets, it doesn't seem to think
the cure for what ails it is an ugly Massachusetts
socialist.
* * *
Will the Catholic hierarchy deny Kerry Communion for
his defiance of Catholic teaching? If it does so, we can
expect the media to portray Kerry as a persecuted
dissenter, distorting the issue and making the Church, as
usual, the villain. But laymen don't have to wait for the
Vatican or the bishops to act: They can protest Kerry's
presence anytime he shows up at their churches, making it
clear that they themselves regard him as a flagrantly
faithless Catholic who is abusing their religion for
political profit. True, Catholics don't like to make
scenes in church. But did Jesus *enjoy* making a scene at
the Temple when it was profaned?
* * *
Well, as I live and breathe! No sooner had I pegged
George Will as a "subneoconservative" than he made a
snide reference to the neocons in his own column -- a
sure sign he's decided they're on the skids and isn't
planning to answer their phone calls anymore. I guess
this makes him the first ex-subneocon.
* * *
In the most ignominious act in its history, the
"conservative" Philadelphia Society has chosen as its new
president Midge Decter, Mrs. Norman Podhoretz. Mme.
Podhoretz, as you may recall, once accused the society's
most august member, Russell Kirk, of "anti-Semitism."
Thank God Kirk didn't live to see this.
Exclusive to the electronic version:
Much has been written against Henry VIII, and I
don't want to pile on. But it seems to me that when a
fellow finds himself beheading more than one wife, he
should seriously ask himself whether some of the blame
for these failed relationships may lie with him.
* * *
A California scholar contends that J. Robert
Oppenheimer, one of the brains of the atomic bomb, was,
as long suspected, a member of the Communist Party at
Berkeley in the 1930s. A new book, on the other hand,
argues that Harry Dexter White, Number Two man in
Franklin Roosevelt's Treasury Department, was not,
contrary to similar suspicions, a Soviet agent; but Ted
Morgan, in the WASHINGTON POST, cites a conversation in
which White (nee Weiss) "insist[ed] that the Russians had
worked out a system that would replace capitalism and
Christianity." Other papers, some from the Soviet
archives, also incriminate White. He died suddenly in
1948 while under investigation by the House Un-American
Activities Committee. FDR may not have ended the
Depression, but he did provide many jobs for Stalinists.
King of the Subneocons
(pages 3-5)
I was there, at the right place at the right time,
when it started. I didn't quite comprehend what I was
seeing, though. By the time I recognized it as the
movement it was, I'd already decided against joining it
-- to my lasting ruin.
You may think the last thing we need is another
political label, along with "radical," "liberal,"
"neoliberal," "libertarian," "conservative,"
"paleoconservative," "neoconservative," and all the rest
of the verbal clutter of public discourse. I reluctantly
offer this one, only because I *do* think a certain class
of today's "conservatives" is now sufficiently large and
distinctive to deserve identification. They warrant a
name of their own more specific than "those guys," even
if they don't know it.
I refer to the subneoconservatives. The subneocons
(let's give them a nickname while we're at it) are the
largely Christian people who, though usually called
conservatives, no longer uphold the principles of the
older conservatism once associated with William Buckley
and NATIONAL REVIEW, but have become reliable
fellow-travelers (and in many cases useful idiots) of
neoconservatism. Their chief enthusiasm isn't the free
market, private property, or limited government; it's war
-- especially war for the benefit of the state of Israel.
In fact, Buckley and his magazine themselves are now one
of the chief organs of subneoconservatism. Looking back,
I see that this strange hybrid began at the magazine
around the time I started working there in 1972. I didn't
suspect a thing.
But the first notable subneocon wasn't Buckley. It
was the young Washington correspondent he hired at about
the time he hired me. His name was George F. Will.
Buckley, having been tarred as a crypto-Nazi, was making
nice with the Tribe and saying all the right things about
Israel and the Holocaust, but at the core he hadn't
changed much. Yet. It took George Will to see that a
whole new style of conservatism might be marketable.
Will was a few years my senior, but he acted much
older. He looked like one of Bertie Wooster's odd pals --
with the face of a haddock, thick glasses, and bow tie --
but he spoke with an air of authority, and he was
obviously determined to go places even then. NATIONAL
REVIEW was just a launching pad for his career; it was
bush-league, in his eyes, and he meant to play in the
majors. He seemed faintly disdainful of its old-style
conservatism, of its Christianity, and of Buckley
himself.
Will saw, early on, that the action was elsewhere,
and he became chummy with Irving Kristol and Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, who were then close associates and had
been labeled "neoconservatives" (though Moynihan would
later enter the U.S. Senate as a liberal, if hawkish,
Democrat). His also cultivated Senator Henry Jackson, the
neocons' favorite politician and a compleat supporter of
Israel, whom he would later salute in an obituary as "the
finest public servant I have ever known." (In his 11,000
Senate votes, Jackson almost never voted against Federal
spending, for any purpose.)
Will regarded the old conservatism as square, and he
dropped as useless baggage the books conservatives had
been reading for a generation: those of Henry Hazlitt,
James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and the
like. Among conservatives, he was, or tried to appear,
the Latest Model. Like many seemingly "bold" and "daring"
people, he was merely quick to realize what had become
safe and even lucrative.
Personally, I got along with him well enough, though
I thought him a bit pompous and calculating. Buckley
sometimes found him irritating; he once showed me a
letter he'd written mildly scolding Will, which Will had
sent back with a brief contemptuous reply penciled in at
the bottom. "He wouldn't talk to Irving Kristol that
way," Buckley complained. Indeed.
I got another glimpse of this side of Will from
J.P. McFadden, publisher of the anti-abortion quarterly
THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW, who told me he'd asked Will (who
had written of abortion disapprovingly) to write an
article for him. Will preferred not to. He ingenuously
explained that he was afraid that if he wrote for a
"pro-life" publication, he wouldn't be invited back on
the talk shows. "You're kidding!" McFadden had exploded,
finding this a sorry reason. Will, mistaking his meaning,
replied that no, he wasn't kidding -- it really might
hurt his career. Will didn't grasp that McFadden was
amazed not at the fact, but at his cynical acceptance of
it.
In his Washington column Will angered NATIONAL
REVIEW readers by joining the attack on Richard Nixon and
Spiro Agnew during the Watergate uproar, but he caught
someone else's eye: he was hired as a columnist by the
WASHINGTON POST and NEWSWEEK and was soon a regular on
television political talk shows. NATIONAL REVIEW was
eating his dust, and he kept a careful public distance
from traditional conservatism. A lofty "I never knew ye"
was more or less his stance. He offered himself as the
"independent" conservative, willing to join liberals in
bashing Republicans, and naturally liberals loved him. It
was a profitable pose.
As years passed, Will made a safe niche of his own
in the liberal media, continuing to contrast himself
favorably with lesser conservatives. He had none of their
square old prudery about the welfare state, which he not
only accepted, but lauded as a necessary and desirable
feature of modern society. Above all, he never found
fault with the state of Israel, except when its Labor
governments made concessions to the Arabs; his positions
were identical with hard-line Zionist propaganda; Israel
was America's "only reliable ally" in the Middle East. At
the time, though I was strongly pro-Israel myself, I
wondered how Will squared his own position with his
proclaimed conservatism. I was still assuming that he was
sincere.
I caught on slowly. I tended to assume, like a
child, that everyone was sincere. At the same time, I was
beginning to notice, even in my innocent thirties, a
general edginess about Tribal matters, and I vaguely
wondered why so many intelligent people -- Buckley as
well as Will -- had such an exaggerated fear of the Jews,
which usually expressed itself in the form of exaggerated
praise and sympathy, especially for Israel. It seemed to
me a baffling loss of proportion, as if such people
believed anti-Semitic notions of ubiquitous Jewish power.
It was as if Will had staked his whole career on
believing in, and truckling to, that imaginary power.
When I myself ran afoul of that imaginary power and
found it rather surprisingly real, I confided in
Buckley's nominal publisher, William Rusher, who smiled:
"Now you're getting close to the white-hot core of this
whole thing." Again I was baffled, though the scales were
starting to fall from my eyes. It was as if I'd been
blind to something that was perfectly obvious to everyone
else. And they were trying to tell me something, though I
couldn't make sense of it. It sounded as if they thought
a few Jews really did control the world! But ... *how?*
Whatever the explanation, George Will seemed to have
a much better operational grasp of it than I did, at
least if celebrity, media exposure, book contracts,
income, and things of that sort were any measure. With
all due respect for his poise and talent, his tireless
cultivation of Tribal favor seemed to be a critical
variable.
As for me, I had trouble getting any attention at
all until I wrote a few columns arguing what I thought
was an at least tenable position: that the alliance with
Israel had been unduly costly, and posed future dangers,
to the United States. Suddenly I was the most dangerous
man since Hitler. I was attacked in various Tribal or
Tribe-controlled publications, including NEWSWEEK.
Buckley felt he had to disown my offending columns; he
did so in an article that Hugh Kenner described to me as
sounding "as if it were written with a gun to his head."
What astonished me about all that was the sheer
*centrality* of Jewish issues in the media. Why were a
tiny Mideast country and even events of the Hitler era
always on the front pages, on the evening news, and in
the forefront of public consciousness? Why were these
matters always so infernally *touchy?*
I just didn't know what to make of it, but George
Will clearly did. To me the exasperating thing was that
it seemed reasonable to suppose that there might be two
sides to a controversy. Yet when it came to Tribal
issues, Will (like many others) always wrote as if the
Jewish side were self-evidently correct. To this day, as
far as I know, he has never so much as suggested that
Israel has ever done wrong to the United States or to the
Palestinians.
Will's special genius is for playing it safe
belligerently. This is the key to all the subneocons, in
fact. They take the side of the Jews because they
perceive the Jews as strong, while pretending to take the
Jewish side on moral principle. It was obvious to me long
ago that if the odds were different, the same people
would be on the Arab side or even, if it came to that, on
the Christian or American side. For the time being,
however, there is little danger of that.
I sometimes wonder which gentiles were defending the
Jews when it was a bit risky to defend the Jews. Will has
written scathingly of Pius XII's "silence" during World
War II, accusing the entire Catholic Church of
anti-Semitism. From this, even assuming that Will has his
facts straight, we may gather one of two things: Either
Will, in Pius's place, would have shown more courage than
that Pope did; or it's safer to denounce anti-Semitism in
America today than it was in German-occupied Rome during
that war. Will's record under very different contemporary
pressures leaves me in no doubt as to the answer.
In 1982 Will tried his hand at political philosophy
with a little book called STATECRAFT AS SOULCRAFT. To say
that it failed as philosophy is almost beside the point.
It was Will at his worst, but also at his most typical.
He has a thousand opinions, all magisterial, but no
convictions. He is forever quoting the classics while
counting the house. Once again he berated other
conservatives ("soi-disant conservatives," as opposed to
the One True Conservative) for stubbornly rejecting the
New Deal and other additions to the welfare state. He
also praised Israel.
A cynic might suggest that Will wrote about
"soulcraft" because he'd learned the cash value of
selling one's soul. But whatever the reason, the theme
has completely disappeared from his subsequent writings.
Soulcraft must have seemed like a hot idea at the time.
In NATIONAL REVIEW I ridiculed Will's "toothless,
coffee-table conservatism," but I needn't have bothered.
His book had no impact. And this is curiously true of his
whole career. He has won great success without having any
visible influence. After more than thirty years in the
public eye, as America's most respected conservative
between Buckley and Limbaugh, there is no such thing as a
Will disciple. He has added nothing to the idea of
conservatism; he has merely set a pattern for opportunism
in the guise of conservatism. Maybe in that respect he
has, if not disciples, at least many imitators. At any
rate, his book reinforced my growing suspicion that he
took his positions only for advantage. I've never known
him to take a position that cost him anything. He saw the
paleocons as losers, and he was determined never to be
one of them. Under all his fancy talk, it really came
down to that.
The old conservatism made a surprising comeback in
1980, when a longtime subscriber to NATIONAL REVIEW was
elected president of the United States. We at the
magazine rejoiced, but we were also caught off-balance
after so many years in the wilderness that we hardly knew
what to do with the actual political triumph of our
fantasies. Will was ready, though: He and the neocons
moved right in to capitalize on the situation. Their
agenda was not to repeal the welfare state, of course,
but to convert Reagan's anti-Communist hawkishness into
more American military intervention in the Middle East.
Will also became a frequent luncheon companion of Nancy
Reagan; meanwhile, Bill Buckley and his wife savored
their own friendship with the Reagans. "We" had
conquered.
During the Reagan years, neocon infiltration of both
the Reagan administration and conservative institutions
changed the nature of the conservative movement. The
conversion of conservatives into subneocons became the
greatest mass movement since the Okie migrations of the
Great Depression. The Soviet Union was dying and the Cold
War with it, but "national defense" became the movement's
top priority, even as the Federal Government continued
its mad expansion.
Led by Congressman Jack Kemp, Republican subneocons
made their peace with big government, Federal spending,
and budget deficits on a scale Franklin Roosevelt himself
never dreamed of. Conservative think tanks became all-out
neocon (the American Enterprise Institute) or, more
often, subneocon (the Heritage Foundation, the Ethics and
Public Policy Center). The presidency of the first George
Bush found them eager for war with Iraq, though
disappointed when it stopped short of "regime change."
During these years, a new generation of allegedly
conservative pundits appeared, almost all of whom have
been, in truth, subneocons who fawn on Israel, support
the Likud party to the hilt, and hunger for war on Arabs:
Rush Limbaugh (of course), Cal Thomas, Sean Hannity,
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the late Michael Kelly, Mark
Steyn, Richard Lowry (Buckley's anointed successor at
NATIONAL REVIEW), Jonah Goldberg, and on and on. Even
clergymen, Catholics as well as evangelical Protestants,
have joined the ranks: Richard John Neuhaus, Jerry
Falwell, Pat Robertson. Then there are such newspapers as
the WASHINGTON TIMES and the DETROIT NEWS. Even READER'S
DIGEST has gotten in step. All fervently support the new
George Bush and the War on Terror, uninhibited by old
conservative scruples against unconstitutional
government.
At the same time, once-prominent conservatives who
have refused to go subneocon -- Pat Buchanan, Sam
Francis, and myself, for example -- have been
marginalized. I wasn't surprised when Will joined the
1996 media assault on Buchanan, hinting that he was a
"fascist." If there is anything a coward hates, it's any
display of courage.
Critics observe that the neoconservatives are much
the same people they always were: Cold War liberals,
mostly Jewish, who have merely changed their emphases.
There is much truth in this, though I'd say that Irving
Kristol, the Founding Father of neoconservatism, has a
genuine and strong conservative streak.
But it also means that the deeper metamorphosis has
taken place among Christian conservatives, who have
forsaken their ancestral principles. George Will led the
way.
If he hadn't done it, someone else, cowardice being
what it is, inevitably would have. That's why it's so
easy to forget to give him the credit he deserves. But I
was present at the creation, and I am happy to set the
record straight. He was, and remains, the king of the
subneocons.
Snow White and Anarchism
(page 6)
The other night I watched Walt Disney's SNOW WHITE
for the umpteenth time, still feeling a bit of the
enchantment it gave me as a small boy more than fifty
years ago. This time it gave rise to a thought that had
never occurred to me before.
The Seven Dwarfs, I noticed, seem to live happily in
the forest with no formal government to speak of. Though
they mine diamonds for a living, their modest home
suggests either extreme frugality or a certain lack of
business sense. Nevertheless, they enjoy a harmonious
existence until Snow White inadvertently brings the
government into their home, in the form of the wicked
Queen.
Nearly everyone in our age agrees that government is
necessary to social life. As Thomas Hobbes wrote, life in
a state of nature is "a war of every man against every
man," bound to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short," until a power arises to "keep them all in awe."
What kind of government? That seems to be secondary. The
main thing is that there be some Top Dog to maintain
order: a king, a dictator, or whatever, with an absolute
monopoly of coercive power.
By this reasoning, plausible at first sight, the
Dwarfs owe their happiness to the sovereignty of the
Queen. But that hardly seems to be the lesson of the
story; the opposite seems nearer the truth. I should
mention that I disagree with the Queen's magic mirror; I
find her better-looking, and more interesting as a
person, than Snow White. The sadder but wiser girl for
me. Still, she is definitely trouble.
The assumption that social life depends on the state
-- a monopoly of force with the authority to use it -- is
curiously stubborn. To most people the proposition that
we'd be better off without it seems counterintuitive,
even baffling. They can hardly imagine a stateless
society, despite the dreadful record of the state over
the last century especially. Not only have the collisions
of states produced colossal wars; even within their own
borders, states have proved oppressive, inefficient, and
often murderous. Yet it's hardly an exaggeration to say
that we are all Hobbesians now.
Would Hobbes say that it's better to be ruled even
by a Saddam Hussein or a Stalin than to have no Top Dog
at all? That seems to be the logic of his position. Most
readers have found Hobbes's naked statement of this
position repellent, but they accept it in principle.
Today, for example, the Bush administration deems it
insufficient to topple Saddam; it feels it must replace
him with, as it were, a kinder, gentler, "democratic"
Saddam, a Top Dog with broad popular support. {{ The
alternative would be an intolerable vacuum. }}
Brilliant men -- Locke, Jefferson, Madison, Hayek,
and many others -- have labored to solve the conundrum of
the state. But all attempts to limit it have finally
failed; the U.S. Government today is the best proof,
since it is vastly remote from, if not opposite to, the
vision of its Founders. But this rather obvious fact is
lost on Americans today, including their muddle-headed
president.
One objection to Hobbes is that states have been of
so many different kinds. One state professes to protect
private property; others have tried to abolish it. One
state seeks to enforce one religious orthodoxy; others
seek to establish another religion, or even atheism, on
the plausible view that human society requires some basic
unity of belief. Such conflicting purposes of states,
each supposedly necessary to any social life, seem to me
to show that no state is necessary. True, some states are
more destructive than others, but the fact that human
society, however impaired, seems to survive them all
suggests that society continues to exist in spite of
states, not because of them. What keeps society going,
under even the most despotic regimes, is whatever is left
of free human energies {{ (as in Communism's black
markets). }}
In a way, Jefferson offered the most seductive
justification for the state. He rightly asserted that all
of us have inalienable rights, but he added that
governments -- monopoly states -- are established to
"secure" these rights. This too is plausible but
paradoxical. How can freedom depend on force? The
American Founders thought they'd solved the problem posed
by Hobbes, but they accepted his premise, and by now the
results are all too clear.
The Dwarfs are better off without the Queen, and
that would still be true if they elected her themselves.
If states are created in order to secure our rights, they
all fail spectacularly and always have, including the one
expressly established for just that purpose. We can only
begin to secure our rights by eliminating that damned and
damnable thing, which Albert Jay Nock called "our enemy,
the State."
NUGGETS
THE BIG PICTURE: The returns on the sexual revolution are
now in, and they are beyond what even pessimists foresaw.
White Westerners are reproducing themselves below
replacement levels; thanks to low birth rates and
immigration, Italy and Spain are well on the way to
becoming Muslim countries. Islamic terrorism is a trifle;
the real story is demography. As the churches empty,
mosques spring up, full of ardent believers. Muslim calls
to prayer ring through the cities, from Madrid to
Hamtramck, Michigan. Note: Islam hasn't joined the sexual
revolution. (page 8)
FRIENDS: One of the creepiest Republicans in the U.S.
Senate, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has narrowly won a
primary victory over a conservative challenger,
Congressman Pat Toomey, thanks to, yes, two of the
party's leading conservatives. One, of course, was
President Bush, who dropped by to endorse Specter,
allowing that "he's a little independent sometimes --
nothin' wrong with that." The other was the state's other
Republican senator, the allegedly anti-abortion Rick
Santorum, who campaigned hard to help the pro-abortion
Specter keep his seat. Truly, the party is dearer than
life itself. (page 10)
CONTEMPORARY COMMUNITY STANDARDS: Over the past
generation, liberals have accused only two men of
producing pornography: Ken Starr and Mel Gibson.
(page 12)
Exclusive to electronic media:
OUR FIGHTING WOMEN: Pfc. Lynndie England, of Fort Ashby,
West Virginia, is the girl you've seen posing, all
smiles, in those photos with naked Arab prisoners in Abu
Ghraib prison. Lynndie, who has been fired, is pregnant
by a man she no longer sees, and faces a court martial,
is now the most famous female American soldier since
another West Virginian, Jessica Lynch.
ALL IN GOOD FUN: Rush Limbaugh likens the torture of
those Arab detainees to college fraternity pranks. Pardon
me for splitting hairs, but if college boys inflicted
their little jokes on involuntary subjects for six months
or so, they'd wind up doing time for kidnapping, assault,
and other crimes.
LESSONS OF THE MASTERS: Some of the interrogation
techniques used at Abu Ghraib -- such as keeping
prisoners hooded for months -- go beyond frat-boy humor
and suggest coaching from a Reliable Ally whose agents
are eager and experienced in these matters. Expect any
congressional inquiry to avoid this angle, however.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* Taking the Bait (April 6, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040406.shtml
* Waste Your Vote (April 20, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040420.shtml
* Conscience and Terrorism (April 8, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040408.shtml
* Alex Revisited (April 22, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040422.shtml
* The Tragedy of Iraq (April 27, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040427.shtml
* Sympathy for the Savage (April 29, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040429.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]