SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
December 2004
Volume 11, Number 12
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Thou Shalt Not Vote
-> Notes on the Aftermath
-> Humor in Chesterton
-> Lincoln's Latest Defender
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
Thou Shalt Not Vote
(page 1)
Now that the dust has settled, the meaning of the
2004 election is clear: I won. Late in the campaign, I
canceled my write-in campaign and asked my supporters not
to vote at all. I announced I would claim every
abstention as a virtual vote for me.
The result wasn't everything I'd hoped for, but it
was decisive enough. Naturally I aspired to win a
majority, but a slightly higher than usual number of
eligible voters cast their ballots: around 60 per cent,
about evenly divided between George W. Bush and John
Kerry. That left me with a roughly 40 per cent plurality.
I'll take it.
In all humility, I can't take it personally. Some of
those who abstained from voting had never even heard of
me. That's all right. The important thing is that they
didn't vote. They have no faith in government or in the
false claims and promises of democracy. I don't seek
power for myself; I seek its widest possible dispersion
through the dismantling of the state.
Of course Bush has been declared the winner, since
the democracy doesn't recognize abstention as an
expression of the will of the people, even when the great
majority decline to vote. It interprets all votes as
votes for the state, but doesn't count abstentions as
rejections of the state.
The allegedly impartial news media regularly show
their real partiality -- partiality to the state -- by
lamenting low voter turnout as a collective sin of
"apathy," and many nonvoters are furtive and sheepish
about their alleged "failure" to show up at the polls.
But the choice to abstain is an honorable one: It
signifies a refusal to participate in the crass and
corrupt business of power.
Those of us who refuse to vote should be positive,
not shy, about it. The refusal to participate in politics
is not a dereliction of civic duty, but an acceptance of
it. When enough nonvoters affirm this, openly and
defiantly, the politicians will begin to get the message,
the state will lose its authority, and liberty will be
the victor.
It's a remarkable fact that "politician" and
"politics" have become disreputable words in democracies.
So why are those who elect politicians supposed to be
acting virtuously? Shouldn't voting be seen, on the
contrary, as a shameful act?
Everyone understands that elections don't give us
selfless public servants; they give us self-serving,
often cynical and venal rulers, whose interest, as
Hans-Herman Hoppe points out, is to loot the public
treasury in the time allotted to them. The system
encourages voters to play the same game, what Frederic
Bastiat called "organized plunder," in which "everyone
tries to live at the expense of everyone else." It's
taken for granted that old voters, for example, will vote
for candidates who promise them benefits paid for by
younger, and even unborn, taxpayers.
This ignoble game corrupts all the players, and the
longer it goes on the worse it gets. The honorable and
rational thing to do is to refuse to play, until those
who do are embarrassed to admit it.
Notes on the Aftermath
(page 2)
Dealing with the Democrats' debacle, Senator Barbara
Boxer explained that America isn't yet "ready" for
sodomatrimony. A world of meaning in that "ready": The
idea isn't wrong, immoral, unnatural, or crazy -- just,
you know, a bit premature. The Dems mean to keep pushing
it until the country wearies of resisting it and the
courts do their stuff.
* * *
At the same time, the Democrats insist that they too
have "moral values." After all, they say, peace and
fighting hunger are matters of morality, aren't they?
Well, of course they are -- but that's not quite what
we're talking about here. For a generation now, the
Democrats have been on the side of =discarding= Christian
sexual morality, while treating its supporters as mere
bigots. They pretend to compensate for this by advocating
a "social gospel," summed up in the great progressive
commandment "Give all that thy neighbor hath to the
poor."
* * *
One uncovered story of the 2004 campaign was John
Kerry's claim to be a faithful Catholic. Apart from his
public position on abortion, it came down to whether his
first marriage had been properly annulled and his second
solemnized by the Church. Well, now we have the answer:
According to the archbishop of Boston, Sean O'Malley, who
would surely know, neither is the case. Bear in mind that
an annulment isn't supposed to be like a quickie Reno
divorce, frivolously dissolving a marriage; it's supposed
to be a careful finding that the marriage was never
validly contracted in the first place. Such findings, in
order to be warranted, must be rare. These days, they
notoriously aren't. Yet Kerry didn't even bother trying
to get one. We've been spared our first bogus Catholic
president.
* * *
Garry Wills sees the election as "Bryan's revenge"
for the 1925 Scopes trial, in which William Jennings
Bryan's fundamentalism took it on the chin. Writing in
the NEW YORK TIMES, Wills laments that "many more
Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's
theory of evolution," hence Bush's regrettable victory.
Come again? Can this be the same Garry Wills whose recent
book WHY I AM A CATHOLIC, while rejecting many papal
claims and teachings, reaffirmed the Apostles' Creed
(including "born of the Virgin Mary")? Good old Garry.
Why doesn't he just repudiate the whole Creed, and get it
over with?
* * *
This has been a bad year for the neocons. Even
fifth-graders now know the Iraq war was their pet cause.
It's amusing, and encouraging, that their bete noire
Patrick Buchanan has written a bestseller, HOW THE RIGHT
WENT WRONG, about their calamitous takeover of the Bush
administration and the conservative movement (reviewed in
our October issue). The neocon press won't even review
it; it's simply unanswerable. Even in attacking it they'd
have to quote it, which would mean quoting their own
embarrassing words.
* * *
This fall we were spared a season of unrelieved
politics when the Boston Red Sox made the most astounding
comeback in baseball history, roaring back from a 3-to-0
deficit against the mighty New York Yankees with four
straight victories, then immediately beating the even
mightier St. Louis Cardinals in four straight. After 86
years of frustration, history owed the Sox a miracle.
Even their own fielding blunders couldn't stop them.
Humor in Chesterton
(pages 3-4)
We're always being told that laughter is good for us
-- good for our mental and even physical health, as if
humor were a drug to be prescribed, like Prozac. Comedy
has actually become a sort of separate industry, with its
own cable television network. Apparently humor has become
a thing so distinct from the rest of American life that
it has to be bottled, so that we can make time for it in
our schedules.
To my mind, humor has always seemed inseparable from
sanity itself, something built into our sense of reality
rather than superadded to it. God made things funny. He
made us to laugh as well as to reason. That is part of
what it means to be made in God's image. Only creatures
with lungs and immortal souls can laugh.
My favorite controversialist, G.K. Chesterton
(1874-1936), is known as a great humorist (as well as a
man of letters and Catholic apologist). But unlike most
humorists, he never seems, to me at least, to be trying
to be merely funny; he is trying to tell the truth as
robustly and vividly as possible. In a way, his
seriousness of purpose is what gives his humor its power.
His jests (why, by the way, has this fine old word fallen
into disuse?) demand thought; they also reward it richly.
He brings a joyous spirit of sport to religious debate.
His most serious writing on the most sacred subjects
can be, without warning, explosively funny. In ORTHODOXY,
his great defense of Christianity, he suddenly says of a
well-meaning socialist, "Mr. Blatchford is not only an
early Christian. He is the only early Christian who ought
really to be eaten by lions."
Even Mr. Blatchford must have roared at that. This
is one trait of Chesterton's humor: his lack of malice.
He rarely attacks; you almost feel that his jokes are
chiefly intended to amuse his targets, to share with them
his own amusement, not to isolate them from his other
readers. His humor even seems a form of charity. One of
his favorite targets was Bernard Shaw; it's typical of
both of them that they were always warm friends.
Chesterton's orthodoxy has worn better than Shaw's
"progressive" views, which have become banal. Their
friendly rivalry was portentous; by now Shaw's supposedly
advanced opinions, on everything from eugenics to free
love to socialism, have been tried, with baneful or
disastrous results; whereas Chesterton's Catholic views,
though vindicated by time, remain unfashionable. He
genially defended most of the ancient things Shaw
satirized. (He once quipped that birth control involves
neither birth nor control; and even Shaw might have
qualms about schools handing out condoms to children.)
Chesterton isn't above a joke for its own sake, of
course; some readers find his wordplay tedious. I must
say that there are times when he loses me; he can be not
only tedious but, I'm afraid, quite obscure, and I don't
know whether he's writing mysticism beyond my
comprehension or mere nonsense. I prefer to think I
haven't yet reached his depths.
But for the most part, his wit is aimed at making us
recognize truth in a way that logical argument alone
can't do. He is a greater master of the English epigram
than Oscar Wilde himself, because his witticisms are so
much more profound and prophetic than Wilde's. Not all of
them are funny; some of them sum up deep reflection: "The
old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke
the future." He said that more than a century ago, and it
will serve as a remarkably accurate prediction of
twentieth-century history.
The recent eruption of jingoism in this country
recalls Chesterton's great observation, "The real
American is all right. It is the ideal American who is
all wrong." He abounds, almost dizzyingly, in such
remarks: "In one point I do certainly think that
Victorian Bowdlerism did pure harm. This is the simple
point that, nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the
word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word
that excuses it." Again: "The morality of a great writer
is not the morality he teaches, but the morality he takes
for granted." Long ago he noticed that "toleration ...
actually results in timidity. Religious liberty might be
supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss
religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is
allowed to mention it."
Probably no English writer since Shakespeare has
surpassed Chesterton's gift for condensed expression. As
with Shakespeare, it's tempting to quote him incessantly,
since nothing you say about him can rival his own
eloquence: "For under the smooth legal surface of our
society there are already moving very lawless things. We
are always near the breaking-point when we care only for
what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we
have a moral principle about such delicate matters as
marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter
of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard
cases that everything will go soft." Only Chesterton
could have topped "a welter of exceptions with no rules"
with a brilliant pun.
Chesterton's incredibly fertile humor is as
inseparable from his style as his syntax. It's essential
to his total tone. He is always alive to the latent
comedy of a situation, the incongruity of his opponents'
positions, the self-contradictions of false philosophies.
For him, error is not only wrong, it's uproarious. If you
press it hard enough, its absurdity will inevitably be
revealed.
Truth itself begets humor. Chesterton himself
explains why, in his roundabout preface to THE PICKWICK
PAPERS: To the vulgar Bible-debunker, he says, it seems
preposterous to say that God created light before the
sun, that "the sun should be created before the
sunlight.... To many modern people it would sound like
saying that foliage existed before the first leaf; it
would sound like saying that childhood existed before a
baby was born."
To this Chesterton retorts with a "Platonic" reason:
"The idea existed before any of the machinery that made
manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need
of judges, and mercy existed before any man was
oppressed."
He then brilliantly attacks the "low priggish maxim"
that "a man should not laugh at his own jokes. But the
great artist not only laughs at his own jokes; he laughs
at his own jokes before he has made them. In the case of
a man really humorous we can see humor in his eye before
he has thought of any amusing words at all. So the
creative writer laughs at his comedy before he creates
it, and he has tears for his tragedy before he knows what
it is.... The last page comes before the first; before
his romance has begun, he knows that it has ended well.
He sees the wedding before the wooing; he sees the death
before the duel. But most of all he sees the color and
character of the whole story prior to any possible events
in it."
Such is Chesterton's defense of his beloved Dickens.
It also describes the way he himself brings a sense of
the ludicrous to every error he refutes. If it's wrong,
it must also be funny. Humor, like light, is inherent in
the nature of things.
He likewise defends Dickens against the charge of
having no taste: "[He] really had, in the strict and
serious sense, good taste. All real good taste is gusto
-- the power of appreciating the presence -- or the
absence -- of a particular and positive pleasure."
Chesterton has good taste to a superlative degree; an
almost universal gusto and gift for expressing his many
appreciations, with wit, imagery, lightning logic,
metaphor, analogy, puns, alliteration, inspired phrasing,
fresh twists on old sayings, and a good bit of sheer
whimsy. Writers are a notoriously jealous lot, but
probably no author has praised so many other authors as
generously as Chesterton has.
And who else would have had the subtlety to praise
Shaw this way: "With a fine strategic audacity he
attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted
as for what he prevented"? Every time I try to track down
a saying of Chesterton's I especially treasure, I find
myself distracted by dozens of others, equally fine.
"Most men now are not so much rushing to extremes as
sliding to extremes; and even reaching the most violent
extremes by being almost entirely passive." "If there
were no God, there would be no atheists." "The Catholic
Church is the only thing which saves a man from the
degraded slavery of being a child of his age."
Above all, Chesterton refused to be "a child of his
age." His humor was a mode of his detachment from the
modern world and its fashions. It's said that a mark of
the saints is their hilaritas, and in Chesterton's
inexhaustible hilarity we find something akin to
sanctity. He saw that error naturally leads to comic as
well as tragic extremes; he also saw where truth leads --
to health and holiness.
I close with two of Chesterton's most profound
remarks, which are stunning rather than amusing. One,
from ORTHODOXY, states the doctrine of the Incarnation
better than I've ever seen it stated outside Scripture:
"Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt
that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone
has felt that God, in order to be wholly God, must have
been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds,
Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the
Creator."
The other, from THE EVERLASTING MAN, makes short
work of the notion that Christ's words are outdated:
"Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that
the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time,
but are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how
suitable they were to his time is perhaps suggested in
the end of his story."
These are heart-stopping words. Only the greatest of
humorists could say things so witty, yet so far beyond
mere laughter. For Chesterton, humor points to something
that transcends mirth: the divine mystery itself.
Lincoln's Latest Defender
(pages 5-6)
Like the Confederacy, the Union cause still has its
die-hards. The issues at stake in the War Between the
States come up even today in the U.S. Supreme Court, with
Justice Clarence Thomas, of all people, reviving
arguments once made by Jefferson Davis.
Of the neo-Unionists I've read, the best by far is
Professor Daniel Farber, who teaches law at Berkeley and
the University of Minnesota. His recent book, LINCOLN'S
CONSTITUTION (Chicago), makes a strong but ultimately
flawed case against the right of states to withdraw from
the Union, as well as a weaker case that Lincoln acted
constitutionally in suppressing the South.
Secession and its suppression are separate issues,
and it's typical of Farber that he carefully keeps such
questions distinct in this learned, informative, valuable
book. He reminds us, for example, that President James
Buchanan, Lincoln's predecessor, thought both that
secession was unconstitutional and yet that the Union had
no constitutional authority to prevent it. The U.S.
Constitution is silent on the subject.
Lincoln tried to solve this problem by equating
secession with "insurrection," which Congress, in
Article I, Section 8, is authorized to "suppress." But
it's surely odd, as Farber sees, to say a state can
commit insurrection against a confederation by peacefully
withdrawing from it. Fort Sumter conveniently gave
Lincoln a pretext for claiming that the Southern
secessions amounted to violent rebellion (though most of
the secessions occurred long before Sumter was fired
upon).
May the Union invade the states? The Constitution
doesn't provide for it, and doesn't even contemplate it.
To the contrary, Article IV, Section 4 seems to imply
otherwise:
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in
this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall
protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application
of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the
Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic
Violence."
These words hardly suggest that the Union itself may
commit invasion; and, as Farber notes, the Southern
legislatures weren't about to invite Union troops in! In
his first inaugural address, Lincoln repeated his party
platform's condemnation of "the lawless invasion by armed
force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter
under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes."
Strong words -- but note the fatal word "lawless." Slick
Willie had nothing on Honest Abe.
Everything depends on whether the states were still
"sovereign," as the Articles of Confederation said
flatly, though the word was absent from the Constitution;
and if not, on whether the Union was authorized to use
force against them if they tried to withdraw. And
finally, there was the practical question of human cost:
was the prevention of secession worth the enormous
violence of the war?
Ignoring the Articles and other documents, Lincoln
insisted that the states had "never" been sovereign.
Hence, he had the right to "save the Union" by force,
though it meant making war on the Southern states. For
Lincoln, invading them wasn't "lawless" invasion, and he
didn't need an invitation. Nor did the bloodshed deter
him; he was willing to starve civilians in order to win,
if that was what it took.
Farber is much fairer than Lincoln was to the
arguments for secession. Delving deeply into sources with
which Lincoln was barely acquainted, he carefully weighs
the words of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, John Marshall, and others on both sides, showing
that the question of secession had divided even the
Founders of the American Republic. Many of those who
composed and favored the Constitution thought, or hoped,
it would mean the end of the state sovereignty proclaimed
in the Articles, but they rarely if ever said so
publicly. If they had, it's a cinch that ratification
would have failed. The pro-Constitution Federalists
tried, to the point of disingenuousness, to soothe
misgivings about the status of the states.
And so, as Farber says, "the precise nature of
sovereignty under the Constitution was never quite
specified." He examines the "complex and ambiguous"
question with subtlety and discrimination. But it's
surely significant that the anti-Federalists spoke
openly, even fiercely, about the topic, while the
Federalists kept a cagey silence about it.
"In the end," Farber writes, "one fact [about the
war] is crucial. It was the Confederacy that fired the
first shot." Here, for once, Farber is a bit obtuse. That
shot precipitated the war, but it didn't affect the
principles involved, except to confuse them in the minds
of passionate men. If the states had the right to secede,
they had the right to drive Union troops out of their
territories; but if not, not.
When all is said, the states were =states,= not
provinces. The very word implies sovereignty, just as a
confederation implies voluntary association. As Jefferson
Davis would argue, sovereignty couldn't be surrendered by
mere implication. So profound a change in the status of
the states -- essentially, the abolition of their very
statehood -- would have had to be spelled out, and it
wasn't. Farber makes a plausible case against the "exit
option," as he calls it, but he fails to surmount the
historical facts.
Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution had
argued vehemently that its adoption could lead only to
"consolidated" government and the destruction of the
states' independence. Though this is just what finally
happened, they didn't contend that the Constitution
itself destroyed state sovereignty; only that this would
be its natural consequence. State sovereignty might
formally survive for a while, but not for long. So even
the Constitution's most fervent opponents didn't accuse
the document itself of =abrogating= state sovereignty,
even if that would be its result. "If given their full
scope, the anti-Federalists realized, these [new Federal]
powers might well eclipse any real sovereignty on the
part of the states," as Farber puts it.
Farber recognizes that Lincoln took liberties with
the Constitution -- assuming the authority not only to
invade states, but to defy court orders, to suspend
habeas corpus, to raise an army, to close newspapers, and
more, all without consulting Congress -- but he finds
most of these steps justified by circumstances; and
besides, as he points out, Congress finally ratified most
of them. This won't do. The fact remains that Lincoln
violated the Constitution he was sworn to uphold (his
oath of office says nothing about "saving the Union") and
usurped powers of Congress. The fact that Congress
(which, after the Democrats left, was a Republican
Congress) later went along with him is no excuse for what
he did.
Granting that Lincoln faced an unprecedented crisis,
if so many unconstitutional measures were necessary to
"save" the Constitution, that fact is itself strong
evidence that Lincoln was wrong. It seems unlikely on its
face that he could have been right as often as Farber
(let alone his more rabid defenders) says he was. Lincoln
was a brilliant courtroom lawyer and a rhetorician of
genius, but his knowledge of constitutional law and
history was thin; he apparently never even read THE
FEDERALIST PAPERS! It's not necessarily wrong to claim
implied powers from those specifically granted in the
Constitution; but most of those Lincoln asserted were
derived from a power =not= granted -- the power to "save"
the Union from secession. When supposedly "implied"
powers collide with the text, it's time to retrace one's
steps; which Lincoln didn't do. And Farber never
challenges Lincoln's repeated assertion that secession
would "destroy" (rather than merely diminish) the Union.
Farber admits that Lincoln's assaults on free speech
and the press are hard to defend (though he thinks they
did little real harm) but he fails to mention some of
Lincoln's most flagrantly illegal acts. Imposing military
governments on defeated Southern states is impossible to
square with "guarantee[ing] to every State ... a
Republican Form of Government." Moreover, Lincoln ordered
the arrests of dozens of elected officials in Maryland,
including the mayor of Baltimore and dozens of
legislators, then used Union troops to prevent suspected
secessionists from voting in the next election! This in a
war to ensure "a new birth of freedom" and to make sure
self-government wouldn't "perish from the earth."
What about the total horror of the war? Positing
Lincoln's duty to save the Union by crushing secession,
Farber excuses him on grounds that he had no way of
knowing how bloody the war would get. But by the end of
1861 it was clear that both sides had been wrong to
expect a short, easy war. It was going to be a long,
bitter one, and it was going to be fought almost entirely
in the South. Lincoln absurdly said that the South was
trying to "conquer" the North, a physical impossibility.
True, the South fired the first shot; but it fired it,
after all, in South Carolina.
Finally, the simplest prima facie evidence that
Lincoln was wrong is the Union today. A Federal
Government that spends, and runs up debt, in the
trillions of dollars would have made even Hamilton
swallow hard. (We may doubt whether any of the Founders
ever had occasion to use the word "trillion," or even
"billion," in his entire life.) The unlimited,
uncontrolled, centralized, and consolidated state the
anti-Federalists feared has come to pass. It grabs new
powers at whim, rarely bothering to ask whether these
have constitutional warrant.
LINCOLN'S CONSTITUTION is a better book than Lincoln
deserves. Farber generously gives his half-educated views
too much credit. Apart from the moral and material harm
of his war, Lincoln's fancied "implied" powers have
proven a terrible precedent for asserting countless legal
powers where, in fact, none exist. Lincoln's
constitutional heresies have become a national way of
life. When a handful of enumerated powers wind up
generating an infinite number of "implied" powers, the
text becomes a dead letter.
NUGGETS
THE OTHER WAR ON TERROR: The death of Yassir Arafat
leaves Ariel Sharon without a scapegoat for the violent
resistance his ruthless oppression of Palestinians has
provoked. Come to think of it, Arafat was for Sharon what
Saddam Hussein was for Bush, and Sharon too can be
expected to carry on his war without his original
villain. He'll just have to find someone else to blame.
(page 7)
WINDOWS FOR DUMMIES: Saying that society can't exist
without government is like saying that society depends on
robbery. This is Bastiat's famous broken-window fallacy
writ large: the notion that breaking windows "stimulates"
the glass trade, and that destruction therefore produces
wealth. We may as well ask, If it weren't for government,
who would break the windows? (page 9)
TOUGH LUCK: Scott Peterson is now the first American in a
generation to be convicted for killing an unborn chlld.
(page 11)
Exclusive to electronic media:
EXIT: Conservatives are rejoicing at Dan Rather's
retirement as CBS NEWS's anchor man, especially since it
comes on the heels of his phony expose of President
Bush's evasion of National Guard service. Personally,
I've never thought of Rather as much of a journalist.
When has he ever broken a major story we'd otherwise have
missed? His first "scoop" was the JFK assassination,
which we might have heard about without him. Ironically,
the fatal Bush story only underlines his incompetence as
a reporter. Sad that his long career should end this way.
AT YOUR SERVICE: Why do people talk as if governments
originate in the need for public services, and only
impose taxes as an afterthought? Taking their subjects'
money is the =only= thing =all= governments of every form
do, and have always done. Taking wealth by force --
taxes, duties, levies, tributes, tariffs, excises, et
cetera -- is the defining act of the state and its
raison d'etre. If it didn't tax, it couldn't exist.
WE THE PARADIGM: American security, we are told, requires
the adoption of American-style democracy, not only in
Iraq, but in Ukraine -- and, apparently, just about
everywhere else too. We're never told just why, or what
the limits are. Even Woodrow Wilson might rub his eyes at
this notion.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* "You Can't Mean It!" (October 28, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041028.shtml
* The Party of Abnormality (November 4, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041104.shtml
* Are You "Ready"? (November 9, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041109.shtml
* Tolerance and Progress (November 16, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041116.shtml
* Journalism and Patriotism (November 18, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041118.shtml
* Let the Blue States Go! (November 23, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/041123.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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