SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
April 2005
Volume 12, Number 4
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Schiavo Case
-> The Moving Picture (plus electronic Exclusives)
-> Improving on the Gospels
-> John 6 and Persecution
-> Studying the Tribe
Nuggets
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
The Schiavo Case
(page 1)
The plight of Terri Schiavo, ignored for many years
by the news media, exploded into national attention only
when it was almost too late to save her. As President
Bush and Congress tried to intervene with emergency
legislation, the entire judicial system united against
her to the end. The media parroted the line that she was
in "a persistent vegetative state," ignoring evidence
that this was untrue, that she responded, even vocally,
to the presence of her mother, and that her condition had
been brought on by unexplained traumas that left her with
broken bones. No wonder the public overwhelmingly
supported her husband, despite his compromised position,
implausible story, and strange behavior.
The Florida judge in the case consistently ruled in
favor of her husband. In the talk-show debates, that
phrase "persistent vegetative state" was repeated ad
nauseam, though nobody really knew how much she was aware
of, or whether she felt pain. At any rate, her physical
survival wasn't endangered by her condition; her life
could have been prolonged indefinitely, as long as she
received medical care -- and food and water.
My first thought is that our legal system must be
seriously askew if a woman's life, however tenuous, can
be placed at the mercy of her worst enemy -- the
estranged husband who evidently wanted her dead. Michael
Schiavo has a girlfriend by whom he has already fathered
two children. It would be presuming a lot to suppose
that, under the circumstances, he could be either
sympathetic or even impartial toward his disabled wife.
Such an obvious interest would disqualify him as a juror
if she had been on trial for her life.
Husbands, after all, are sometimes less than
solicitous for their wives' welfare. In recent times
we've been reminded of this grim truth by the cases of
O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake, and Scott Peterson, to
mention a few examples. Imagine asking such men to decide
whether, say, the lives of their comatose wives should be
prolonged.
You don't have to read the tabloids to realize that
conjugal love often proves far from unconditional.
Wedding ceremonies may include the words "till death do
you part," but until now it has been assumed that this
formula doesn't and probably shouldn't mean "until one of
you pulls the plug on the other."
Hard cases make bad law, but was this case really
all that hard? The decision didn't seem to be terribly
hard for Michael Schiavo, who refused an offer of a
million dollars to spare his wife. Meanwhile, Terri
Schiavo's parents wanted her to live, showing that
parental love usually is unconditional, even when
children become inconvenient. For one thing, parents
don't "cheat" on their children by, say, abandoning them
for other children.
Sometimes agonizing decisions must be made,
including the decision to end life-preserving care. But
in that case, it should be made by someone whose motives
aren't in doubt, whose love for the patient is assured,
and who stands to gain nothing from the patient's death.
Terri Schiavo's parents seemed to meet that standard. Her
adulterous husband didn't.
The Moving Picture
(page 2)
{{ EMPHASIS IS INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS"
SIGNS AROUND THE EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}
Teresa Wright has died at 86. Don't remember her?
She was the eternally believable good girl of such
memorable movies as MRS. MINIVER, PRIDE OF THE YANKEES,
Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT, and William Wyler's BEST
YEARS OF OUR LIVES. I still have a crush on her; they
don't make 'em like her anymore. I can't even picture her
in jeans, on a cell phone, with her belly button showing.
In fact, her studio finally fired her for refusing to
pose in swimsuits.
* * *
Condi versus Hillary in 2008? Maybe not. The
secretary of state has disclaimed flickering speculation
that she harbors presidential ambitions. Along the way,
it transpired that she favors legal abortion. She also
has tacky taste in clothes. Perhaps all is for the best.
But we're still waiting for Hillary to drop out of the
race.
* * *
Father Richard McBrien, head of Notre Dame's
theology department and as solid a Unitarian as you'll
find anywhere, says he thinks Christ's divinity would be
uncompromised by marriage (as in THE DA VINCI CODE). He
even suggests that he finds the idea appealing, because
it challenges the Church's traditional negative attitude
toward human sexuality, et cetera. (as exemplified,
presumably, by the teaching of the Virgin Birth). Ironic,
isn't it, that "Notre Dame" means "Our Lady."
* * *
Robert Blake, the has-been actor, has been
acquitted of shooting his wife in the head, though it's
rather glaringly obvious that he, well, shot his wife in
the head. The verdict makes O.J. Simpson's acquittal
seem, by comparison, like poetic justice. But then,
considering Mrs. Blake's character, the murder itself
seems like poetic justice. Maybe the jury was just trying
to even the whole mess out. Hey, it's California!
* * *
Speaking of crime, the following sentence was
uttered in a news report of a big shooting spree (in
Wisconsin, not California): "The alleged gunman then
turned the weapon on himself." Talk about careful
phrasing! We mustn't jump to the conclusion that the guy
who shot himself was the same guy who'd just shot a dozen
other people in the room.
* * *
Obesity, the Propaganda Machine assures us, is a
"national problem," even an approaching "crisis"! What,
are all the fat people going to collapse at once? Why,
then, let's have some Federal legislation! There's
apparently no such thing as a personal problem anymore.
In fact, some obese people don't think they have a
"problem" at all. As if it were up to them to decide.
Dream on, fatso.
* * *
Terry Schiavo is dead. Her parents, Florida's
governor and legislature, and countless well-wishers
wanted her to live. But the courts ruled that her life
was at the mercy of her worst enemy, her estranged
husband, who now lives with another woman and who had
even refused an offer of a million dollars to spare
Terry's life. So someone -- we don't know who --
obediently disconnected her feeding tube, escaping all
legal responsibility and public notice because he or she
was obeying the relevant authority of the state.
Exclusive to electronic media:
Odd, isn't it, this modern fascination with politics
and "public service"? A man who runs for office is, after
all, "promising" to make new laws, to create even more
new and arbitrary legal obligations for everyone. At what
point will we -- or rather, =did= we -- have =enough=
laws? Why is making new ones still thought of as an
achievement, or a form of production? Just asking.
Improving on the Gospels
(pages 3-4)
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THE DA VINCI CODE, by Dan Brown, published by
Doubleday, is easily the most successful novel in years,
and in some respects it deserves to be. After more than a
year it remains high on the bestseller lists. It's a
brilliant thriller that ingeniously blends fiction,
history, and occult pseudo-history. Its target is the
Catholic Church. Despite my antipathy to its premises, I
couldn't stop reading it.
The story begins with a murder in Paris. Jacques
Sauniere, curator of the Louvre, is shot in the museum
after hours -- by (as we soon learn) a deranged albino
acting on orders of a priest of Opus Dei. Before he dies,
Sauniere manages to leave a coded message, in his own
blood, for the American academic he was supposed to have
met that night.
That academic, Robert Langdon, a renowned Harvard
professor of symbology, manages to decode the message,
solve the murder, and elude the police, who suspect him
as the killer. In all this he is assisted by a brilliant
young Frenchwoman, Sophie Neveu, a gifted cryptographer,
who turns out to be Sauniere's granddaughter and has some
interesting family secrets.
The mystery of Sauniere's killing leads Langdon and
Sophie to retrace the secret history of Christianity.
They enlist the help of an eccentric English scholar, Sir
Leigh Teabing, who fills in the historical blanks and
takes his own crucial role in the unfolding action. He
finally gives THE DA VINCI CODE its most stunning plot
twist, a stroke of dramatic genius.
According to Teabing -- and Brown, by implication --
Jesus Christ was a mere human whose divinity was first
proclaimed by the Emperor Constantine nearly three
centuries after his death. Jesus had married Mary
Magdalene and had a daughter by her, born in France,
where she fled after the {{ Crucifixion, when she was no
longer safe in the Holy Land; Peter and the other male
leaders of the Church had it in for her. }}
Brown doesn't even pretend there's hard evidence for
this, except some Gnostic gospels (and the Dead Sea
Scrolls, which in fact are pre-Christian documents that
say nothing about Jesus); but the early Church,
male-dominated and misogynist, would have covered up the
marriage if it had happened; therefore we can assume it
did happen. The fact that no records confirm Teabing's
(and Brown's) version proves that the records were
destroyed. Teabing even says that the Holy Grail was not
the cup passed at the Last Supper, but Magdalene herself
-- the "vessel" of Jesus' bloodline. (The Crusades were a
long quest to find, and destroy, information about the
line of Jesus and Magdalene.)
For a world-famous expert on Christian history,
Teabing commits a lot of basic factual blunders. Nor does
he explain why the testimony of other documents should be
preferred to the four Gospels accepted as authentic by
early Christians.
The descendants of Jesus and Magdalene, as Teabing
(Brown's mouthpiece) tells it, eventually begot a royal
line in France, but the Church had managed to conceal
these facts from all but a few. These few initiates
included a secret society called the Priory of Sion,
whose members, over the centuries, included early
Gnostics, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Botticelli, Jean
Cocteau, and Leonardo da Vinci; Langdon learns that
Sauniere had belonged too. Teabing and Langdon (speaking
for Brown, of course) assert that Leonardo's ostensibly
orthodox religious paintings subtly affirm his occult
beliefs -- hence, the "Da Vinci code."
Brown's fiction is thus based on an entire
alternative "history," derived from other popular
authors, which he means the reader to take seriously.
Among other things, Brown expects us to believe that
Constantine originated the idea that Christ was divine,
in spite of the New Testament, the early Church, the
writings and teachings of the Church Fathers, the
martyrs, and so on. He also tells us that early
Christians worshipped goddesses until the Church stopped
the practice and suppressed alternative gospels that told
the truth; in fact, the Church was so hostile to all
things female that it blamed Eve for the Fall of Man,
restricted priesthood to men, and, in the late Middle
Ages, burned =five million= women as witches. In our own
time, Brown has "Cardinal" Josemaria Escriva (he was
actually a monsignor) founding Opus Dei, which Brown has
plotting murders to protect the Church's ancient and
guilty secrets.
All this is so batty it's hard to know where to
start refuting it. Books have already been published
refuting Brown's "history," which he claims has been
solidly researched. Even two authors of his dubious
sources, one of them the real-life model for Teabing, are
suing him for plagiarism and charging that he has
misrepresented their work. Some of his falsehoods are
obvious and baseless, but there are enough partial truths
to make the whole business confusing.
There really was a Priory of Sion; in fact three
distinct groups took that name at various times; but none
of them was devoted to the weird doctrines Brown alleges.
And of course there was a real Leonardo da Vinci, who may
have had his heterodox moments; but he apparently died a
devout Catholic, and his paintings don't bear the occult
meanings Brown professes to see in them. For that matter,
there really was an Emperor Constantine, an early Church,
a Jesus ... but why go on?
Brown's human Jesus interests us only because the
divine Jesus of the Gospels interests us. If Brown's were
the real Jesus, there would be no such religion as
Christianity; his early death would have been a merely
unfortunate interruption of a promising career, like
Mozart's, rather than the event that gave his whole life
its point -- the culmination of all his works, words,
miracles, teachings, parables, and predictions. Why would
anyone have bothered crucifying such an ordinary,
inoffensive man? Why would his message -- reduced to "Be
nice to other people" -- have upset either Roman or
Jewish authorities? Why would martyrs have died to bear
witness to him?
And why would a huge church spring up to honor him?
Why, in particular, would it have taken pains to conceal
his true -- and rather pointless -- story? How could it
have managed to fool nearly everyone for two millennia?
And if the church survived that long, would it still be
in conscious possession of those "facts"? Was the Pope,
in his last hours, still keeping the secrets Brown
insists he was privy to? Is Catholicism a huge conspiracy
to prevent us from learning those secrets?
If Brown is right, you might think someone along the
way -- a frisky Arian bishop, perhaps -- would have
spilled these explosive beans. Or we might have heard
from embittered survivors of some of those five million
unlucky women. Keeping sensational secrets just isn't
that easy, even for a large and powerful Catholic Church.
Brown's unbelief requires us to believe too many
improbable things. His Catholic Church, even today, seems
to exist for the sole purpose of hiding its own origins.
The enormous success of THE DA VINCI CODE reminds us
how far some people -- millions, in fact -- will go in
order to reject Catholicism. Rather than believe that a
man rose from the dead, they will be willing to believe
that the Church has possessed near-miraculous powers of
deceit and concealment. If you're distressed about the
decline of Catholicism in France, Brown will reassure
you: it seems that the Parisian police are headed by a
crafty Vatican agent (who wears a telltale cross that
Langdon, ever alert to symbolism, notices). Able to see
Catholicism only as a racket, Brown isn't the least bit
interested in its spiritual life. {{ In fact he shows no
interest in any religious truth or experience, except
insofar as religion produces fanatics like the albino who
murders Sauniere. Christian teachings are mere
abstractions, used by cynical men, that make no real
difference to the world. }}
It isn't just that Brown is ignorant of some of the
plainest facts of history; he simply can't imagine why
anyone should care about any religion. One is as good as
another, though Christianity is worse than the
goddess-worship it supplanted. No soul is at stake.
Believe what you like.
I once knew a woman who had been raised and educated
as a Catholic but later joined the Mormon Church. I asked
her why she had converted, and she told me how helpful
Mormons had been to her and which Mormon doctrines she
"liked." I said nothing, but these struck me as arbitrary
reasons for adopting a religion. Later I came to see that
many Catholics remain in the Church for no better reasons
than these; the idea that a religion can actually be true
or false -- or that it matters, either way -- simply
never occurs to them. Believe what you like.
Brown, obviously an intelligent man, simply can't
conceive of religion offering a compelling and universal
truth, or at least of seeming to. The albino killer has
become a Catholic out of mere gratitude to an Opus Dei
priest who has rescued him from a wretched life;
well-to-do people like Langdon and Sophie have no
spiritual needs, and they examine religions in the manner
of people looking for possible hobbies.
Brown treats Jesus' impact on the world as a given;
but he never asks whether that impact would have been
possible if Jesus were the merely human figure he assumes
him to have been. And wouldn't his widow Magdalene have
had something illuminating to say about him? Wouldn't her
intimate knowledge of him have thrown new light on his
message? Wouldn't she have been privy to thoughts and
sayings unrecorded in the four putatively misleading
Gospels?
Such questions never occur to Brown, though his
story makes them unavoidable. If the Church has given the
world only the partial truth, what is the whole truth?
Brown has written an immensely entertaining tale, but as
an improvement on the New Testament, it leaves something
to be desired.
John 6 and Persecution
(page 5)
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Dan Brown's head-spinning "history" of the early
Church is an offshoot of certain academic fads. These
range from the long (and continuing) search for a
"historical" Jesus behind the Jesus of the Gospels to the
feminist campaign to revive Gnosticism, with the claim
that the early Christians were Gnostics. According to
this line of thinking, we can start with the assumption
that the canonical Gospels represent the Church's
distortion and suppression of the true facts, while
adding bogus supernatural details -- miracles, and all
that.
Luke Timothy Johnson, a former priest and monk who
teaches at Emory University, begs to differ. In THE REAL
JESUS (HarperCollins) -- pugnaciously subtitled THE
MISGUIDED QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE TRUTH OF
THE TRADITIONAL GOSPELS -- he argues that to use the four
Gospels as historical documents is to abuse {{ them,
whether your agenda is "higher" criticism or
fundamentalism. }} They aren't interested in literal
factual accuracy, but in bearing witness to Christ. The
methods of historical investigation -- and history is no
more than a method of inquiry -- can never prove them
true or false.
{{ But this doesn't mean that they are "fictions."
either. }} It means that we must read them in the spirit
in which they are written. In fact, they are trustworthy
records of what early Christians believed.
How can we know this? Johnson draws heavily on the
earliest Christian documents: the Epistles of St. Paul.
In writing to the Roman Christians, whom he had not yet
met, Paul assumes that his readers know and accept the
Gospel story, in which the central event is the
Resurrection. Indeed =all= the Epistles, not just Paul's,
support the Gospels. Johnson shows that {{ such
historicist critics, as John Crossan, Elaine Pagels, and
the Jesus Seminar, }} eager to debunk Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John, have given little or no weight to the
testimony of the Epistles; by contrast, they are always
ready to credit such dubious sources as the Dead Sea
Scrolls of the pre-Christian Essene sect and various
apocryphal gospels, many of whose "facts" are simply
outlandish. The historical method has been applied with
considerable madness. No wonder it has produced no solid
or uniform results; each historicist critic has adopted
the materials that suit his own taste, and "constructed,"
as Johnson puts it, his own {{ Jesus stripped of
divinity. }}
The four Gospels show a supernatural Jesus, but they
don't show him always finding easy assent among his own
disciples. He repeatedly rebukes their lack of faith. In
the sixth chapter of John's Gospel, he has just fed a
crowd of five thousand with five loaves and two fishes,
when he twice announces, "I am the bread of life." Lest
they assume this to be a merely figurative saying
{{ (like "I am the good shepherd") }} he explains it in
shockingly literal terms: "I am the living bread that has
come down from heaven.... Unless you eat the flesh of the
Son of Man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life
in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has life
everlasting and I will raise him up on the last day. For
my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He
who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I
in him."
The evangelist tells us that many of the disciples
left him at this point, muttering, "This is a hard
saying; who can listen to it?" It sounds as if Christ
lost most of his following {{ (maybe nearly all of it) }}
at this moment, for he asked the Twelve, "Do you want to
leave me too?" In retrospect we can see that he was
announcing the Eucharist, which he would institute on the
eve of his death: "This is my body ... This is my
blood.... Do this in memory of me." It seems strange to
deny that he meant those words literally at this most
solemn moment with his closest followers.
In his first letter to the Corinthians (chapters 10
and 11), Paul emphasizes that communicants are sharing in
the Blood and Body of Christ, and that those who do so
unworthily are eating and drinking "judgment" --
damnation -- to themselves. He could hardly say this if
the Christians believed they were consuming only bread
and wine, mere =symbols= of Christ's Body and Blood. Here
again the epistles illuminate the early Christians'
understanding of the canonical Gospels.
In a perverse way, the doctrine of the Eucharist is
further confirmed by one of the earliest slanders against
the Church: that its members practiced cannibalism! One
can see how its enemies might distort the Communion meal
into this lie in order to egg on persecution.
But how do the Church's modern debunkers explain it?
It appears that the Christians weren't persecuted for
holding the Gnostic, Essene, feminist, or other
enlightened views the debunkers say they held, but for
holding something like Catholic views. The facts are
pretty obscure by now, but somehow I doubt that the
Romans, so tolerant of most eccentric religions, would
have cracked down so hard on Gnostics.
Studying the Tribe
(page 6)
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Kevin MacDonald, of California State University at
Long Beach, has written a learned trilogy on what he
calls "Judaism as an evolutionary strategy," analyzing
Jewish conduct through the ages, right up to the present.
Most recently he has written three penetrating essays in
THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY, one of them "Neoconservatism as
a Jewish Movement"; it shows the movement's roots in the
Trotskyite Jewish left of yore, as well as its ancient
roots in Jewish tribalism. {{ It's a fascinating
dynamic. }}
You can't read MacDonald's work, either the imposing
trilogy or his shorter essays, without feeling that such
a study of Jewish influence is long overdue. He isn't
accusatory; he's quite attentive to strategic differences
that have divided the Jews themselves. But he does make
it clear that the extreme elements among them have always
had advantages over the others. Hence, for example, Ariel
Sharon's ruthless Likud coalition has muscled out the
Labor Party in Israel, with vigorous support from
erstwhile "moderate" Jewish organizations in the
Diaspora. Not long ago, those organizations appeared
firmly in the Labor camp; but MacDonald explains how
seemingly unpredictable alignments arise from Jewish
culture. We shouldn't have been surprised.
One quibble. I'm allergic to the word
"evolutionary"; the pattern seems to me quite conscious
and intelligent, and indeed everything MacDonald adduces
confirms this: the cunning combination of group
self-interest with pseudo-universalist rhetoric (liberal,
conservative, Marxist, democratic, patriotic, et cetera)
designed to fool outsiders; the long and vengeful
historical memory; the use of guilt and victimhood for
advantage; the severe measures of group self-discipline.
Neoconservatism is just a new application of some very
old tactics. MacDonald is telling in great detail and
depth what a few brave Jews -- such as the late Israel
Shahak and, today, Israel Shamir -- have tried to tell us
from inside the fanatical world of Zionism.
MacDonald's reward for his labors has been
predictable. He has been smeared as anti-Semitic, and
some Jews have tried to get him fired from his university
and ostracized in academia. Even to describe and analyze
organized Jewish behavior, however objectively, is to be
an enemy deserving destruction. Accurately quoting Jewish
sources themselves, from the Talmud to recent
publications, only makes the offense worse!
Everyone knows this is a subject protected by
profound taboos; indeed the mere mention of those taboos
is an offense. The taboos themselves, in other words,
force us to pretend that there are no taboos, as
MacDonald has found. The relevant Jewish powers -- the
Tribe, as I call them (to distinguish them from
independent Jews) -- insist that they favor complete
freedom of speech, and woe to him who says otherwise. In
fact it's not always wise to observe that those powers
exist, even though politicians, journalists, churchmen,
and other influential people constantly kowtow to them.
No other topic requires such mental and verbal
contortions in order to avoid ugly, and damaging,
accusations. The Tribe resists being studied, especially
by those who are wary of it. Even wariness is
anti-Semitic, you know -- though the Tribe wants to be
feared. It's striking how freely the Christian Right can
be discussed in public, while Jewish power may be alluded
to only in euphemisms. The difference is especially
startling when you consider the relative numbers of
Christians and Jews.
The rules of this game are head-spinning. Kafka and
Orwell might have collaborated on them. Except, of
course, that they're unwritten, and must remain so. Just
as the Talmud says that no gentile may study the Law, to
formulate the rules is to violate them. You can't win.
Not if you're a gentile, anyway. That's really the whole
point of the game. No wonder the Tribe is winning.
{{ If you're so much as accused of anti-Semitism,
you lose. And what's the penalty for making false charges
of anti-Semitism? There is none. There is no such thing
as a false charge of it; to be accused is to be guilty.
If nothing else, you're guilty of having been accused.
{{ The neoconservatives have used, without
compunction, every trick in their very old book to defeat
and destroy the few traditional conservatives who have
resisted their takeover of what is still called the
"conservative movement." After accusing his own dead
father of anti-Semitism, Bill Buckley virtually deeded
the whole movement over to the neocons.
{{ Zionist power has long controlled the American
Congress. Today the neocons have gained nearly total
control of the executive branch too. After all, the
United States is fighting Israel's enemies, and may soon
be fighting two more: Syria and Iran. }}
The neocons have succeeded almost too well: Their
success has gotten them more media attention than they
probably wanted -- much of it critical, in a guarded
(given the taboos) way. More and more Americans now know
what a "neocon" is and don't need MacDonald to tell them
that the neocons are a specifically Jewish and Zionist
movement. {{ (Some of my old friends in the Midwest are a
lot less naive about this than they used to be.) }}
Some neocons, uneasy at their recent exposure, have
in effect tried to go underground: They deny that there's
even such a thing as a "neoconservative." The word, they
say, is an anti-Semitic code word for "Jew." Have they
already forgotten that it was once their own code word?
NUGGETS
THE MAN FOR THE JOB: President Bush has named Paul
Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. Wolfowitz's
qualifications are that he is a neocon hawk and
reportedly has a bank account. (page 8)
BASEBALL, RIP: Spring is here, and baseball has come back
to Washington, D.C., in more ways than one: The city
again has a major-league baseball team and Congress has
held hearings on steroid abuse. It's clear that all the
slugging records of recent years are highly dubious, and
the sport will never be the same. Sad news on the heels
of one of its most thrilling moments: the amazing victory
of the Boston Red Sox in last fall's playoffs and World
Series. (page 9)
FAREWELL: George Kennan has died at 101. Best known as
"Mr. X," the author of the containment doctrine of Cold
War, he insisted he'd been misunderstood. Be that as it
may, he wrote trenchantly about geopolitics and
diplomacy, and he had a healthy reactionary streak that
would have shocked his liberal admirers. (page 10)
PLAYING GAMES: An indignant congressman has given us an
interestingly mixed metaphor, calling one controversial
subject "a pawn in a political football game." As far as
I'm concerned, anyone who uses pawns in a football game
is nothing but a sissy. (page 11)
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* Justifying War (March 1, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050301.shtml
* Our Divine Tribunal (March 3, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050303.shtml
* English Usage, Old and New (March 8, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050308.shtml
* Bastiat and "Organized Plunder" (March 10, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050310.shtml
* Kramer versus Coherence (March 15, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050315.shtml
* The Vatican Cover-Up (March 17, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050317.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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