SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month

July 2006
Volume 13, Number 7

Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
  -> Fear of the Smear
  -> The Babe's Edge
  -> The Da Vinci Gospel
The Sobran Forum
  -> Counterweight to Dogma, by Nona Aguilar
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
"Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue



FEATURES

{{ MATERIAL DROPPED OR CHANGED SOLELY FOR REASONS OF 
SPACE APPEARS IN DOUBLE CURLY BRACKETS. EMPHASIS IS 
INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS" SIGNS AROUND THE 
EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}

Fear of the Smear
(pages 1, 4)

     {{ As you probably already know, Israel is the only 
"democracy" dedicated to the proposition that all men 
sure as hell aren't created equal. }}

     More than sixty years after Hitler's death, this 
seems to be the golden age of anti-Semitism, judging by 
the frequency with which the charge is made. 
{{ Apparently "anti-Semitism" was the first word Abe 
Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, and the neoconservatives learned 
to pronounce right after "mama" and "dada." }} An 
anti-Semite used to be a guy who hated Jews; now he's a 
guy whom Jews hate.

     All right, that's too simple. But you see the point. 
Calling someone that name is, nowadays, the easiest way 
to do him a bit of no good. It's almost never applied to 
people who have actually harmed Jews, or urged others to 
harm them; it's used for those who commit Thoughtcrimes 
against the Jewish state. Like "racism," its use has 
widened as the actual evil has receded. The fewer racial 
lynchings we have, the more we hear about racism.

     The charge of anti-Semitism doesn't have to be 
proved; and it can't be =dis=proved. It's an assertion 
about motives, not actions. That's the beauty of it: its 
unfalsifiability. Joe McCarthy was ruined for calling too 
many people Communists, even card-carrying Reds; but has 
Norman Podhoretz paid any penalty for calling too many 
people anti-Semites?

     Any number can play, including gentiles. Taki was 
accused by his Catholic publisher. My fate was crueler: I 
was =defended= by mine. Bill Buckley denied that I was 
anti-Semitic, but wrote a sentence, or a chapter (with 
Bill, the difference may be unclear), adding that though 
I was innocent of the crime, I somehow deserved to be 
falsely accused of it. That was a little like saying, 
"True, he was a guard at Auschwitz, but let's give him 
credit: he always showed up for duty on time." Thanks, 
Bill!

     Even when an innocent man is falsely accused, you 
see, he is still guilty of ... of ... well, of =having 
been accused.= The charge itself is its own proof! Orwell 
and Kafka would understand. So would Stalin.

     Most people don't really care whether the charge is 
true anyway. To them, the very fact that it was made is 
enough to warrant ostracism. Their reaction may be 
interpreted as follows: "Uh-oh! The Jews are mad at this 
guy! I'd better steer clear of him, or they may come 
after me too!" This response implies, of course, that 
"the Jews" control everything, which is what Henry Ford 
infamously believed and which is what Abe Foxman seems to 
want =everyone= to believe. Some might call that belief 
anti-Semitic, but there you go. Weird, but true. The 
label is enough to terrify people, to make strong men 
tremble. (The "racist" label used to have similar power, 
but nobody thinks blacks run the country.)

     {{ No use saying, "But I'm not anti-Semitic!" 
Automatic retort: "Yeah, sure. That's what anti-Semites 
always say." Pleading innocent only gets you in deeper. 
Denial is further proof of guilt. So what if it's also 
what an innocent man might say? }}

     Here's the real kicker, though: The burden of proof 
is on the accused, not the accuser. Since the word 
"anti-Semitism" is never really defined, the accused 
can't even know just what he's accused of, let alone 
whether he's innocent. It can mean anything from genocide 
to joking about "Israel's Amen Corner in this country," 
the phrase with which Pat Buchanan enraged Israel's Amen 
Corner in this country.

     {{ Lots of "neoconservatives" claimed the label 
proudly, until it became a term of reproach, whereupon 
they decided it was nothing but an anti-Semitic code-word 
for "Jew." In effect, they denied their own existence. As 
Milovan Djilas once observed, "The Party line is that 
there is no Party line." But here it's even crazier: the 
Party line is that there is no Party. }}

     {{ Recent case history: two distinguished 
professors, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer 
of the University of Chicago, have just published a long 
article on how costly the Israel lobby's success has been 
for the United States. Care to guess what they're being 
accused of? Several neocons offered the clinching 
evidence: David Duke agreed with them! Before you say 
that two and two make four, make sure Hitler, or Pat 
Buchanan, never said so. }}

     Now you might think it's almost self-evident that 
two countries as remote and different from each other as 
the United States and Israel would have divergent 
interests, that what was good for one might sometimes be 
bad for the other, and so on. {{ This is essentially all 
the two profs are saying, albeit with footnotes. }} But 
even self-evident truths, if applied to Israel, can 
become explosive and, yes, anti-Semitic.

     Still, I think "Jewish power" is largely a mirage. 
True, there are powerful Jewish interests, and they can 
be nasty, but most Jews are only their distant relatives. 
Fear of "the Jews" is really fear of nuts like Foxman, 
whom it would actually take very little courage to stand 
up to. I think of a line in the film MILLER'S CROSSING, 
where the Irish hero says to the Irish mob boss, "You 
don't hold elective office in this town, Leo. You only 
run it because people =think= you run it. When they stop 
thinkin' it, you stop runnin' it."

     As I wrote shortly after the 9/11 attacks, "When it 
comes to Israel, an American journalist speaks his mind 
at his own risk. That helps explain why so few voices in 
the U.S. press are saying what European journalists may 
say without fear." The neocons will learn that fear is a 
dangerous weapon to wield. Those who fear you today will 
hate you and fight you tomorrow. Osama bin Laden and 
George Bush will learn this too.

A version of this piece was originally published at 
Taki's Top Drawer (http://takistopdrawer.us), April 8, 
2006.



The Babe's Edge
(pages 2, 4)

     {{ Barry Bonds finally limped past Babe Ruth, 
statistically, hitting home run number 715. Ruth's career 
record, of course, was 714. If you needed me to tell you 
that, you obviously aren't a baseball fan. It may be just 
a matter of time before Bonds breaks Hank Aaron's 
lifetime record of 755 homers. }}

     {{ Since everyone knows that Bonds owes his amazing 
batting records to illegal steroids, nobody outside the 
Bonds family is rejoicing. This milestone has produced a 
flood of censorious comment to the effect that Ruth was 
"really" a greater hitter, no matter what the stats 
say. }}

     {{ Well, of course he was. Babe }}Ruth changed 
baseball. Some still think he changed it for the worse, 
but he certainly changed it. Before him, it was a 
low-scoring game of singles, bunts, stolen bases, and 
spitballs. The home run was a rarity, not a major factor 
in a team's fortunes. A hitter might lead the league with 
a dozen homers in a season. The game's greatest pre-Ruth 
player was the odious Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers, a 
competitor of murderous ferocity who was hated by his own 
teammates and who, even today, has no memorial even in 
Detroit.

     Then came Ruth. He began as a pitcher for the Boston 
Red Sox, where he set several durable records and 
outdueled the great Walter Johnson. In those early years 
he was a surprisingly lean kid, unlike the burly figure 
of his prime. As a pitcher he wasn't expected to hit; but 
this had the paradoxical effect of allowing him to swing 
away, without worrying about striking out, and soon he 
was blasting balls out of the park. He was moved to the 
outfield, where he could play every day, and he set a new 
record with 29 homers in a single season.

     This was sensational, because the simplest fan, who 
might not relish the sacrifice bunt, could thrill to the 
mammoth home run. And Ruth hit the ball farther than 
anyone had ever hit it before. One spectator died of a 
heart attack while watching Ruth tag one. Baseball's 
popularity soared.

     When Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees in 1920, 
he went from mere sensation to god. He doubled his own 
home-run record; he simply had no competition as a 
slugger, and he'd dwarfed all his predecessors. It was as 
if Barry Bonds were to hit 150 homers in a season. No, 
even that hardly suggests Ruth's achievement. Such 
dominance of the game is almost beyond measure. Something 
previously inconceivable was happening.

     By 1920, his first season with the Yankees, Ruth had 
already set a new lifetime home-run record: 103. Nobody 
else had reached triple figures before. He was just 25 
years old.

     Suddenly baseball was a slugger's game; other 
musclemen were swinging for the fences too. Cobb growled 
that the home run was ruining the sport, destroying the 
need for finesse. Hitting homers was no great feat, he 
said, and to prove his point he announced to the press 
that he would hit the long ball himself. In his next two 
games he hit five homers. Having made his case, Cobb went 
back to swatting singles and stealing bases, the 
old-fashioned way.

     But there was no turning back. Baseball had 
discovered its ultimate weapon, and neither the game's 
strategy nor its economy would ever be the same. In 1930 
a reporter asked Ruth if it was proper that he should be 
getting a higher salary than the president of the United 
States. "I had a better year than he did," Ruth replied. 
He'd had 46 homers; Herbert Hoover had had the 
Depression.

     Ruth was making $80,000 that year {{ ; today, thanks 
to inflation and television, Bonds is making 
$18 million. }} Here again, calculation doesn't take us 
very far. In today's money, Ruth was making about a 
million bucks, less than any infielder makes now. {{ And 
Bonds, struggling with seven homers and a .254 batting 
average, is having a better year than our current 
president. }}

     Ruth had more than power; he had flamboyance, 
magnetism, humor, joie de vivre, a delight in his own 
magnificence, a love for his adoring fans, an unguarded 
emotional directness that made his fiery temper not only 
forgivable but lovable. He was everything you'd want your 
hero to be. The press loved him too; he was great copy, a 
pal to reporters, and legends sprang up about him. He hit 
home runs for dying boys, he pointed to the bleachers 
before he hit one in the World Series -- who knew how 
much of it was true? If these were myths, they were myths 
only he could inspire. The awesome statistics were only a 
by-product of this jovial god.

     In fact, Ruth's amazing numbers changed the way we 
think of baseball. The game's obsession with statistics 
as a way of measuring performance began with his records. 
To be sure, baseball had been keeping individual records 
for generations, but with Ruth these became far more 
elaborate and, for fans and analysts alike, much more 
important as a focus of attention -- an end in 
themselves. Only in recent times, thanks to the brilliant 
Bill James's study of "sabermetrics," have students of 
the game begun to abandon the simplistic idea that stats 
speak for themselves; a high batting average, for 
example, is no longer accepted as a reliable measure of a 
player's real offensive value. (And a high fielding 
average may be so misleading as to be nearly 
meaningless.)

     {{ And what of Barry Bonds? }} Surly, sulky, 
suspicious, foul-mouthed and self-pitying. Everything you 
=don't= want your hero to be. He craves admiration, but 
does nothing to reward it; he has none of Ruth's easy 
ability to connect with the fans. Despite his enormous 
success, he exudes resentment. Does he take steroids? 
It's a reasonable question, and the answer is all too 
obvious, but he resents it. His detractors, he says, are 
racists. He'll go to his grave blaming everyone but 
himself for the ill will he provokes. It just goes to 
show that the richest man on earth can always persuade 
himself that he's a victim. Bonds has, to a superlative 
degree, what is now called "attitude"; Babe Ruth never 
heard of it.

     {{ So never mind the statistical squabble about who 
was the greater slugger. One of these men will be 
remembered happily for as long as baseball survives; and 
if it doesn't survive, the other will be remembered for 
his prominent role in its demise. }}

A version of this piece was originally published at    
Taki's Top Drawer (http://takistopdrawer.us), May 31, 
2006.


The Da Vinci Gospel
(pages 3-4)

     In late May, the film version of THE DA VINCI CODE 
was released in more than 4,000 theaters in the United 
States and in thousands of others around the world. 
Despite harshly unfavorable reviews, in its first weekend 
it raked in nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, most 
of it abroad, rivaling the sensational opening of Mel 
Gibson's PASSION OF THE CHRIST.

     Neither of these movies was going to be stopped by 
bad reviews. Both were spinoffs of the Gospels, in their 
different ways, and any critic who panned them risked 
being trampled by the crowds rushing to see them.

     Sixty million copies of Dan Brown's novel are said 
to be in print, and last year I bought one of them 
myself, a deluxe illustrated edition with lavish pictures 
purporting to authenticate the book's surreal historical 
claims. I spent a weekend reading it in utter 
fascination. The plot was essentially conventional: an 
innocent man, a Harvard prof named Robert Langdon, flees 
the Paris police and has to solve the bizarre murder he 
has been accused of. But the solution leads him to the 
amazing discovery that the Catholic Church has been 
concealing the truth about Jesus for two millennia!

     The closely guarded secret, which, almost 
miraculously, has never been spilled over all those 
centuries by a single drunken bishop, is that Jesus was 
not a supernatural figure but a rather normal sort of 
person, married to Mary Magdalene, with whom he had 
children. His royal line survives underground to this 
day, and one of his descendants, as it turns out, just 
happens to be the brilliant young woman who helps Langdon 
crack the case. The real murderer is a demented albino in 
the employ of Opus Dei, the sinister outfit popes rely on 
to knock off nosy people who learn too much.

     All this is so flamboyantly implausible that you 
have to admire Brown's fine-tuned audacity. He is aiming 
at a huge readership of bottomless gullibility, 
superficially schooled but unable to spot either factual 
errors or glaring incoherence, people who are cowed by 
sheer assertiveness. When Brown, in a brief foreword, 
assures the reader that his research has verified the 
history his story presupposes, they aren't going to ask 
questions, let alone suspect Brown's weird fusion of 
plagiarism with sheer invention.

     One of the book's key figures, for example, is 
Sir Leigh Teabing, a noted expert on Christian history 
who explains that the idea that Jesus was divine was 
first conceived and proclaimed by the Emperor Constantine 
in A.D. 325. We are left to wonder why people who didn't 
believe he was divine had been worshiping him for three 
hundred years by then. Why did the Church exist at all? 
And what held it together for three centuries? Was it a 
church or a fan club?

     This points to a certain gap in the illustrious 
Teabing's vast knowledge of Christian history: namely, 
the New Testament. He has never read or reflected on, 
say, the first chapter of St. John's Gospel: "And the 
Word was with God, and the Word was God." Neither, 
obviously, has his creator, who shows almost total 
ignorance of all four Gospels. Brown has managed to stir 
controversy about four of the most famous books in the 
world without even knowing their contents -- quite a 
feat! He's like a man who has never read HAMLET, but is 
sure Shakespeare didn't write it; he has no interest in 
Jesus' teachings, only in his, well, sex life.

     If Brown doesn't know the primary sources, he does 
have his eccentric secondary ones, such as a popular and 
entirely speculative book called HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL 
(which, when Brown was shown to have adopted its "ideas," 
gave rise to an embarrassing plagiarism suit). It's as if 
a revolutionary treatise on astronomy turned out to be 
based entirely on a book about the Zodiac.

     According to Brown (speaking through Teabing), the 
esoteric truth about Jesus and his main squeeze has been 
preserved through two millennia by a few brave heretics, 
such as the Gnostics. Once again Brown displays his basic 
ignorance. The Gnostics believed that sex, like matter 
itself, was evil, and they'd have been the last to 
cherish the idea of a carnal Jesus. Regardless, Brown 
includes Leonardo da Vinci in this heretical succession, 
insisting that his paintings tell the truth in "code."

     Wouldn't you know, modern feminism comes into the 
story, albeit somewhat anachronistically. During the 
Middle Ages, Brown points out, the Church burned five 
million women as witches, less because it believed in 
witches than because it hated women. Five million! I'd 
almost forgotten that. No, wait. I don't think I'd ever 
heard it before, actually. Wouldn't historians have 
mentioned such an infamy? Wouldn't millions of men in 
those days have protested the roasting of their wives, 
daughters, and grandmothers? Or did they all say, a la 
Henny Youngman, "Take my wife -- please"? Why did the 
misogynistic Church forbid men to dump their dumpy old 
mates and swap them for young and nubile trophy wives?

     Like a strange dream, it doesn't add up. But the 
narrative momentum of a thriller forbids critical 
sifting. Stories demand that we suppose, not believe, but 
some people forget the difference. Brown demands that we 
mistake batty surmises for hard facts. And his "facts" 
are counterfeit.

     I used to work in a mental hospital, where I learned 
that psychosis and stupidity are two different things. 
One evening a patient told me how the doctors were 
transplanting a monkey's brain into his skull, piece by 
piece; he begged me to help him escape. He'd worked out 
the story with such ingenuity and conviction that it was 
all I could do not to believe the pitiful madman, and I 
wished I could somehow help him. In the end I could only 
try to reassure him, lamely, that he'd be all right.

     After reading THE DA VINCI CODE, I wondered whether 
its author was similarly psychotic or just cynical and 
shameless. Today the answer seems obvious. He wrote the 
book for a certain market. Just as Gibson's film found a 
huge market of believers in the Gospel message that 
Christ is risen, Brown's book found a huge market of 
unbelievers for whom the "good news" is that Christ is 
=not= risen, is =not= divine, and therefore is no 
impediment to earthly happiness, especially sexual 
pleasure; indeed, he enjoyed it himself!

     Again, though Brown claims to respect Jesus as a 
great (though merely human) teacher, it isn't clear why 
he should, since he shows no interest in, or acquaintance 
with, Jesus' actual teaching, especially his call for 
sinners to repent. In Brown's world, there is no reason 
for repentance; only the Church has done anything it 
should be sorry for, such as burdening us with the ideas 
that we are sinners and that women are evil.

     It's all pseudo-scholarly New Age tripe, and the 
essence of New Age thinking is wishful, as opposed to 
critical, thinking. If reincarnation grabs you, well, 
it's true for you. You need no proof beyond your own 
preferences. It's a loopy twist on American pluralism 
("Attend the church of your choice"). The most perfect 
expression of it I've ever heard was that of a young 
neo-Nazi in a television interview: "Nazism is the answer 
for me. It may not be the answer for everyone." Dan Brown 
may not be the answer for everyone.

A version of this piece was originally published at 
Taki's Top Drawer (http://takistopdrawer.us), May 29, 
2006.



THE SOBRAN FORUM

{{ EMPHASIS IS INDICATED BY THE PRESENCE OF "EQUALS" 
SIGNS AROUND THE EMPHASIZED WORDS. }}

Counterweight to Dogma
by Nona Aguilar
(page 5)

      The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, 
      Sex, and Feminism, by Carrie L. Lukas; 
      Regnery Publishing, 2006; 221 pages.

     If more young women are beginning to realize that it 
may be possible for them to have it all if they don't 
expect to have it all at the same time, it is thanks to 
contributions from a number of bright, smart women in 
touch with their deeper feminine instincts =and= their 
brains. Women opening up this broader line of inquiry 
include economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, journalist Maggie 
Gallagher, psychology professor Judith Kleinfeld, policy 
analyst Lauren R. Noyes, scholar Christina Hoff Sommers 
-- and now author Carrie L. Lukas.

     Age 32, married, and a first-time mother, Lukas is 
grateful for the satisfying turn her life has taken, 
which she credits to good decisions made in the decade 
after graduating from Princeton. In that period, Lukas's 
thinking took her away from the doctrinaire views she 
held in college, prompting different -- and better -- 
life decisions.

     To be sure, Lukas made mistakes along the way. 
Mindful that more mistakes (i.e., poorer decisions) could 
have been substantially deleterious to her life, Lucas 
wrote her book. Its modest goal: to offer young women 
sound information they can use to make better life 
choices.

     Lucas focuses on three areas of crucial feminine 
relevance: the negative effects of casual sex; the 
relationship between age and infertility; and the 
long-term benefits of marriage for women.

     Take casual sex: Men seem to be able to enjoy casual 
encounters without apparent consequence (an arguable 
matter, in this reviewer's opinion). Because it holds 
that there are no essential differences between men and 
women, feminist dogma insists that women should -- and 
can -- feel free to enjoy casual, no-consequence sex.

     So much for theory. Here's the reality. Research 
reveals that casual sex is unsatisfying to most women. 
Most who try it eschew it soon enough. Reasons for 
dissatisfaction vary but include confusion ("Will we see 
each other again?"), feelings of shame ("Didn't it mean 
=anything= to him?"), and feelings of being "used." In 
one study cited by Lukas, nine out of ten women express 
regret about their casual liaisons.

     In addition to the emotional risks of casual sex, 
there are health risks. Sexually transmitted diseases 
(STDs) are not gender-neutral. A woman is four times more 
likely to contract gonorrhea and eight times more likely 
to contract HIV from a single act of intercourse with an 
infected partner. Moreover, women are far more likely to 
suffer permanent STD damage, including infertility and 
cancers.

     And speaking of infertility ...

     Because men produce sperm continuously throughout 
their lives, they can impregnate throughout their lives. 
By contrast, women are born with all the eggs they will 
ever have. Eggs aren't replenished -- and they age. By 
their thirties women can't conceive as readily as they 
did in their twenties; the possibility declines 
precipitously by the time women turn forty. In matters of 
fertility, like so many things, it really =is= different 
for a woman.

     When it comes to marriage, we already know that men 
benefit -- but here's a news flash: so do women. Like 
married men, married women exhibit better mental health 
and are happier than their single, widowed, cohabiting, 
or divorced counterparts, according to research Lucas 
cites. Other research shows that married women have 
better health and are more secure financially. And -- 
surprise! -- their level of sexual activity and 
satisfaction is greater compared with that of single 
women with partners.

     This may explain other research that Lukas uncovers. 
Many women choosing divorce later experience regret; they 
wish they had given their marriages another chance. They 
probably should have. Couples who stick it out through 
periods of marital storm and severe problems, including 
infidelity, verbal abuse, emotional neglect, and 
alcoholism, often describe themselves five years later as 
happily married. The couples explained that, with time, 
many of the sources of conflict and distress eased.

     If Lukas has one piece of advice for young women, it 
is: be strategic and thoughtful in making your decisions. 
You will live with the consequences. Come to think of it, 
she has a second piece of advice: Get the facts, ma'am -- 
which is why Lukas wrote her book. It's a counterweight 
to prevailing dogma.

Nona Aguilar writes frequently on women and health issues 
and has been widely published by FAMILY CIRCLE, LADIES 
HOME JOURNAL, and REDBOOK, as well as by Catholic 
publications. Her book THE NEW NO-PILL, NO-RISK BIRTH 
CONTROL (1980; Simon & Schuster, 2002), was the first to 
research and report on the unexpected, positive 
psychological benefits of using natural family planning.



NUGGETS

IF ISLAM IS A "RELIGION OF PEACE," how come there are so 
many brawls in the NBA? (page 6)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

IF YOU'RE GOING TO HARP on the "lethal" potential of 
religion, you should spare a chapter for the lethal 
actuality of atheistic ideologies. (page 6)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

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? (page 7)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

SUGGESTION: If we're going to install a new government in 
Iraq, why not lend them our Constitution? We can spare 
it; after all, we aren't using it. (page 9)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

WHEN HATE IS OKAY: Why is otherwise tolerant progressive 
opinion so judgmental about homophobia? Can't they 
understand that the Good Lord made some of us homophobic, 
and he loves us the way we are? (page 9)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

HARDLY ANYONE complains about unconstitutional 
government. But millions would complain if their 
unconstitutional government checks stopped coming. The 
Framers of the Constitution worried constantly about the 
problem of usurpation; but few Americans today even 
understand the word "usurp." It has dropped out of our 
public vocabulary, so we don't recognize usurpation when 
we see it. (page 10)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

"HARD CASES MAKE BAD LAW," says the old adage. But 
liberalism starts with the hard cases, then can't draw 
the line anywhere. At first it wanted abortion legal in 
the first trimester for poor minority girls who'd been 
raped by their fathers; now it passionately resists 
restrictions on late-term slaughters of fully developed 
infants in the birth canal. (page 11)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

SOME PEOPLE THINK you can take Christ's "teachings" and 
ignore his miracles as if they were fables. But this is 
to confuse the Sermon on the Mount with the Democratic 
Party platform. (page 12)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

I UNDERSTAND that Florida public schools are now required 
to teach Holocaust studies from kindergarten through 
twelfth grade. Doesn't anyone see where this must 
inevitably lead? Soon Florida's college students will 
have to take =remedial= Holocaust studies. (page 12)
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME



Exclusive to electronic media:

LIBERALS ACCEPT MILITARISM as the politically necessary 
cost of socialism; conservatives accept socialist 
programs as the politically necessary cost of militarism. 
It's a very expensive symbiosis.
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

QUERY: What's the difference between women and 
neoconservatives? Answer: You can get a few women to go 
into combat.
                    -- from REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME



REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian")
(pages 6-12)

* "Everyone Has His Reasons" (July 13, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060713.shtml

* The Lawless State (July 11, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060711.shtml

* St. Paul and the Liberal Agenda (July 4, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060704.shtml

* The Behemoth of Bust (June 27, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060627.shtml

* The HAMLET That Never Was (June 22, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060622.shtml

* What Would Gore Have Done? (June 20, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060620.shtml

* The Real Bill Buckley (May 30, 2006)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060530.shtml

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

All articles are written by Joe Sobran, except where
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