THE WANDERER, JANUARY 18, 2007
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
The Urge to Surge
The Democrats have assumed control of both houses of
Congress, with preposterously exaggerated celebration of
the "historic" fact that Nancy Pelosi is the first female
speaker of the House. Why this is considered such a
milestone I fail to understand. It's not as if women in
politics were a novelty, as, say, women in pro football
would be. Franklin Roosevelt appointed a woman to his
cabinet, and nobody thought it was terribly remarkable.
The last time we saw such a silly fuss was in 1984,
when Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his
running mate. By a remarkable coincidence, Ferraro too
was a Democrat, Italian, Catholic, and vociferously
pro-abortion.
When was the last time the media got excited about
an anti-abortion politician? Sometimes politics is almost
too depressing to think about. As President Bush pushes
for a "surge" (the new word for escalation) in the war in
Iraq, the new Democratic Congress appears disposed to
treat him like bad weather -- that is, to complain but
not to do anything about him.
Pelosi is typical: She favors "supporting" the
troops who are already there while verbally opposing the
war. That way Bush gets all the blame but nothing really
changes, nicely setting the stage for the Democrats in
2008.
There are no good options in Iraq now, nor even the
illusion thereof. Sally Quinn of THE WASHINGTON POST
argues for an immediate U.S. withdrawal in a poignant
way: She recalls how, as a little girl, she shared a
hospital plane with severely wounded soldiers from the
Korean war: "I remember ... the soldiers screaming in
pain and crying out for their mothers.... Many of them
were amputees. Some had no stomachs, some had no faces."
The Democrats are also planning a flurry of early
legislation -- raising the minimum wage and so forth --
so, between them and Bush, we must not look for smaller
government soon.
I do not think Bush has been the worst American
president ever. But he may prove to be one of the hardest
to clean up after.
Say It Again, Sam
It has been nearly a year since my old friend Sam
Francis died, and he is missed. [Website editor's note:
It has been nearly two years. Joe corrects his error in
next week's column.] Not by everyone, to be sure: One
neoconservative crowed that his death had left this
country a better place. Gracious people, those neocons.
But those of us who valued Sam's unique eye and voice
will welcome a new collection of his essays, SHOTS FIRED:
SAM FRANCIS ON AMERICA'S CULTURE WAR, edited by Peter B.
Gemma (FGF Books, Vienna, Va., www.shotsfired.us;
1-877-SAM-0058). Reading it is like having Sam back with
us for a little while.
The neocons had plenty of reason to loathe Sam. The
feeling was mutual. Though he was a robust critic of
liberalism and was unsparing of the Clinton
administration, these pieces reveal him as an even more
severe critic of the second Bush administration (not that
he much cared for the first) and especially of the
"neocon mafia" that nestled within it. Sam's way with the
sharp phrase is shown by his jab at "neoconservative sex
god Irving Kristol." His humor and insight are here, as
well as his vigor and elegance of expression. I can't
resist quoting his sardonic description of politics as
"the high art and science of fooling some of the people
some of the time."
Sam was right early and often. He saw the follies of
the Republican Party, and he saw how it was changing for
the worse. He didn't have to wait for the Iraq war to go
bad or for public opinion to turn against it to tell us
what was wrong with it. It had disaster written all over
it, and he wouldn't be at all surprised at how it has
gone over the past year.
But after all, these are current topics; and Sam's
purview wasn't confined to the ephemeral. In this book we
also find the Sam Francis who never shrank from a good
cause, even if it was a lost cause; who could think and
write boldly on debates most people assume were finished
long ago: on the Civil War, on slavery, on Lincoln (whom
he sees as essentially "a small-town politico" rather
than a far-seeing statesman).
Though such short quotations are fun, they don't
convey the quality of Sam's deeper analyses of history
and politics. In these he follows his intellectual hero,
James Burnham, a maverick conservative who has been
absurdly called "the first neoconservative." (Burnham
would have shared Sam's view of the neocons.)
Sam was even more pessimistic than his master.
History, to his mind, had no tendency to reach happy
endings, and most of the things others called "progress"
he viewed as ambiguous at best, degenerate at worst. He
was a natural enemy of every form of official optimism:
"The final and unpredictable irony of our history may be
that we were more civilized at the beginning of it than
at the end of it." This is the remark of a man who had
thought long and hard about the subject, and who was
willing to think alone.
Sam's essential loneliness (he never married) was
one of the most striking things about him. Even his
humor, which could be uproarious, was never far from
gloom. He didn't expect the truth to be consoling. He
sought it anyway.
Key Words
In THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, Alexander Hamilton made an
argument for ratifying the Constitution that deserves
more attention. The proposed Constitution, he said, would
be superior to the (unwritten) British constitution in
this respect: It would be "unalterable by the
government."
A simple and profound point. In Britain, freedom of
speech or habeas corpus could be abolished by a mere act
of Parliament; but here, so radical a change would have
to be made by the people through the difficult process of
amendment. What, after all, would be the use of a
constitution if the government could change it at its own
pleasure?
Worth thinking about. We lose this advantage, as
Jefferson pointed out, when the government is allowed to
define the extent of its own powers. Which, alas, is what
happens whenever the president, Congress, or the federal
judiciary gets away with claiming wider authority on the
pretext that the Constitution is a "living document."
In theory, "We the People," in our Constitution,
tell the government what powers we are "delegating" to
them. The whole idea is stood on its head, and its
purpose defeated, when the government tells us what its
powers are! Why do we stand for this?
+ + +
As I always say, "At present, the U.S. Constitution
poses no serious threat to our form of government."
REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME -- a new selection of my
Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian -- will brighten
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--- Joseph Sobran
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