Sobran's --
The Real News of the Month
October 2000
Volume 7, No. 10
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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Features
THE MOVING PICTURE
(pages 1-2)
Attorney General Janet Reno's announcement that she
wouldn't refer Al Gore's fundraising practices to a
special prosecutor was universally greeted as good news
for Gore. Does everyone suspect that a special prosecutor
would have reached different conclusions from Miss
Reno's? Isn't it possible that an investigation would
*exonerate* him?
* * *
As I write, Gore is even with George W. in the
polls. He has succeeded in dissociating himself from one
of the greatest presidents in our history by picking Joe
Lieberman as his running mate and publicly smooching
Tipper. (The kiss was "completely spontaneous," he
explained later; the romantic impulse just happened to
seize him in front of a national TV audience.) All his
efforts to reinvent himself are finally paying off;
millions of voters are swayed by such contrived
impressions. The triviality and superficiality of
presidential politics is impossible to exaggerate. And
H.L. Mencken thought it was bad in *his* day.
* * *
Even if Gore wins the presidency, the Democrats will
also have to win control of both houses of Congress in
order to enact his socialist dreams. That, happily, seems
unlikely. A Republican Congress might even prove an
obstacle to George W.'s unconstitutional desire to give
the federal government a bigger role in state education.
Not all Republicans are Compassionate Conservatives.
* * *
Southern Protestant football fans are rebelling
against the U.S. Supreme Court's latest constrictions on
public prayer by praying publicly at football games. The
NEW YORK TIMES and various Jewish groups are alarmed, as
usual, seeing any free exercise of religion as a threat
to religious freedom. Voluntary prayer may be technically
legal, but it's "insensitive" and "divisive." Ideally,
the separation of church and state would be preserved by
eliminating churches, and freedom of religion by the
atrophy of religion. According to liberal opinion, the
only effect of public prayer is to annoy those who aren't
praying; perish the thought that prayers are ever
*answered.*
* * *
Gloria Steinem, who has spent most of her life
disparaging marriage as bad for women (one of her bons
mots: "A woman without a man is like a fish without a
bicycle"), has married. At age 66, she has apparently
decided she can finally afford to admit she's not a
lesbian. The American Indian ceremony was performed at
the home of feminist and Indian activist Wilma Mankiller,
which ought to have given the groom fair warning.
* * *
Anthropologists now believe that some American
Indians in the Southwest practiced cannibalism. Human
bones and blood in cooking pots have been found at a site
in Colorado, dating from about AD 1150. A specimen of
human feces was found to contain myoglobin, a human
protein, proving that human flesh had been eaten. Dozens
of similar sites have also been discovered with further
evidence that bones had been hollowed out for their
edible grease. The Noble Savage, innocent of Christianity
and uncorrupted by it, continues to be an elusive and
mythical figure.
* * *
A group of Jewish scholars has issued a statement
repudiating the idea that Christianity is the source of
Nazism. "Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon," the
statement says, and goes on to stress common ground
between Christians and Jews, who worship the God of
Abraham and Moses and accept the authority of the Old
Testament. The statement doesn't entirely exculpate
Christians for their hostility toward Jews and widespread
passivity toward Nazism; but we shouldn't expect miracles
(and Christians haven't always acted like Christians,
anyway). We should be grateful for such candor and fair-
mindedness, in contrast to so many recent bitter anti-
Christian polemics from Jewish quarters -- most of which
show no interest in Abraham, Moses, the Old Testament, or
God.
* * *
George W. caused a stir by calling reporter Adam
Clymer of the NEW YORK TIMES a vulgar name when he
wrongly thought the microphone wouldn't pick it up.
Republicans, including Rush Limbaugh, defended Bush and
blamed Clymer's naked liberal bias for provoking him. If
you ask me, Republicans bring unfavorable coverage on
themselves by accepting liberal premises without
conviction and then trying to "save" liberal programs --
Medicare, for example -- from insolvency with budget
gimmicks. It's the usual inspiring GOP message: the whole
welter of open-ended socialist programs can work if
administered by cost-conscious Republicans. If this is
Bush's theme, he deserves to lose to Gore, and he
probably will.
* * *
As mentioned above, Bush wants to enlarge the
federal role in education. Wasn't it his father who
wanted to be remembered as "the education president"?
Neither father nor son seems particularly well acquainted
with the life of the mind; their fuzzy conception of
"education" doesn't seem to go beyond test scores and job
training. George W. doesn't see, and isn't disturbed by,
the secularization of education under state control,
which means that most children are denied the most
essential part of education: knowledge of their relation
to God. When the state runs the schools, the "separation
of church and state" entails the separation of
schoolchildren from their Creator.
* * *
Poor J.D. Salinger. First an ex-girlfriend, Joyce
Maynard, and now his own daughter, Margaret Salinger,
have written unflattering memoirs showing the reclusive
author (who hasn't published anything since 1965) as an
eccentric household tyrant with sexual peculiarities. His
daughter recalls that he was devoted to various health
and spiritualistic fads; his prescriptions included
drinking urine. To top it off, the half-Jewish writer's
first wife was a Nazi he met during the American
occupation of Germany; apparently they soon proved
(surprise!) incompatible. Today Salinger is 81 and
profoundly deaf and is not on speaking terms with his
grown children. Well, too bad. I still think THE CATCHER
IN THE RYE and his short stories (such as the sublimely
hilarious "The Laughing Man") are some of the most
charming fictions of the twentieth century. Nobody
matched him for dialogue, urbane wit, sharp observation,
and unforgettable child characters. But it sounds as if
Holden Caulfield would be unwelcome at his door.
* * *
"We must get rid of our arrogant assumption that it
is the masses who can be led by the nose," wrote C.S.
Lewis. "As far as I can make out, the shoe is on the
other foot. The only people who are really the dupes of
their favorite newspapers are the intelligentsia." I hope
that's still true. I'm afraid that state-controlled
education and the media have given us something new and
terrible: an apish mass intelligentsia.
* * *
My slogan for the 2000 presidential campaign:
"Impeach the winner!"
THE MISCELLANEOUS STATE
[Material cut from the original text for reasons of space
is enclosed in curly brackets ({ thus }).
(pages 3-4)
[Breaker quote: Conspiracy theories flatter our rulers'
intelligence.]
[Breaker quote: "A corrupt society has many laws."]
My big news this month is that I cleaned up my
house. It had reached -- long surpassed, some might say
-- the crisis point. Years' accumulation of unsorted
books, newspapers, magazines, junk mail, loose papers,
videotapes, audio cassettes, floppy discs, pamphlets,
leaflets, medicine bottles, paper cups, cotton swabs,
prayer cards, cigar boxes, et cetera, with "et cetera"
signifying a mad miscellany of { unique and }
unclassifiable items, had made { nearly every room
impassable. The habit of hoarding had risen to a
degree that might be called pathological. (Do the
shrinks have a name for this disorder?) } The
shocking mess would have appalled Beethoven.
Finally there was nothing for it but to throw things
out. I filled countless trash bags with items I thought
I'd never discard. { For me, throwing away a book is
nearly sacrilege. But with my daughter's wise
guidance, I steeled myself to recognize the
difference between (a) books I really and truly
need and (b) books it would be nice to get around
to when I'm 80. After a few days, spreading
expanses of floor reappeared, and I'm determined
never to go back to my wicked old ways, though I
don't yet trust my good resolutions: I've had so
many of them before. } But the experience wasn't lost
on me. Most people have no difficulty doing what is
nearly impossible for me: keeping an orderly house. Yet
they don't bother keeping orderly minds, and a muddled
mind is as horrifying to me as my house would be to them.
The objective equivalent of my house, it occurs to
me, is the federal government. There too is a chaotic
accumulation, the result of many years' neglect and
carelessness. Those who see cunning conspiracy in that
government are missing the point. They flatter our
rulers. Dishonest as those rulers may be, none of them
ever intended the sheer sloppiness of the present system,
with its mad miscellany of { powers, } programs, and
functions beyond { enumeration or } cataloguing. Think
of it: pre-school education, farm subsidies, space
programs, food and drug regulations, pensions, medical
care, labor laws, art subsidies, health and safety
regulations, { tax "services." } As for "defense," our
military bureaucracies are almost an economy unto
themselves, with forces spread around the world far
beyond any rational defensive need.
An Aristotelian might begin by asking: What is the
purpose of government? We might retort: What *isn't* the
purpose of government? There is no wish to which our
politicians don't cater. Never having bothered to define
the proper aims, scope, and limits of government and law,
they are (as C.S. Lewis puts it) "incessantly engaged in
legislation." They no longer have any notion of the
specifically federal, as delineated in the U.S.
Constitution. Anything that may be done, the government
should do, and preferably at the federal level.
"A corrupt society has many laws," a Roman author
observed. By that standard the United States is supremely
corrupt. Everyone tries to live at the expense of
everyone else in a system of what Frederic Bastiat called
"organized plunder."
The best possible reform would be re-form:
simplification. Oh, but the world is so complex now, so
"interdependent"! We can't turn back the clock, can we?
The idea of living under the Constitution our rulers are
sworn to uphold is regarded as pure nostalgia, not to be
taken seriously.
And as a practical matter, government is no longer
concerned with rights, in the sense of just claims that
are prior to the very existence of government; its
concern is "entitlements," the claims of some people to
the wealth of other people through the medium of the
state (and the Internal Revenue "Service"). This enormous
economy of parasitical dependency is what Hilaire Belloc
foresaw when he spoke of the Servile State.
Franklin Roosevelt once boasted that "no damn
politician" would ever be able to repeal "my Social
Security system." He was so right. The entitlement
programs that bribe millions of voters are the most
insidious feature of the modern state; they make those
voters shareholders in tyranny, counting on the state to
extort money from their neighbors. No tyrant rules by
terror alone; in order to succeed, he must have plenty of
popular support. Even today, many Russians yearn for
Stalin. Most tyrants, like most slaveowners, aren't
especially cruel; we have been so hypnotized and misled
by the extreme cases of recent times that we no longer
recognize "normal" tyranny.
By today's standards, as I often repeat, George III
was a very mild ruler, claiming only a modest amount of
his subjects' wealth and infringing their freedoms only
sporadically. And in fact most Americans in 1776 had few
complaints about him. Maybe Jefferson and his peers were
right to accuse him of tyranny, but in hindsight it seems
tragic that they thought that by throwing off British
rule they were paving the way for something better. Over
the long run, the American Revolution was a case of out
of the frying pan, into the fire.
The formidable obstacle to reform -- to reducing the
federal government to constitutional simplicity -- is the
entitlement program. Millions of Americans now live off
the state, which is to say, off the money the state
extorts from their neighbors. They feel, quite literally,
"entitled" to this money, as the state assures them they
are; their consciences are quite undisturbed by their
parasitical way of life.
Even more remarkably, most of the taxpayers who pay
punishing rates to support this situation feel little
resentment, even though the income tax makes criminal
suspects not of the parasites, but of the producers. We
are forced to make an annual report of our financial
affairs to the state, whose aggressive curiosity makes
the Spanish Inquisition seem retiring by comparison. And
most people are resigned to it; they don't question the
legitimacy or the basic justice of the system.
It's a telling turn of phrase that we sometimes
speak of "tax revolts." In theory, the state is our
servant; but you don't "revolt" against a servant; you
*fire* him. The phrase tells us who we think the real
master is. { And are we wrong to think so? } In
theory, we can change our rulers through the democratic
process; yet the more "democratic" we get, the harder our
real rulers are to dislodge. The government officials we
actually deal with face to face are rarely elected, and
they have nothing to fear from elections. As Milton
Friedman has put it, when you are summoned for a tax
audit, do you feel you are dealing with your *servant?*
{ As I say, } nobody knows exactly how the present
system emerged, but it was not through any conscious and
cunning design. It grew up like an unweeded garden, with
government gathering powers almost casually and the
citizenry, hypnotized by the slogans of democracy,
submitting at every step. This submissiveness is the most
{ amazing and } appalling part of the whole thing. The
average American has totally forgotten his heritage of
liberty and its counterpart, strictly defined and limited
government.
With the cheapest verbal legerdemain, the federal
government has inverted the Constitution. What was
supposed to control that government has been magically
converted into a device for *enlarging* the government
and removing all restraints upon it. In theory, again, We
the People tell the government, through our Constitution,
what it may and may not do; but in practice, the
government now tells us what the Constitution means. And
what surprising meanings it turns out to contain! At
every step, it turns out to mean that the government is
entitled to more power over us than we had ever
suspected. Such consistency can hardly be the accidental
result of disinterested interpretation. Yet most people
simply can't see the simple pattern, or realize that
anything is amiss.
The Constitution offers not a speck of authority for
entitlement programs; and they would remain immoral and
morbid even if it did authorize them. But the Framers
regarded the protection of property as one of the chief
duties of government, and would have condemned any
proposal to establish a welfare state. They never thought
in terms of "programs," especially such programs as
impose permanent, election-proof burdens on successive
generations. When they spoke of "the general welfare,"
they meant measures that benefit *all* citizens, not
merely certain favored constituencies. They recognized
government debt as irresponsible, a tyrannical burden on
posterity; they likewise recognized inflation as general
robbery.
The federal income tax, introduced by Abraham
Lincoln, made every citizen directly answerable to the
federal government; struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court
several times (ah, those were the days!), it was finally
established by the nefarious Sixteenth Amendment in 1913.
At first the tax schedule was modest, but thanks to two
world wars it eventually soared to totalitarian levels,
enforced by totalitarian means. And, as usual, the
populace got used to it.
The frustrating idiocy of this year's presidential
campaign is largely due to the fact that the American
people have long since forgotten what they have lost.
They assume that this country was always pretty much like
this. The two major candidates are "debating" only what
minor variations to make on the welfare-warfare state;
how to "save" Social Security and Medicare, for example.
No basic principles are to be discussed; that would be
"ideology," or even "extremism," a sin against
"pragmatism."
When memory goes, imagination departs with it. The
study of our past teaches us not only what was, but what
might be again. But we live in an amnesiac present that
has no standard against which to measure itself. We don't
know where we were before, or how we got here; so we are
collectively incapable of criticizing the features of the
federal government as we know it. We accept the whole
chaotic welter as a given, a natural outgrowth of the
Founding Fathers' labors (of which we have only the
foggiest notions). It is not for us to judge it. We
merely do as we are told, without asking, let alone
wondering, by what authority our rulers command us.
The crowning achievement of the modern state, I
suppose, is the mass-production of the kind of citizens
it needs in order to sustain itself. It needs, first of
all, a mass of sheep, preferably educated in its own
schools. It also needs "liberals" who will spearhead
"change," meaning the expansion of the state and the
annihilation of tradition and memory, as well as
"conservatives" who will consolidate its gains. From its
point of view, an election in which the alternatives are
Al Gore and George W. Bush is just about perfect.
Oxford and His "Lovely Boy"
(pages 5-6)
[Breaker quote: The author of HAMLET thought he was a
failure.]
[Breaker quote: C.S. Lewis found in the Sonnets a model
of selfless love.]
Though I've argued at length that "Shakespeare" was
really Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, I've generally
kept it rather objective, as a good argument usually
ought to be. Now I'd like to add something more personal.
The man who wrote HAMLET -- which posterity would
rate one of the supreme works of Western literature --
thought of himself as a miserable failure. It's important
to understand this. Otherwise we may imagine him as a
smug aristocrat, feeling superior to his surroundings;
and nothing could be further from the truth.
In his Sonnets, our only direct access to Oxford's
intimate feelings, he shows himself obsessed with his
"disgrace," "shame," "guilt," "stains," "blots," and
"scandal." He thinks his ruin is final and irreversible;
it is too late to cure it; his life is in decline and his
reputation permanently soiled. He might say, with Hamlet
himself: "What a wounded name shall live behind me!" As
it is, he hopes that after his death "my name [will] be
buried where my body is" and "forgotten."
Rather late in his life, in his forties, Oxford fell
in love with a beautiful young man, Henry Wriothesley,
the teenaged Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). For a while
he felt that this love, which we would now call
homosexual (it was that, but it was also much more than
sexual), redeemed his existence. And even when
Southampton finally rejected him, he refused to cease
loving, even at the brink of death.
Oxford was a troubled but large-hearted man. His
life had begun in great promise: he was titled, rich, and
immensely talented. He was also lovable, but proud,
impulsive, and sometimes quarrelsome. By his thirties he
had not only suffered misfortune, but brought most of his
woes on himself; he suffered from scandal and
humiliation. His wild temper nearly ruined his marriage;
in time he came to realize his faults, and his hard-won
wisdom bore fruit in the plays and poems the world still
adores.
This story is reflected, somewhat obscurely, in the
Sonnets. It's essentially a simple and, I think, very
moving story; but scholarship, being scholarship, has
missed it.
In 1571, at the age of 21, Oxford had married Ann
Cecil, the 15-year-old daughter of the great Lord
Burghley, the most powerful man in Elizabethan England.
Burghley had become Oxford's guardian when his father,
the 16th Earl of Oxford, died in 1562. In 1590 Burghley
decided that Elizabeth de Vere, his granddaughter and
Oxford's eldest daughter, should marry the handsome young
Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). Southampton, for unknown
reasons, didn't want to marry Elizabeth. Since he and
Elizabeth were still in their teens, he may simply have
felt unready for matrimony.
Oxford was immediately smitten with the boy. He
joined Burghley's campaign to promote the marriage by
writing sonnets -- the first 17 Sonnets -- urging
Southampton to marry and beget a son, on the curious
grounds that a lad so beautiful had a duty to "the world"
to propagate his beauty. When Southampton still refused
to marry, Oxford continued to write sonnets, in which we
may get glimpses of how a love affair commenced between
the two men, despite the wide gap between their ages.
In this affair Southampton, being young, desirable,
and popular, always had the upper hand. The Sonnets
(published in 1609, five years after Oxford's death) make
this clear. Oxford's poetic voice is adoring and often
pleading, generous but insecure, often on the verge of
heartbreak:
Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate.
Sometimes Oxford exultantly idealizes the boy.
Sometimes, in the boy's absence, he is lovesick, full of
worry, jealousy, and despair. Sometimes he scolds him, in
a rather paternal way. Several times he warns him to be
discreet about their association, for the boy's own sake.
These are the poems of a self-consciously aging man;
one of their dominant notes, missed by virtually all the
commentators (though it is so obvious I marvel that any
reader can miss it), is regret. Oxford feels that his
time has passed, and it is too late to repair the wreck
he has made of his life. The first 126 Sonnets have the
tone of a middle-aged man deeply, desperately in love
with someone a generation younger than he is. (Their tone
alone is enough to rule out William of Stratford as the
author; he was still in his twenties when the first poems
to Southampton were written, too young to be looking back
in despair on a wasted life.)
In the end Southampton went his own way, leaving
Oxford to insist that he would always love him
regardless. Oxford expressed his undying love with
exquisite eloquence: "Love is not love / Which alters
when it alteration finds"; "No, Time, thou shalt not
boast that I do change."
Oxford's determination to keep loving even after
crushing rejection is one of the most touching things
poetry has ever recorded. His love was certainly strange
and unconventional; but Oxford was a strange and
unconventional man, willing to bear disgrace rather than
compromise himself. Sonnet 121 ("'Tis better to be vile
than vile esteemed") shows his defiance of public
opinion, "others' seeing" and "vulgar scandal." No matter
how others might judge him, he would judge himself by his
own lights. He loved Southampton -- "my lovely boy" -- to
the bitter end, no matter what the world might think of
him, no matter even what Southampton himself might think.
It was a love that could "redeem all sorrows / That ever
I have felt," even when it broke his heart.
The traditional identification of William of
Stratford as the Bard has entirely misapprehended the
story the Sonnets tell. These poems -- the first 126,
anyway -- were written for Southampton alone: Oxford
never meant for most of them to be published.
According to the traditional view, the Sonnets tell
us "universal truths." Many scholars regard them as
"fictional." This view is utterly wrong. The first 126
Sonnets are the record of a very real and unique love,
without precedent in literature and not even "literary"
in the usual sense. The poet used certain literary
conventions of the Petrarchan sonnet to say things no
poet had ever dreamed of saying before. All his genius
was concentrated on one young man who apparently failed
to understand the immense compliment he was receiving.
Far from being "universal," his love was sui generis.
C.S. Lewis, who doesn't question the authorship of
William of Stratford, nevertheless has some acutely
appreciative remarks about the Sonnets [in ENGLISH
LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY EXCLUDING DRAMA --
ed.]. Their story is "so odd a story that we find a
difficulty in regarding it as fiction." He thinks their
language "too lover-like for that of ordinary male
friendship.... I have found no real parallel to such
language between friends in sixteenth-century literature.
Yet, on the other hand, this does not seem to be the
poetry of full-blown pederasty."
Above all, Lewis finds the Sonnets wonderful
expressions of selfless love:
The self-abnegation, the "naughting," in the
SONNETS never rings false. This patience, this
anxiety (more like a parent's than a lover's)
to find excuses for the beloved, this clear-
sighted and wholly unembittered resignation,
this transference of the whole self into
another self without the demand for a return,
have hardly a precedent in profane literature.
In certain senses of the word "love," Shake-
speare is not so much our best as our only
love poet.
This story has nothing to do with the legendary
"Shakespeare of Stratford." The Sonnets have baffled
scholarship because the scholars have assumed the wrong
man as the author. It's a natural mistake, but, being a
mistake, has borne no fruit. The Sonnets have always
seemed unrelated to William of Stratford for the simple
reason that he didn't write them.
This interpretation of the Sonnets, unless I'm badly
mistaken, covers the facts and explains nearly everything
that has been inexplicable to conventional scholarship,
which has been confused by its initial assumption about
William of Stratford. Once we realize that Oxford wrote
the Sonnets, and that they were addressed (as many of the
scholars, to their credit, have grasped) to Southampton,
we can put the hitherto baffling facts and loose ends
together in a way that finally makes sense.
I don't mean to excuse or extenuate the
homosexuality of the relations between Oxford and
Southampton. But to leave it at that, as if sensuality
exhausted the relationship, is to miss something vital
and, to my mind, deeply endearing. Oxford was, I repeat,
in *love* with Southampton, in much the way a man may be
in love with a woman; such utter devotion may be somewhat
adulterated by carnality, without being totally corrupted
by it. Oxford's love for his mistress, recorded in
Sonnets 127-52, is much more carnal, at times almost
contemptuous: he never exalts her as he does his "better
angel."
What sort of "possessing" Oxford ultimately hoped
for, I don't know; but he continued to love Southampton
when possessing him was no longer possible. In some ways
his love seems paternal. His final sonnet to Southampton
(126) sounds like a father's tender parting advice to his
son; its opening words -- "O thou my lovely boy" -- make
my heart melt. (They had the same effect on my friend
Peter Brimelow, who used them in a book dedicated to his
little boy.)
Even if I'm right, all this still leaves an element
of mystery. In the Sonnets we read one of the world's
amazing love stories as in a glass, darkly.
Nuggets
UNSPEAKABLE THOUGHTS: Tennis great John McEnroe, still
spry at 41, has irked feminists by saying that he, or
indeed any first-rate male college tennis player, could
beat even the best women players in the world. The
feminists don't exactly deny it; being feminists, they're
just annoyed that anyone would say the obvious so
bluntly. When it comes to sports, they don't insist on
equal pay for equal work. The free market sure can be
gallant sometimes, can't it? (page 8)
CHECK THE FIGURES: Many of us pay more in taxes than
we pay for housing, food, medicine, and utilities.
Nowadays the real wolf at the door is the government.
(page 8)
HOT TOPICS THAT LEAVE ME COLD: Bush-Gore debates,
soft money, Medicare tinkering, the Middle-East peace
process, education reform, same-sex marriage, AIDS, rogue
nations, oil prices, Chinese espionage, negative
campaigning, the war on drugs, professional wrestling,
Dennis Miller, Eminem, and Jennifer Lopez. Like, who
*cares?* (page 10)
ECONOMICS IN ONE (VERY SHORT) LESSON: Clinton's
eagerness to take credit for prosperity is a reminder of
how rulers boast of the success of whatever they don't
manage to destroy. The plain truth is that the market
takes care of itself without government assistance. If
you doubt that, consider how black markets thrive, not
only without the state's help, but *in spite of the
state's most determined efforts to crush them.* (page
12)
[Exclusive to the electronic version]
STATISTICAL SCRUPLES: Janet Reno is "troubled" by a
new Justice Department finding that nearly 80 per cent of
the thugs on death row in federal prisons are nonwhite.
Does she know of any of them who was wrongly convicted or
excessively sentenced? Or does she know of whites who
received lesser sentences for equivalent crimes? She
could help erase the racial disparity by being less
lenient on white malefactors like Clinton and Gore.
THE BEST MAN: After hearing my old running mate Howard
Phillips interviewed the other day, I thought admiringly:
"If Junior Bush could talk like that, he'd walk away with
the election." So principled, direct, forceful.
Unfortunately, Bush is trying so hard to prove he's not
too conservative that he's let Gore convince the public
that he's not too liberal.
Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12)
* Joe Lieberman's Dual Orthodoxies (August 10, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000810.shtml
* The Man from Nowhere (August 17, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000817.shtml
* Getting Personal (August 22, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000822.shtml
* Abortion and the English Language (August 24, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000824.shtml
* The Sin of Joe Lieberman (August 29, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000829.shtml
* Scouting and Sodomy (August 31, 2000)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/000831.shtml
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved.
SOBRAN'S is distributed by the Griffin Internet
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[ENDS]