Sobran's -- The Real News of the Month July 2001 Volume 8, No. 7 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates. Print version: $59.95 per year; $100 for 2 years; trial subscription available for $19.95 (5 issues). E-mail subscriptions: $39.95 for 1 year ($25 with a 12-month subscription to the print edition); $65 for 2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print edition). Address: Sobran's, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-493-3348. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue CONTENTS Features -> The Moving Picture -> The Great American Novel (with out-takes) -> From Federation to Monolith The Loose Leaf Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition) List of Columns Reprinted FEATURES The Moving Picture (pages 1-2) Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, long a Republican, has effectively switched to the Democratic Party. Well, why not? Are the two parties all that different? The Republicans are writhing because Jeffords has shifted the balance of power in the Senate, giving the Democrats a 51-to-49 majority; but how can they really complain? If our major parties were really opposed on principle, this sort of conversion would be impossible. Imagine (say) a Libertarian toying with the idea of becoming a Communist. Democrats are praising Jeffords's "conscience" and "courage." Just what has this shrewd career move cost him? By exploiting his leverage he's become the instant pet of the media and his new party. * * * Somehow -- call it prophecy, call it clairvoyance -- I *knew* the execution of Timothy McVeigh would be postponed. It just couldn't happen without a hitch, could it? He gloated to the end that the final score would be in his favor, 168 deaths to 1. It becomes narrower when you count the 93 people of Waco he was avenging. And numbers aside, his atrocity has actually made Waco seem less fiendish in comparison. Most people vaguely excuse anything done in the name of law enforcement (even if they don't know what law was being enforced), whereas they are shocked by *unauthorized* mass murder. * * * Speaking of which, Mother Waco herself -- Janet Reno -- says she may run for governor of Florida. How would she go about wooing Miami's Cuban vote? One wag suggests that she adopt this campaign slogan: "Reno -- She'll Get the Kids out of Your House." * * * The love life of New York's Mayor Rudy Giuliani is getting to be like THE SOPRANOS you can't help knowing about it even if you're trying not to pay any attention. Donna Hanover, the estranged Mrs. Giuliani, has won a court ruling that, for the children's sake, Rudy's mistress, Judi Nathan, may not shack -- er, visit -- him in Gracie Mansion. Rudy's lawyer Raoul Felder has blasted Donna (on Mother's Day!) as an "uncaring mother." Details of Rudy's impotence have been leaked to the press. New Yorkers are longing for the sobriety, dignity, and decorum of Ed Koch. * * * Over the past few years, William Kristol and David Brooks of the neoconservative WEEKLY STANDARD have become media-ubiquitous apostles of something they call "national greatness conservatism." Their progress has been noted by Franklin Foer, who writes in THE NEW REPUBLIC that they now "champion campaign finance reform and environmental protection. They oppose the Bush administration's proposed repeal of the estate tax because, as Brooks puts it, 'We should be concerned with the widening income gap.' They attack corporate power with Naderesque ferocity." And they favor a militarily aggressive foreign policy, with full U.S. support for Israel and hostility to China. Foer observes that they also want to detach the Republican Party from the Christian Right (last year they backed John McCain's candidacy against George W. Bush). So what's "conservative" about all this? Or any of it? * * * The renewed, endless violence in the Middle East has inspired all sorts of analyses and think-pieces on how to get the "peace process" going again. I've yet to see an explanation of the benefits to ordinary Americans of U.S. involvement in that hopeless mess. Neither the Zionist nor the Islamic (or other Arab) cause is linked to any interest of most Americans. The Jews aren't grateful for our support, as Ariel Sharon, like his predecessors, has made clear enough, and Muslims, especially Arabs, hate us bitterly for it. The fanatics on both sides have one thing in common, though: they are more rational than we are. They are at least fighting for things that are holy to them. Just what are *we* hoping to get? * * * Actually, I can answer that last question: "we" are going to get reelected. What we are pleased to call our "elected representatives" are bought and/or intimidated by the Israeli lobby. (The Israeli journalist Ari Shavit has remarked, with no more than modest realism, that the U.S. Congress is "in our hands.") So there will be no sanctions against Sharon for his defiant use of American F-16s to strike Palestinians in the occupied territories; just as there have never been sanctions against Israeli espionage and technology theft, or against the 1967 Israeli assault on the U.S.S. Liberty that killed 34 American sailors. By an interesting coincidence, Congressman James Traficant, an outspoken Ohio Democrat who is one of the very few members of Congress to criticize Israel, now faces federal criminal charges for something or other. The Zionist WEEKLY STANDARD (see above) is cackling with amusement at his plight. Another chapter in the relations between our "reliable ally" and our prostitute Congress. * * * We're told that we live under a system of democratic self-government -- We the People rule ourselves -- so that when we pay taxes we are actually taxing, and paying, ourselves. And the federal debt doesn't really matter, because, as Franklin Roosevelt taught us, "we owe it to ourselves." I suppose it follows that when the Internal Revenue Service menaces us with prison for failing to cooperate in the confiscation of our wealth, we are only threatening ourselves. * * * A friend of mine can recall his awe, as a boy, at meeting living veterans of the Civil War. Which prompts me to reflect that no living American is old enough to remember living under the U.S. Constitution, and few if any can recall living before the income tax and the replacement of the real dollar by the Federal Reserve Note. Thus living memories become ancient history, people can hardly imagine what they can no longer remember, and the customary evils that have replaced sound traditions come to seem natural, inevitable, eternal. The Great American Novel (page 3) {{Passages in double curly brackets were cut from the print edition for reasons of space.}} Time has been unkind to the reputation of Margaret Mitchell's novel GONE WITH THE WIND. Since the late 1940s liberal critics have derided it for creating a falsely glamorous picture of the Old South; a black woman recently created a stir by rewriting the story from (what else?) the slaves' point of view. Yet in 1936 GONE WITH THE WIND was as much a critical as a popular success, winning rave reviews and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Typical of the currently fashionable derision is the Princeton historian James M. McPherson, who in DRAWN WITH THE SWORD writes scornfully of "the moonlight-and- magnolias GONE WITH THE WIND image of the Confederacy," its "distortions and romanticizations." The book "glamorized the Old South and romanticized the Confederacy." Yet GONE WITH THE WIND is anything but a glamorization of the Confederacy; just the opposite. The story unfolds amid bitter war and vindictive Reconstruction. Its hero and heroine are a pair of scalawags who share none of the illusions of their compatriots. Rhett Butler, who makes a fortune as a blockade runner, openly ridicules the notion that the South can defeat the North in war. Scarlett O'Hara cares little about the war or the cherished myths of Southern patriotism; during Reconstruction she, like Rhett, incurs social contempt and ostracism by shamelessly doing business with the occupying Yankees. She and Rhett are bound together by their frankly cynical realism {{amid the prevailing folly. They have nothing in common with Robert E. Lee.}} Their romance itself is hardly romantic. Rhett treats Scarlett with infuriating mockery; she insults him in reply, but he laughs it off. Her real love through most of the book is Ashley Wilkes, who, for all his Southern gentlemanliness, knows that the South is doomed to defeat; his code of honor proves archaic, and, unlike Rhett and Scarlett, he is clearly ineffectual in coping with war's aftermath. The world has passed such people by; they're no longer fit to live in it. {{The slaves have both dignity and individuality: Mammy and Uncle Peter are quite unafraid to tell Scarlett off. True, they speak in Negro dialect rather than the king's English; but then, a surprising number of Negroes did. Mitchell had merely discovered Ebonics before its time.}} Far from creating stereotypes, Mitchell (1900-1949) is the victim of stereotyping. She has been typecast as the champion of the ancien regime, when she was anything but. In fact she belonged to a generation of Southern rebels who rejected Confederate mythology, though they weren't buying into Northern mythology either. After an unhappy year at Smith College, she did an enormous amount of research on her own for the big novel she was writing during her late twenties. The bulk of the book was written in three years, but she kept reading history and economics and correcting tiny details even after the book was accepted for publication in 1935. Her biographer Darden Asbury Pyron notes that she anticipated the iconoclastic economic interpretations of the war later advanced by Charles and Mary Beard. Rhett's jaunty debunking of Confederate shibboleths springs from her research. {{She was compulsive about getting minutiae right. "I worry if I don't have ten references for each fact," she told one correspondent. "Even if I made an error, I suppose few people would realize it. No one outside of north Georgia would know. But I would know and would probably wake up screaming in the night about it." But}} Mitchell was above all a masterful storyteller. Her research never upstages the tale or the characters. And Rhett and Scarlett are two of the most riveting characters in fiction. Rhett's mockery of respectable hypocrisies, his cheerful willingness to accept his reputation as a scoundrel, and his seeming indifference to Scarlett's rejections all make him fascinating both as romantic hero and as ruthless social commentator. Scarlett's more furtive contempt for respectability as she scrambles to survive makes her nearly as irresistible. After selling the film rights to David O. Selznick of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Mitchell actually worried that Hollywood would convey a falsely romantic picture of the Old South, with opulent mansions featuring Greekish marble columns. And some of her fears were realized. A screenwriter's corny prologue informs the viewer, in cloying terms totally alien to Mitchell, of a vanished land of "cavaliers," "knights," and "ladies fair"; Max Steiner's relentlessly gushing music reinforces this false impression; and the Wilkes mansion, Twelve Oaks, is everything Mitchell warned against. Yet even the movie is short on moonlight and magnolias, and its virtues are largely due to its literal -- often literal-minded -- fidelity to the novel. The studio was afraid to offend countless devoted readers (and Mitchell herself) by altering the sacred text. And rightly so. GONE WITH THE WIND is a superb and mature novel, one that makes everything Hemingway wrote about war and manhood, not to mention women, seem puerile by comparison. If, while puncturing Confederate illusions, it also clashes with today's liberal pieties, that is because it exposes their hollowness too. Like all great novels, it offers a richly realized world, defying every narrow philosophy. From Federation to Monolith (pages 4-5) I'm always grateful when liberals come clean about what they're really up to. A few years ago I praised a scholar named George P. Fletcher for acknowledging, in an article in THE NEW REPUBLIC, that we no longer live under the U.S. Constitution. He argued that this is a good thing, because the Constitution sustained an obsolete social order; but at least he didn't pretend, as most liberals do, that the present political regime is an organic development of the "living" Constitution. Now Fletcher (who teaches at the Columbia University School of Law) has expanded that article into a book. I regret to say that the book, OUR SECRET CONSITUTION: HOW LINCOLN REDEFINED AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (Oxford University Press), has left me considerably less elated than its seminal article did. Still, it leaves no doubt that the liberal agenda, as I've always insisted, has no connection with the Constitution that is still, officially at least, on the books. Fletcher states his thesis right up front: "The Civil War called forth a new constitutional order. At the heart of this postbellum legal order lay the Reconstruction Amendments -- the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified in the years 1865 to 1870. The principles of this new legal regime are so different from our original Constitution, drafted in 1787, that they deserve to be recognized as a second American Constitution. The New Constitution established, in fact, a Second American Republic." Again, "we have undergone a major disruption in our constitutional history, which we try to camouflage as a single evolving Constitution." But the emergence of a second Constitution after the Civil War "was a historical necessity, and there is no turning back from the course we then adopted." Fletcher faults American historians who "overlook the consolidation of the United States as a nation in the mid-nineteenth-century sense of the term." We have, he says, "experienced a major rupture in our supposed two- hundred-plus years of continuity under the same legal order. The lawyers who rarely look beyond our borders employ a methodology of 'original intent' that can only make Continental Europeans smile at our simple- mindedness." We can't have those sophisticated Europeans smiling at us, can we? The consolidations of Germany and Italy, one might observe, were followed by National Socialism and Fascism, along with two world wars; the appropriate lesson may not be the one Fletcher intends. Perhaps the Framers of the first Constitution were correct in their suspicion of "consolidation." The appeal to "original intent," moreover, is not a naive plea for archaism. It's a recognition of the need for stability in law, and therefore in the language of law. The historical understanding of the Constitution's meaning is, as Madison said, the only rational foundation for its proper interpretation. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of the fanciful notions of modern justices who want to superimpose their own pet policies on the document under the guise of constitutional imperatives. The principles of the two Constitutions, Fletcher stresses, are "radically opposed to each other." The first established a limited federation among the *states*; the second established a monolithic *nation* "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and empowered, moreover, to *make* them equal. As his use of Lincoln's words indicates, Fletcher believes that this second Constitution was actually founded, not in the postwar amendments, but in the Gettysburg Address. And he thinks we should finally acknowledge our "secret" Constitution. How can this be, when the Gettysburg Address had no legal force at all, but was merely one man's 272-word rhetorical performance? Fletcher has a woolly notion that the "nation" somehow gestated within the forms of the original Constitution until it was ready to be "brought forth" at Gettysburg in 1863. The Civil War established it as a fact that the United States were a single entity, from which no state could withdraw. Like other champions of Lincoln, Fletcher gives him credit for doing precisely what he denied any intention of doing; he also overlooks Lincoln's hardly liberal views on race. Far from seeking a revolutionary transformation, as his more hysterical enemies charged, Lincoln consistently professed to be "preserving the Constitution" and "saving the Union" -- the Union "as of old," slavery and all, until he decided to emancipate slaves in the seceding states. Even then, he conceived this emancipation narrowly, as a war measure, which he might order for the purpose of suppressing rebellion, but which Congress had no power to enact under the Constitution. (He thought it likely that the courts would strike down, as unconstitutional, the Emancipation Proclamation.) Lincoln did say, at Gettysburg, that "our fathers" had "brought forth a new nation" in 1776, never mind that the Declaration of Independence spoke only of 13 "free and independent states," not a single monolithic "nation." Still, it was the original "nation" he said he was trying to save; he didn't say or imply that he was transforming it. The founding generation, which adopted the Constitution, was hostile to the very idea of a single "consolidated" government of the kind Fletcher prefers (and falsely projects onto the past). Needless to say, Lincoln never suggested that a new Constitution was being enacted; even if he had wished it (and there is no evidence that he did), he could never have proclaimed it publicly. Nor did those who framed and ratified the postwar amendments suggest that they were doing any more than adding a few clauses to the one and only Constitution. These clauses did give the federal government new powers over the states, but the Constitution was otherwise intact. Later rulings by a liberal U.S. Supreme Court vastly expanded the reach of these amendments, especially the Fourteenth, which has become an all-purpose battering ram against state and local laws the Court dislikes; but those rulings are clearly untenable. If the Fourteenth meant everything the Court has said it means, then later amendments -- ensuring Negroes and women the vote, for example -- were superfluous. Nobody in 1865-70, or long afterward, thought the Fourteenth Amendment virtually repealed the Tenth, which reserves to the states and the people all the powers not delegated to the federal government. It was generally agreed that a federal income tax, a national prohibition of liquor sales, and expansion of the franchise required formal changes in the Constitution. Otherwise, the Fourteenth Amendment would have been an omnibus measure, granting limitless power to the federal government -- and, incidentally, abolishing federalism. Lincoln himself opposed amending the Constitution at all in 1848, on grounds that "it can scarcely be made better than it is." Even when taking gross liberties with it during the Civil War -- liberties that amounted to blatant violations -- he retained odd scruples against loose interpretation. He also consistently opposed allowing the judiciary to usurp the political and legislative processes, as in the Dred Scott decision. Though he favored the Thirteenth Amendment, he might have had reservations about the Fourteenth and Fifteenth -- and certainly about the later misapplication of the Fourteenth. But Lincoln isn't the point here. We tend to forget the rest of the dramatis personae of the period; and what Fletcher is tacitly admitting is that the Confederacy was essentially right, and the Union forces wrong, about the real meaning of the original Constitution. Since the "new" Constitution was only made manifest at Gettysburg in 1863, the South, in 1861, was fighting, just as it claimed to be, for the old Constitution, an order of confederated sovereign states. The North was fighting, whether it knew it or not, for a novel and as yet unarticulated principle of monolithic nationhood. Under that principle the states would be reduced to mere provinces, holding their powers only by sufferance of the almighty Union. This is what Fletcher is saying, without quite realizing it. Of course many Northerners sensed what was at stake and hoped the original Constitution would be preserved. Some caviled at the Gettysburg Address on grounds that the war was (as Lincoln himself had at first avowed) a war to save the Constitution, not to induce "a new birth of freedom," whatever that might mean. But the Constitution itself became a casualty of the war. To put it even more plainly, the Constitution is dead. We may, if we like, say that we now live under a "new," a "secret," or a "living" Constitution, but that doesn't change the fact. It merely tries to disguise it. To live under a Constitution whose meaning may be changed at will by those it is supposed to restrain is like having a butcher who can redefine ounces and pounds at his own whim: it rather defeats the purpose. Lawless rulers usually plead that they are obeying a "higher law." Fletcher not only admits this -- "Those who fight in the name of the higher law allow themselves to sidestep the rules" -- but approves of it: "The faith in principles of higher law explains why Lincoln, in the aftermath of war, was committed to articulating a new foundation for the Union. It accounts as well for Lincoln's casual [!] attitude toward formal constitutional institutions, such as the writ of habeas corpus. It also explains why, after Lincoln's assassination, the radical Republicans in Congress used allegedly [sic!] illegal means to coerce the South to accept the Fourteenth Amendment." Allegedly? If it was necessary to "coerce" ratification, that ratification was contrary to every principle of law. No agreement signed under duress is valid. So the very basis of the "new" Constitution is void. If Lincoln and the Unionists have to be defended this way, it's hardly necessary to indict them. Still, it would be suicidal for the current regime to undercut its own legitimacy by acknowledging that the old Constitution died long ago, with the Confederacy. The "secret" Constitution must remain secret. THE LOOSE LEAF It occurs to me that if the late TIMOTHY McVEIGH had performed 168 abortions, the federal government would have gone out of its way to protect him. +++ GEORGE STALLINGS, formerly known as Father Stallings, before he became founder and self-installed archbishop of the renegade African American Catholic Congregation, has taken another step away from mainstream (or, as he would say, white racist) Catholicism: he has married a Japanese woman, in a ceremony conducted by the REVEREND SUN MYUNG MOON. +++ Among many others united in wedlock in the same extravaganza was the 71-year-old Archbishop (for real!) EMMANUEL MILINGO, an eccentric African who had already been stripped of his archdiocese by the Vatican for his erratic behavior. He and the missus plan to have kids. At least he doesn't appear to reject HUMANAE VITAE. A newly discovered alleged portrait of SHAKESPEARE at 39, transparently inauthentic, is causing excitement in the press. Who is the subject, really? Dunno. But the labeling, which not only names him as Shakespeare but gives his dates of birth and death, is anachronistic and must have been added long after the picture was made. +++ Inspired by JIM JEFFORDS, JOHN McCAIN is flirting with defection from the GOP too. He says he has no intention of doing so. You don't have to like the Republicans to feel their pain as these media-coddled "moderates" have opportune attacks of "conscience" (aka ego). +++ Why did it take Jeffords so many years to figure out that he was a liberal Democrat? It was obvious long ago. +++ The DEMOCRATS' Senate edge may be short-lived: New Jersey's BOB TORRICELLI, who lives in the fast lane, is said to be on the verge of indictment on bribery and corruption charges. The critics have been unkind to the new flick PEARL HARBOR, but it seems to be a TITANIC-scale hit with young viewers, who don't seem to mind a scene in which FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT displays his determination to win the war by miraculously rising from his wheelchair and standing unassisted. Naturally, the movie features a love story. No, it doesn't involve FDR and JOE STALIN. +++ Former CBS reporter BERNARD GOLDBERG, a reformed liberal, writes in the WALL STREET JOURNAL that DAN RATHER once described the NEW YORK TIMES to him as "middle of the road." Sure, if the road is in North Korea. That explains a lot about Dan's slant on the news. O.J. SIMPSON has been offering advice to fellow- widower ROBERT BLAKE, who must be very grateful for help from such a quarter in his hour of need. +++ BILL CLINTON has been spending a lot of time in Ireland lately. After ST. PATRICK went to all that trouble to rid the Emerald Isle of snakes! +++ The NATIONAL ENQUIRER reports that Bill's spiritual counselor JESSE JACKSON is trying to dump his wife, ever so gently, so he can marry mistress KARIN STANFORD. +++ The tabs are also saying that TED KENNEDY and current wife VICTORIA REGGIE are more or less finished. But remember, he's still good on women's issues. +++ The eternally delightful BOB NEWHART, in a commencement speech at Chicago's Loyola University, offered this tip on how to appear intelligent: "You don't actually have to be intelligent, if you can just create the perception. This can usually be accomplished by a reference to KAFKA, even if you have never read any of his -- or her -- work." You have to admire the comic artistry that can get a howl out of a pronoun. +++ In some of this year's other commencement addresses, BRYANT GUMBEL bemoaned "the plight of people of color," MARIO CUOMO bemoaned poverty, and TONI MORRISON bemoaned most everything. Sounds exciting, eh? Guess you had to be there. +++ Former senator BOB KERREY is still being treated as a victim because some people want to know if he's a murderer. Someone (I forget who) has asked whether NEWSWEEK would have sat on the story as it did if the subject had been PAT BUCHANAN. The JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, so-called, is renewing its disgraceful efforts to strip JOHN DEMJANJUK, now 81, of his citizenship. Last time, you'll recall, the old man, after an ordeal of several years, was ultimately acquitted -- in Israel! -- of being an infamous Treblinka concentration camp guard known as "IVAN THE TERRIBLE"; it later transpired that the government had hidden some documents contradicting its own charges. Now he's accused of being someone else at a different camp. Nearly half a century after Joe McCarthy was discredited, anti-Nazi hysteria marches on. +++ The fourth ALI-FRAZIER fight ended with Ali winning by a decision -- only this time the fighters, LAILA and JACQUI, were the daughters of the two former champs. A chip off the old block, Laila called her opponent "ugly" and "ignorant." Civilization marches on. NUGGETS TACIT ADMISSIONS DEPT.: Noticed how many liberals demand the death penalty for those who kill abortionists? They thereby admit that the death penalty *does* deter after all: they know it deters doctors from performing abortions, and they also expect it to deter anti- abortionists from deterring doctors from performing abortions. You never hear them say: "If we kill anti- abortionists, we're no better than they are." Or maybe they just want revenge. (page 8) CALLING ALL LOGICIANS! The media are devoutly observing the twentieth anniversary of the emergence of AIDS. Unlike lung cancer, which has been used to justify a government crackdown on tobacco, AIDS isn't even causing second thoughts about the sexual revolution. On the contrary, it's still being used to legitimize homosexuality (and, of course, new "humanitarian" tasks for the government). Go figure. (page 11) Exclusive to the electronic version: ENDLESS EMERGENCIES: Being ignorant of the physical sciences, I have no idea whether global warming and other alleged environmental dangers are for real. All I do know is that environmentalism has been eagerly embraced by the Usual Suspects as warrant for expanding the role and power of the state -- their favorite "solution" to everything they define as a "problem." Has Al Gore ever discovered a problem whose solution would require *less* government? Has he ever seen government itself as a problem? CLARION VOICE OF TYRANNY: California's Attorney General Bill Lockyer has come right out with it: he *favors* homosexual rape in prisons. Denouncing Kenneth Lay, chairman of Enron Corporation, who hasn't even been charged with breaking any law, Lockyer told a press conference: "I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey.'" Lockyer doesn't just admit the reality of prison rape; he sees it not as a horror, but as part of the punishment he can inflict on enemies of the state. Even if they're not criminals. REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12) * Pedophilia and Hypocrisy (May 8, 2001) http://www.sobran.com/columns/010508.shtml * Hate Mail (May 10, 2001) http://www.sobran.com/columns/010510.shtml * Finding Evil (May 15, 2001) http://www.sobran.com/columns/010515.shtml * Dylan versus the Sixties (May 24, 2001) http://www.sobran.com/columns/010524.shtml * Casey at the Court (May 29, 2001) http://www.sobran.com/columns/010529.shtml * Slavery in Perspective (May 31, 2001) http://www.sobran.com/columns/010531.shtml ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ All articles are written by Joe Sobran You may forward this newsletter if you include the following subscription and copyright information: Subscribe to the Sobran E-Package. See http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples or call 800-513-5053. Copyright (c) 2001 by The Vere Company. All rights reserved. Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate www.griffnews.com with permission. [ENDS]