SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month

September 2002
Volume 9, No. 9

Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
Subscription Rates.
   Print version: $44.95 per year; $85 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: 703-281-1609 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 1-800-513-5053. Allow
   4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue.

{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for 
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets. 
Emphasis is indicated by the presence of asterisks around 
the emphasized words.}}



CONTENTS
Features
  -> Bush's Brain
  -> Thoughts on Power (plus Exclusives to this edition)
  -> Slandering the Right
  -> Cloning PSYCHO
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted



FEATURES

Bush's Brain
(page 1)

     "So far is it from being true that men are naturally 
equal," Samuel Johnson once observed to James Boswell, 
"that we see that no two men can be together half an 
hour, without one of them attaining a very evident 
superiority over the other."

     As the Bush administration was announcing plans for 
a plainly aggressive -- alias "pre-emptive" -- war on 
Iraq, it suddenly hit me: this will be Dick Cheney's war. 
The vice president is pulling the president's chain. This 
is, in truth, the Cheney administration.

     Listen to the two men speak. Bush is notoriously 
inarticulate; or, as I would put it, he has a way of 
wandering into a sentence without knowing how he's going 
to find his way out of it. He is inarticulate because he 
is indecisive; a purposeful man doesn't speak that way. 
The English sentence has an inherent tendency to dribble 
off; it doesn't force you to think ahead, as, I gather, 
you have to do when speaking German or Latin. Bush is a 
mumbling, bumbling, blundering man. His speech reveals 
his character. His predicates sound like clumsy 
afterthoughts.

     Cheney, by contrast, is decisive. The style is the 
man. He knows what he wants. He speaks crisply. His 
speech is that of a forceful man in full command of his 
own mind. When he and Bush are alone together, Bush is 
badly outnumbered. And Cheney has wanted war with Iraq 
from the start.

     It has already become a commonplace to say that 
Cheney enjoys more authority than any previous vice 
president. But it's more than that. He has a daunting 
force of personality. When Bush couldn't make up his mind 
about war, Cheney made it up for him.

     The relation between Bush and Cheney is like that of 
a king and an ambitious prime minister. Bush might as 
well be a hereditary monarch; he is president only 
because his father was a president. But Cheney has 
reached his plateau by will, intelligence, and ability. 
You don't have to like him in order to respect him. He 
understands power.

     The mother of George III of England is said to have 
urged him, "George, be a king." Propriety dictates that 
George W. Bush appear "presidential." He does his best to 
learn his lines. But he is a nonentity. It's Cheney, in 
spite of his shaky heart, who imposes his will on this 
administration. He is the man to watch. Usually the vice 
president is a running gag. This one isn't.

     Though usually described as conservative, Cheney 
sees eye to eye with hawkish Jewish neoconservatives like 
Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. He probably cares 
little for Israel, but he cares even less for the 
Palestinians, and his aims are broadly congruent with 
Ariel Sharon's: joint American-Israeli domination, for 
the time being, of the Middle East. Both men find Bush 
ductile material.

     This isn't the first time a nominal head of state 
has been ruled by a cunning and determined underling. 
Cheney is Jeeves to Bush's Bertie Wooster.



Thoughts on Power
(page 2)

     Advanced weaponry, not the U.S. Constitution, 
defines the nature of the U.S. Government today. It 
represents a standing threat to kill millions of people. 
Usually the threat is directed against foreigners, but 
there is no reason why it couldn't be directed against 
Americans if necessary. Not that I expect this to happen; 
we are all resigned to living under the Superpower.

*          *          *

     Once upon a time, the ordinary man was a peasant who 
feared famine and disease; even the worst of kings was 
too weak and remote to harm him. Today the ordinary man 
has no fear of famine or disease killing him and his 
family, but the State knows where to reach him. It has 
new weapons, and it keeps good records. A Richard III 
might pose danger to his own flesh and blood, but he 
didn't even know the names of all his subjects.

*          *          *

     We are hardly aware of our despair. We no longer 
even aspire to the natural freedom our ancestors could 
take for granted. Imagine the horror they would have felt 
if someone had predicted the kind of state we take for 
granted!

*          *          *

     The threat of the state makes liberals of us all. 
Politics is our Black Death. It infects everything, even 
our thoughts and attitudes.

*          *          *

     C.S. Lewis observes that in the democratic age we no 
longer speak of "rulers," but of "leaders." Of a "ruler," 
he continues, one expects the sober virtues of justice, 
wisdom, and clemency -- qualities that preserve peace and 
tradition. Of a "leader" one expects dash, drive, 
enthusiasm, dynamism -- qualities that hurry the populace 
into change of some sort.

*          *          *

     Change itself is now presumed to be improvement. 
Politicians campaign on the mantra of "change," heedless 
of what they destroy.

*          *          *

     The old, weak king was flattered by such addresses 
as "mighty sovereign." He needed to exaggerate his power. 
But the far worse tyrants of our own time want to be 
known as our "comrades," "fellow citizens," and "public 
servants."

*          *          *

     Isn't it droll that politics is called "public 
service"? It's really nothing but competition for power, 
especially the power to take the citizen's wealth. The 
State is a monopoly of force, that's all; its moral 
pretensions are fraudulent. Anyone who doubts this should 
ponder the character of the most successful politicians 
-- Franklin Roosevelt, the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, Bill 
Clinton, and other notable "public servants." Is it mere 
accident that so many criminals have been in charge of 
the laws? Or does this reflect the very essence of the 
system? The answer seems to me quite obvious.

*          *          *

     For 80 years, Communism has blighted the fine arts, 
along with everything else; yet I can't get over my 
amazement that Sergei Prokofiev, one of Stalin's pets, 
was one of the greatest composers of the twentieth 
century. In fact he and Stalin died the same day: 
March 5, 1953. Prokofiev was perhaps the greater loss. 
After all, he was a genuine creator; Stalin was only a 
critic; and, like many critics, prone to undue severity. 


Exclusive to the electronic version:

     Both sides in the gun-control debate seem to me to 
miss the chief point of the Second Amendment. Its purpose 
is to prevent the Federal Government from disarming the 
state militias. The "security of a free state" meant the 
security of the free (and sovereign) state against the 
Federal Government itself. The Civil War destroyed the 
sovereignty of the states, and the Federal Government's 
nuclear arsenal has buried the old federal system good 
and deep. The Second Amendment tried to ensure a balance 
of military power between the Feds and the states.



Slandering the Right
(pages 3-5)

     Once again, a friend of mine has written a best-
selling book. And once again, it comes as no surprise, 
the friend is Ann Coulter.

     The book is SLANDER: LIBERAL LIES ABOUT THE 
AMERICAN RIGHT (Crown Publishers). It's a runaway chart-
topper. As the title suggests, it disdains subtle 
understatement. In a dust-jacket blurb, Robert Novak 
notes, "Ann Coulter is one of the fiery new breed of 
conservative commentators who don't worry what the 
Establishment thinks of them." Now *that's* subtle 
understatement.

     The first sentence of the book's first paragraph 
reads, "Political 'debate' in this country is 
insufferable." The paragraph ends, "It's all liberals' 
fault." On page 26, liberals "are completely unhinged." 
On page 55 we are told, "Principle is nothing to 
liberals. Winning is everything."

     The note is held throughout the book. Miss Coulter 
shows that smearing conservatives has become the norm for 
American liberals. Liberals think nothing of saying or 
insinuating that conservatives are stupid, Neanderthal, 
extremist, bigoted, heartless, sadistic, Nazi, and 
fanatically religious (though also, of course, 
un-Christian). The same smears Democrats make 
flamboyantly -- as when Ted Kennedy warned that Robert 
Bork would bring back "back-alley abortions," "segregated 
lunch counters," censorship of the arts, and the police 
state -- show up in more muted form in what purports to 
be impartial journalism.

     Just when you think she's lapsed into unrestrained 
exaggeration, Miss Coulter produces precise and footnoted 
quotations from the villains themselves to back up her 
case. She's a lawyer who's come to rumble. Her trademark 
is wild, reckless accuracy.

     I've known Ann -- enough of this "Miss Coulter" 
stuff -- since the mid 1980s, when she was just out of 
law school. Never a dull moment. The first thing to be 
said about her is that she is always laughing. Loudly. 
When she laughs quietly, as she sometimes does, you 
wonder whether her spirits are low. You seldom have to 
wonder long.

     Ann and I quickly became, I think I may accurately 
say, pals. We have shared many a dinner and drink, often 
chaperoned by my stern and humorless grandson, who has 
failed to quell her spirits. She grew up in genteel New 
Canaan, Connecticut, raised by her surpassingly good-
natured parents with two adoring big brothers. Nobody had 
to push her to be an overachiever.

     For years she moved back and forth between New York 
(which she loves) and Washington (which bores her), 
working as a lawyer while rising within the conservative 
movement. Her energy is immense, and she might have spent 
more time in Washington if she could have skied directly 
between the two cities. Her cheerful combativeness only 
makes her countless friends, all of whom find her 
enchanting, in a mildly alarming sort of way. She is like 
a happily bubbling volcano.

     I have watched her growing success with pleasure and 
a pride I might be tempted to call avuncular, if she ever 
showed respect for my age. Which she doesn't. She treats 
me like the youth I still secretly long to believe I have 
never ceased to be. She never makes me feel old, though 
her pep sometimes does.

     Ann has become a regular on television and radio 
talk shows, developing a polemical style suited to the 
age of Geraldo Rivera and Alan Dershowitz. It helps, at 
least on TV, that she is also smashingly good-looking. (I 
myself noticed this before she was a star.)

     She really came into her own during the Lewinsky 
scandal, when liberals were at their most contortive, 
damning (as she notes) the Starr Report of Clinton's 
amorous activities as "pornographic" while denying that 
those activities were "sex." Seldom have liberal 
hypocrisies been so manifest. Seldom has *any* hypocrisy 
been so rowdy and raucous. Clinton's conservative foes 
were always "sex-obsessed"; Clinton himself, sneaking a 
girl into the Oval Office for an Easter morning tryst, 
was not.

     On the eve of the impeachment vote in the Senate, 
NBC spiked an interview with Juanita Broaddrick, who 
plausibly charged that Clinton had raped her in 1978; the 
liberal line was that the story involved only Clinton's 
"private life," though he was his state's attorney 
general in 1978 and -- ex officio, one would think -- was 
supposed to be prosecuting rape, not committing it. (One 
must make some allowance, of course, for local 
traditions.) Anyway, couldn't conservatives get their 
minds off sex?

     As the scandal raged, the canons of feminism were 
suspended. Because Clinton was "good on women's issues" 
-- i.e., pro-abortion -- he was given a pass on what had 
formerly been the vital issue of "sexual harassment." 
Feminists like Gloria Steinem rushed to defend him 
against women who accused him of uninvited fondling, and 
worse. So much for the notion that such charges ought 
always to be taken seriously, especially when the accused 
were "powerful white males" -- a category that would seem 
to include the president of the United States. Like 
Hillary Clinton, the feminists stood by their man.

     They did so with a vengeance. Ann devotes several 
pages to the nastiest episode in recent public discourse: 
liberal and feminist attacks on Clinton's female accusers 
as "ugly." It's hard to remember, or imagine, anything 
more vicious than the ridicule of Paula Jones and Linda 
Tripp for the imperfections of their faces. Such puerile 
cruelty, one would think, could never occur outside the 
schoolyard. And it found its mark: both women were 
actually driven to undergo plastic surgery! Mrs. Tripp 
even made a bizarre public apology for her looks. To this 
day, no liberal has apologized to *her.*

     Journalists have called Linda Tripp 
"Barracudaville," smelling of "gunpower and garlic," 
"ugly and evil," and "Howard Stern in a fright wig," "a 
snitch, and an ugly one, at that." Syndicated columnist 
Julianne Malveaux referred to the "ugly stick [Tripp's] 
been beaten with -- there's something wrong with that 
woman, I'm serious." Actress Rose McGowan (JAWBREAKER) 
told the VILLAGE VOICE, "One thing that gives me 
pleasure is how ugly [Tripp] is. That's a karmic point. 
She deserves to be ugly." Another female (!) columnist, 
Heather Mallick, wrote, "Linda Tripp's the hulking dykey 
one and book agent Lucianne Goldberg's her ugly sister." 
In the book MONICA'S STORY, the author, Andrew Morton, 
also wrote of the "two ugly sisters, Linda Tripp and 
Lucianne Goldberg, [who] ensured that Monica never made 
it to the ball." Liz Langley, a (female) opinion 
columnist, said Linda Tripp and Paula Jones were neither 
"attractive nor possessed of human DNA." They "look like 
a bloated carcass and whatever's pecking at it."

     If you think Ann overgeneralizes about liberals, 
ponder that episode. Only a tiny handful of liberals 
protested the "ugly" taunts -- so cruel, so unseemly, so 
stupid, so irrelevant. One might almost say, so 
illiberal. You'd think feminists, above all, would object 
to humiliating women on the score of their looks. Or at 
least that they would be embarrassed to be seen doing so. 
Not at all. Instead, they took a lynch mob's glee in 
inflicting pain on the defenseless.

     Taking their cue, comedians like Jay Leno, sensitive 
to liberal-feminist pieties, joined in the fun. Nobody in 
their audiences cried, "For shame!" They had received 
cultural permission to mock ugly women. Well, *some* 
ugly women. The women in Clinton's cabinet were not to be 
confused with contestants in a beauty pageant, but they 
remained off-limits to this jolly sport.

     Such atavistic "humor" exposed the superficiality of 
the liberal pieties. They can be suspended whenever 
liberal tactical interests require it. Racial 
proprieties, as Ann shows, were similarly suspended when 
liberals mounted concerted attacks on Clarence Thomas 
(who was called, inter alia, a "lawn jockey") and other 
conservative blacks. Ideological dogmas aside, simple 
decency ought to have forbidden such vilification. But 
liberals were unashamed to appeal to the very bigotries 
they accuse conservatives of harboring.

     Ann has her own heroine: the amazing Phyllis 
Schlafly, one of the greatest grassroots political 
activists in American history, whom the liberal media 
consistently ignore, belittle, and exclude from their 
lists of Important Women. Her book A CHOICE, NOT AN ECHO 
sold more than three million copies -- and was ignored by 
the same media. She single-handedly defeated the Equal 
Rights Amendment, which was "supported by every living 
ex-president, 90 percent of the U.S. Congress, and every 
major newspaper, television network, and magazine in the 
nation, including thirty-six women's magazines with a 
combined circulation of sixty million readers [as well 
as] both the Democrat and Republican party platforms." 
Yet Mrs. Schlafly is marginalized, while the media fawn 
on the frivolous feminist Gloria Steinem, whose chief 
accomplishment has been to extract more than a million 
dollars from the media mogul Mort Zuckerman (with whom 
she also happened to be sleeping).

     One of the most provocative of Ann's contentions in 
SLANDER is that the hidden core of liberalism is 
snobbery: "That's the whole point of being a liberal: to 
feel superior to people with less money." I think there 
is a deep truth here -- as witness the hatred of 
prosperous white liberals for humbler whites like the Two 
Uglies -- but she doesn't pursue it. "The poor," even the 
criminal poor, are eligible for boundless liberal 
indulgence, but the slightly unpoor merit only liberal 
contempt, especially when they vote Republican.

     You don't have to be a Republican to see that the 
major media tilt the news in favor of the Democrats. The 
entertainment media likewise shape their sitcoms and even 
action movies around liberal mythology. Ann's style is 
more accusatory than analytical, but she is usually 
right. She is not the sort of conservative who sighs that 
her enemies are "well-meaning." Since when do well-
meaning people gloat over your big nose?

     All this brazen partisanship, among journalists as 
well as Democrats, has been perfect material for Ann's 
brassy satirical humor. Not for her the judicious 
circumlocutions of Bill Buckley and George Will; this 
stuff is a riot, and she laughs as she deflates it.

     Her first best-seller, HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, 
made a powerful case that Clinton deserved to be removed 
from office on many counts, most of them unrelated to 
girls as such. The man was an out-and-out criminal. By 
the time he finished his second term, Clinton himself had 
proved this even to the satisfaction of his defenders.

     In a terrific climactic chapter, Ann examines 
liberalism's amazing treatment of its chief bogeyman, 
"the religious right." The term is never defined -- 
though "even a witch hunt requires a working definition 
of the witch," as Ann remarks -- and few of its leaders 
are ever identified except for Pat Robertson, who 
actually happens to be a rather squishy conservative. (He 
has even evinced sympathy for China's population 
"problem.")

     Yet the media, led by the NEW YORK TIMES, have waged 
an endless and hysterical campaign against the "religious 
right," portraying it as a fascistic menace and 
ridiculing its impotence. The WASHINGTON POST has described 
its membership as "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to 
command." (Ann notes that Robertson's presumed 
"followers" ignored his plea to drop impeachment 
proceedings against Clinton.) Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, 
and other ethnic minorities vote far more monolithically 
for Democrats than white Protestants do for Republicans, 
yet the media never call these groups "uneducated" or 
"easy to command."

     Liberalism's chief charge against the phantom 
"religious right" is "intolerance," an intolerance that 
threatens to impose absolute censorship and smother 
American culture. Just where this alleged threat is 
located, and what forms it takes, are always left vague. 
Ann's comment: "When anal sex, oral sex, premarital sex 
are all gleefully laughed about on prime-time TV, the 
peril of religious values infecting the culture would 
seem to be somewhat overrated." Quoting Bryant Gumbel's 
absurdly deferential interview with Hugh Hefner ("In a 
macropolitical sense, do you think the Gore preoccupation 
with morality is a frightening turn for the party?"), Ann 
laughs: "Eternal vigilance must be maintained against the 
specter of morality! A guy who puts out a skin magazine 
is being interviewed as if he were a head of state, and 
liberals are worried that excessive morality is wrecking 
the country."

     The religious right is the safest of targets to 
attack; but because they pretend it's an imminent danger, 
they can praise each other for daring to criticize it, as 
if they were courting martyrdom. Ann's comment: "Never 
have acts of cowardice been so lavishly hailed as raw 
courage." She is never funnier than on liberals' "mind-
numbingly similar" denunciations of "organized religion," 
which she copiously quotes. Commenting on the columnist 
Molly Ivins, who fancies herself an independent soul (one 
of her books was archly titled MOLLY IVINS CAN'T SAY 
THAT, CAN SHE?), Ann asks reasonably, "What precisely 
does Ivins say that everyone else is not saying?"

     The TIMES, true to form, ridiculed Catholics for 
protesting an obscene and blasphemous portrait of the 
Virgin Mary in a tax-funded exhibit at the Brooklyn 
Museum of Art -- yet refused to mention the pornographic 
details (photos of female genitalia) the Catholics were 
outraged by. The reader was invited to assume that the 
protestors were religious nuts seeking to blight artistic 
freedom.

     Yet not long afterward, the TIMES was feigning 
indignation that George W. Bush had spoken at the "anti-
Catholic" Bob Jones University. Now this small, unduly 
notorious university is anti-Catholic only in the sense 
that it rejects Catholicism on standard Reformation 
doctrinal grounds. In that respect, it is perfectly 
rational and can be called objectionable only insofar as 
Protestantism is objectionable. But the TIMES's own 
hostility to Catholicism, by contrast, is quite 
irrational. For example, its editorials demand changes in 
the Church's traditional positions on contraception and 
the celibate male priesthood, never mind whether such 
changes could be reconciled with Catholic doctrine. Bob 
Jones would like the Catholic Church to change, but to 
change, at least, into a definite thing; liberalism would 
like the Church to change into nothing.

     SLANDER brings an unexpected indictment against 
liberals: that these arbiters and guardians of 
sensitivity are themselves boors. After reading more than 
250 pages of characteristic quotations, you can hardly 
doubt it. Their own standards convict them. I was 
admittedly partial to the author when I picked the book 
up; I was even more partial to her when I put it down.



Cloning PSYCHO
(page 6)

     I've spent much of this summer with a grandson who, 
at age eleven, already has, to my dismay, an encyclopedic 
knowledge of slasher movies. In some obscure way it 
seemed fitting that he should induce me, one August 
evening, to watch the video of Gus Van Sant's curious 
remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic, PSYCHO, the 
direct ancestor of today's epidemic of slasher films.

     Van Sant's version isn't an adaptation; it makes no 
attampt to improve on the original, or even to add some 
new element to it. It's an almost slavishly faithful 
shot-by-shot reproduction, retaining even most of the 
original dialogue and Bernard Hermann's shrieking 
soundtrack score. Its chief effect is to make you 
appreciate Hitchcock's genius.

     I first saw Hitchcock's PSYCHO in 1968, long after 
it came out, on late-night television, with commercial 
interruptions. I'd heard my friends discussing it for 
years and wondered what I'd missed. I'd missed plenty. 
Even seen under adverse conditions, it was by far the 
scariest movie I'd ever seen. And one of the most 
brilliant. I hardly slept that night, torn between terror 
and admiration.

     At the time Hitchcock was becoming a cult figure, 
thanks in large part to a book of interviews Francois 
Truffaut conducted with him. Eschewing any philosophy of 
life or cinema, the old man simply explained in very 
practical terms how he kept audiences in suspense, film 
by film, scene by scene. He believed in using violence 
sparingly; even PSYCHO has only a few seconds of it, but 
uses it to maximum effect, making the audience expect far 
more than it actually sees.

     Younger directors adored Hitchcock, but his only 
film most of them wanted to emulate was PSYCHO, which 
was actually a departure from his more romantic 
thrillers. THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS, REBECCA, NOTORIOUS, 
REAR WINDOW, VERTIGO, and NORTH BY NORTHWEST each has, as 
PSYCHO does not, a central love story. Hitchcock was a 
great director, but a baneful influence.

     Van Sant's version is shot in color. The original is 
black and white. It was the first black-and-white movie 
Hitchcock had made in years, and for an artistic reason: 
color dissipates tension. Orson Welles once called black-
and-white "the actor's best friend." It may also be the 
director's. It focuses attention on the dramatic 
essentials. Even the shower scene (a great example of 
Hitchcock's economy; he took a whole week to film a 
minute's hacking) loses force in color, with scarlet 
blood flowing down the drain.

     In fairness to Van Sant, he has probably attempted 
the impossible. PSYCHO is by now so familiar -- we've 
all seen it (and its imitators) so often -- that its 
story has lost most of its power to frighten. It's easy 
to forget that when it first appeared, it was so 
terrifying that its stars' careers actually suffered from 
their association with their roles.

     No danger of that with the remake. In the 1960s 
nobody could forget Anthony Perkins as the eerily 
eccentric Norman Bates or Janet Leigh as the ripely 
alluring Marion Crane, hacked to death in the shower. 
Today, everyone has already forgotten Vince Vaughn and 
Anne Heche playing the same characters. He is too 
masculine; come to think of it, so is she. (She is best 
known for her lesbian affair with Ellen DeGeneres, which 
earned the pair a welcome at the Clinton White House.) 
She's petite, but not feminine -- even her short hair 
looks dykish. She also lacks Leigh's rich voice, just as 
Vaughn lacks Perkins's touching yet ominous vocal 
hesitancy.

     In fact, the most implausible feature of Van Sant's 
version is that he posits a world of 1998 in which nobody 
has seen PSYCHO. His script adjusts for inflation the 
amount of money Marion steals from her employer.

     The casting presents problems too. Vince Vaughn, a 
fine virile fellow, just isn't Norman; he's far too tough 
and normal to give you the creeps, and his "mother's" 
derision of his manhood doesn't ring true. Anne Heche 
isn't nearly as attractive as Janet Leigh; nothing to 
stir Norman's weird depths there. William H. Macy, as the 
detective Arbogast, has none of the ominous presence 
Martin Balsam had in the original, which made his murder 
so shocking; Macy's face and voice are comically weak. 
Julianne Moore, as Marion's sister, is a more commanding 
actress than Vera Miles, but her very strength is a 
failing: when she snoops in the Bates house at the film's 
climax, it holds no terror for her. She's ready for 
anything. "I can handle a sick old woman," she says 
confidently, and you believe her.

     Van Sant's PSYCHO seems to have been made for the 
sole purpose of demanding comparison with the original, 
but it's made in such a way as to ensure that the 
comparison will be unfavorable. If this had been the 
first and only PSYCHO, it might have been a good 
thriller, but it wouldn't have captured the imagination 
or supplied us with lasting archetypes. Even aping 
Hitchcock's every shot, Van Sant has managed to turn this 
masterpiece into one more banal slasher flick.



NUGGETS

MAXIMUM SECURITY: I just read that our government 
"protects our liberty." Yes, just as the Berlin Wall 
protected the liberty of those it enclosed. (page 9)

OH, BY THE WAY: Would Bush excuse Japan's "pre-emptive" 
strike at Pearl Harbor? (page 10)

REDEEMING QUALITIES: Say this much for "rogue nations" -- 
at least they aren't isolationist! (page 10)

RACIAL JUSTICE NOTES: President Robert Mugabe's fierce 
anti-white expropriation policies in Zimbabwe are getting 
a little publicity here, but nobody seems unduly upset by 
it. Nor is the American press covering the murderous 
anti-white campaign in liberated South Africa, where 
militant blacks, with official encouragement, chant, 
"Kill the Boer, kill the farmer," and they've proved they 
mean it. If the heroic Nelson Mandela is raising his 
voice in protest, I haven't heard it. Et tu, Tutu? 
(page 12)


Exclusive to the electronic version:

FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: I just heard a radio interview 
with one Olivia Judson, a British expert on the sex lives 
of animals. A great believer in the wisdom of Mother 
Evolution, obviously -- you know the type. Animals 
sodomize each other, so why shouldn't we? That sort of 
reasoning: the illogical leap from the evolutionary Is to 
the ethical Ought, as freshman philosophy classes used to 
warn. She also described the way female insects, 
especially certain Australian spideresses, devour their 
mates during -- or even instead of! -- copulation. I 
don't mind knowing it, but I wish she wouldn't tell it 
with quite so much relish. Is this the next step for 
feminism? 



REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)

* John Lindh, Patriot (July 16, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020716.shtml

* Niceness and the State (July 23, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020723.shtml

* Why the Wolves Rule (July 25, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020725.shtml

* Laws and Kings (July 30, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020730.shtml

* The Conservative War-Mania (August 8, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020808.shtml

* War on Wogs (August 13, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020813.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) 2002 by The Vere Company -- www.sobran.com. 
All rights reserved.
Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate 
www.griffnews.com with permission.


[ENDS]