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]