SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
July 2003
Volume 10, Number 7
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> After Liberation
-> The Moving Picture
-> Land of Hype and Glory
-> Jurisprudence in Tongues
-> Panning Peck
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
After Liberation
(page 1)
If you had no high hopes for the war on Iraq, it's
hard to be disappointed by the outcome. The United States
won, of course, with few American casualties (and an
unknown number of Iraqi ones). Saddam Hussein is gone, if
not dead, and to that extent Iraq has been "liberated,"
but the promised democracy hasn't materialized.
The American occupation has put democracy, free
speech, and freedom of the press on indefinite hold. The
Iraqi dinar has shown surprising vitality, so much
stronger than the dollar that the U.S. forces are
printing dinars; that is, flooding the country with
counterfeit money, {{ thereby impoverishing its
people. }} A few dozen American troops have been killed
in sporadic attacks, and the early signs of welcome have
vanished; but the situation seems fairly stable.
The United States seems neither stronger nor safer
than it was before the war. {{ Iraq's alleged but vaguely
defined "weapons of mass destruction" didn't appear
during the war and haven't been found since it ended. The
suspicion grows that if they }} ever existed in any
meaningful way the U.S. and British governments grossly
exaggerated them and any threat they posed. The impolite
term "lying" has crept into the media, especially in
England, where the press is relatively untamed.
The Bush administration keeps insisting that the
WMDs *did* exist and *will* be discovered, but it and its
defenders have changed their tune: they now say the
important thing is the "liberation" of Iraq, citing the
mass graves of Hussein's victims as proof that the war
was warranted. The implied (and also vaguely defined)
connection between Hussein and "terrorism" has been
abandoned. It's not clear what the "preemptive" war
preempted.
Maybe Bush didn't exactly lie, but he clearly
asserted a certainty he didn't have and wasn't entitled
to. Congress will inquire into whether he was misled by
the intelligence services; he almost surely wasn't. The
problem wasn't the information he received, but what he
did with it. He told the American public it was
definitive proof of Hussein's aggressive intentions.
It wasn't. But Bush has counted on us to take his
word for it then, and not to ask too many questions now.
And it would be awkward for a country that supported the
war in advance to withdraw its consent after an
overwhelming victory, wouldn't it?
The Republican Party hardly seems republican, in the
original sense of the term. It worships Bush with an
almost royalist piety. {{ It has adopted the old view
that "the king can do no wrong" -- which never meant that
he was infallible, only that he could never be held
liable for anything. }} It doesn't matter what the war
cost, or whether the reasons given for it hold water.
What counts is that Bush won, and his political position
is stronger than ever. There is no opposition or even
significant criticism of him within his own party, or
within what now passes for the conservative movement.
Only the Left now occasionally raises the kind of
questions conservatives used to ask, and there isn't much
Left left. Even Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton have been
tamed, along with the rest of the Democratic {{ Party,
which has all but conceded next year's elections. }} The
few "issues" that separate the two parties are matters of
detail, not principle.
For the time being, it's Bush's world. But what a
dull world!
The Moving Picture
(page 2)
Senator Strom Thurmond has finally died, at 100.
Given the recent experience of Trent Lott, the eulogies
were among the most carefully worded in modern history.
Thurmond was one of the few politicians who was old
enough to remember what the Constitution once meant, but
he invoked it chiefly for racial purposes and seldom let
it stop him from delivering Federal pork to South
Carolina. Let the record show that he could be
principled, on occasion.
* * *
Beating our own Supreme Court to the punch (see
below), a Canadian appeals court has legalized same-sex
"marriage." Prime Minister Jean Chretien approved the
decision and announced that the government won't appeal
it. "You have to look at history as an evolution of
society," he explained, equating a sudden rupture of
tradition with benign gradual development. Just like our
own Supreme Court.
* * *
Led by Al Gore, liberals have decided that what they
need is a Rush Limbaugh. They're working on it, hoping to
come up with a hugely popular talk-radio host. Good luck,
guys. They'll also need a few hugely popular liberal
issues, which will take some doing, since the essence of
modern liberalism is its alienation from ordinary people.
Hence its need to achieve "social change" by judicial and
bureaucratic dictatorship. Liberals have already turned
most of the hot-button issues over to conservatives. So
now they want to try demagogy? A little late for that.
* * *
Maybe the key to the condition of liberalism today
is the concept of evolution. Liberalism is no longer a
fighting faith, and liberals sense this. Their agenda
rouses little enthusiasm, and it would take more than a
liberal Limbaugh (if such a being were conceivable) to
change that. Since they can't hope that the masses will
hit the streets to do battle for liberal ideals, they
settle for hoping that, if told that liberalism is an
evolutionary certainty, people will simply accept it.
Once a creed that inspired, liberalism is now merely
something we must resign ourselves to.
* * *
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Hispanics now
outnumber blacks and are thus America's largest minority.
But "Hispanic" is a linguistic category, not a racial
one: it embraces whites, blacks, and descendants of
American (and Central American) Indians, and refers
chiefly to Mexicans but also to Cubans, Puerto Ricans,
and actual Spaniards. Since nearly all of them are in
this country voluntarily (in many cases illegally), it
will be awkward to argue that they are oppressed. Do you
become an Instant Victim just by crossing the border
nowadays? Or do you also have to speak Spanish?
* * *
The death of Katherine Hepburn was followed only a
day later by that of Buddy Hackett. Was this coincidence
or grief? The two had a long-standing romance that was
widely known throughout Hollywood. But Hackett was
married to someone else, and his wife refused to divorce
him, so the affair had to remain discreet. Meanwhile, the
Hepburn-Hackett team continued to enchant the world in
romantic comedies, until -- wait! I've got him mixed up
with someone else. Sorry. Disregard.
Land of Hype and Glory
(pages 3-4)
The musical CHICAGO continues not only to delight
but to fascinate me, particularly the character of Billy
Flynn (played in the movie by Richard Gere), the lawyer
who turns an adulterous murderess into a celebrity. Billy
knows how to use both the press and the courtroom to make
his client, Roxie Hart, a celebrity. Her criminality
would be nothing without his public-relations genius.
With his help, she becomes the darling of Chicago.
Billy is a hilarious addition to the great American
tradition of the con man. The type is not unknown to
Europe, but he came into his own in nineteenth-century
America and is still with us. Hollywood preserved him
most memorably in W.C. Fields, Frank Morgan, and Walter
Matthau.
Visiting in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was
amazed by American enterprise. Unencumbered by history,
its memories, and its legacies, Americans started from
scratch. They didn't need authorization or permission
from state or church; they had no pedigrees and knew
little about their own ancestors. Their energies,
desires, and ambitions had free scope, and they made the
most of it. They could start their own businesses, even
their own religions. Government was minimal. Even
churches belonged to the realm of the market. To a
European observer this was a breathtakingly new world of
possibilities.
In Europe the new and the ancient live side by side;
the ancient is familiar, not exotic. But in America to
grow old is to become obsolete; nothing lasts long enough
to become venerable. In time everything is either updated
or replaced by something newer. Americans commemorate
things -- movies, for instance -- that are less than a
century old. Even the meaning of the U.S. Constitution
isn't fixed; the courts and politicians continually
update that too. This is, after all, a country that can
regard the Kennedys, third-generation scions of a
bootlegger (who remains the only enterprising member of
his clan), as its royal family.
Tocqueville found Americans agreeable and polite,
because in such a fluid society, without stable
hereditary status, success depended on pleasing others:
socially, commercially, politically. The customer was
always right. There were no aristocrats here, only
tycoons adopting aristocratic airs; and few great (that
is, rich) families maintained their status for more than
two generations. None outside the Old South did it by
owning land.
In this situation it was inevitable that
advertising, with all its attendant hyperbole, should
play a leading role. It wasn't long before advertising
itself became an independent industry, in which accuracy
mattered less than hype. Hype has also become the style
of our politics, in which money and advertising are
central.
The obverse of the slogan that the customer is
always right was P.T. Barnum's discovery that a sucker
was born every minute. From a certain perspective, the
customer and the sucker are one and the same. This is the
perspective of the proverbial snake-oil salesman.
As America moved westward, the huckster became a
familiar figure, whether he was selling patent medicine,
the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, or some simulacrum of
high culture. He became a great source of native American
humor and satire. Mark Twain captured him in the Duke and
the Dauphin, who go from one frontier town to another
bamboozling hicks with, among other things, bogus
versions of Shakespeare. Twain was also among the first
to see that politics was the natural habitat of the con
man.
Later Meredith Willson would give us a similar, if
more beguiling, cultural predator in THE MUSIC MAN.
"Professor" Harold Hill appears as a lovable, almost
benign character even before he is reformed by love for
Marian the Librarian. Even his scheme -- selling band
instruments and uniforms -- is fairly harmless.
We can't really wish his comeuppance; after all, in
America most of us are salesmen of one sort or another,
and the con man is our cousin. We don't want to disown
him entirely, especially if he is having fun. He's part
of our national life and its distinctive energy, even a
figure of nostalgia.
All this has its dark side too. Willy Loman, in
DEATH OF A SALESMAN, fails tragically because he can no
longer sell himself; he can't huckster with conviction.
If the customer is always right, and if the suckers
aren't buying, he has only himself to blame. And so he
does, taking his own life.
The con man wasn't just a frontier figure; he was
built into the nature of America itself. Sinclair Lewis
saw him in the respectable businessman and, of course,
the itinerant preacher, Elmer Gantry, a lecherous
hypocrite who answers to no bishop, but makes do with
only a Bible. H.L. Mencken feasted on religious
hypocrisy, but, like Twain, found democracy itself a rich
field for con men. Intellectuals loved Mencken's scathing
treatment of fraudulent politicians as long as most of
his targets were Republicans, but he fell from favor when
he turned his satire against Franklin Roosevelt.
Mencken would be appalled, but probably not
surprised, at the veneration Roosevelt still receives.
The real subject of his scorn was not the con man but the
willing suckers, the American people, whose cultural
level never ceased to decline (and still hasn't). Mass
education has failed to improve things; on the contrary,
it has only made them worse. Today the suckers have been
to college; but they're still suckers.
In fact academic and intellectual life have
presented new opportunities for con men, especially in
the social sciences. Margaret Mead's "discoveries" about
uninhibited sexual life in Samoa turned out to have been
fabrications; so did Alfred Kinsey's even more
influential "findings" about sexual behavior in America,
which became Holy Writ for the sexual revolution and the
homosexual movement. Both Mead and Kinsey professed to
offer only empirical, "value-free" data, yet these bogus
scientific breakthroughs continue to have vast impact on
American sexual norms long after their exposure as lies.
Almost any lie can be sold to the educated public,
as long as it is packaged as scientific and
"progressive." More recently, an academic con man named
Michael Bellesisles wrote a history of gun ownership in
America, purporting to overthrow the mythology of a
traditional "right to bear arms." It transpired that his
research was almost entirely forged, but not before
liberal intellectuals had hailed him for a major
achievement in correcting common beliefs. There have been
a number of similar academic swindles, nearly all of them
perpetrated by leftists and Marxists.
No brief survey of the subject would be complete
without a mention of Bill Clinton, arguably the most
successful con man in American history. Clinton didn't
offer a single grand falsehood; rather, his assertions
turned out to be a tissue of lies -- about everything
from his boyhood to "that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Only his
allegedly brilliant wife, who presumably knew him best,
professes to have believed them all.
Yet Clinton is hard to hate. He had the true con
man's gift of incessantly charming gab -- what the late
Michael Kelly called his "serial sincerity." Even when
you knew he was lying, you couldn't help feeling that he
meant it. He lied from the heart. Clutching his Bible as
he escorted his wife to church, wiping away a tear as he
spoke from a pulpit, gazing steadily and nodding
sympathetically at interlocutors, he was the real thing:
the true American fake. We shall not look upon his like
again.
Truly, Clinton was the man without a pedigree. He
was born William Jefferson [!] Blythe, but there is even
some doubt about his paternity; his mother was a barmaid,
and her husband was apparently overseas nine months
before Bill was born. (Mr. Blythe seems to have lacked
Bill's knack for avoiding military service.) Eventually
Bill took his stepfather's name and developed his own
genius for talking his way into power and out of scrapes.
As a boy in Arkansas -- we have his word for it --
he (with his little friends) boycotted buses in
solidarity with Rosa Parks, wept at Martin Luther King's
"I have a dream" speech, and shuddered when black
churches were burned by Klansmen. Everyone has his own
favorite Clinton yarns, but these are mine. Even as a
child in a segregated state, he had already, precociously
and independently, acquired the views and feelings that
would be mandatory when, many years later, he went to
Yale.
Only one country could have produced such a man, and
it's a pity that Twain and Mencken didn't live to see
him. They did, as it were, prophesy him.
One writer saw early on that Clinton was the stuff
of which comic novels are made: Joe Klein, who captured
him perfectly as Jack Stanton, the rascally presidential
candidate, in the anonymously published PRIMARY COLORS.
Too bad this funny book was upstaged by the uproar about
its authorship, then about the movie that was made from
it; it's not only a shrewd portrait of Clinton, but a
witty comment on American democracy in our time. The
suckers we have always with us.
Jurisprudence in Tongues
(page 5)
Something strange happens to people when they get
appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. They cease to think
and talk like normal human beings. They become possessed
by the Zeitgeist, which speaks through them in spooky
accents, issuing preternatural calls for national
transformation, uninhibited by tradition, precedent, or
even logic. This prophetic spirit has been busy lately.
First Sandra Day O'Connor issued a majority ruling
in favor of affirmative action in state-funded college
admissions policies. Using the magic words "diverse" and
"diversity" fifty times, she called for realizing "the
dream of one nation, indivisible" -- apparently
forgetting, in her mystical transports, that it was the
U.S. Constitution she was supposed to be ruling on and
quoting the Pledge of Allegiance instead.
Nor did she bother explaining how "diversity" -- a
euphemism for discrimination against whites -- will
achieve the promised wonders; but never mind. It would be
an indignity to subject the prophetic spirit to such
nitpicking.
The Constitution doesn't forbid the states to fund
schools and colleges or to dictate any admissions
standards they happen to choose. But O'Connor didn't make
her case on this ground; she assumed the authority of the
Federal Government, and of the Court, to review and judge
the states' actions in this area. It so happens that she
approves the principle of racial preferences, discreetly
applied (with certain arbitrary exceptions).
But the Court wasn't finished. Three days later it
ruled that a Texas law against homosexual sodomy was
unconstitutional. This time the prophetic messenger was
Anthony Kennedy, like O'Connor a Reagan appointee who has
grown in office. He too disdained to quote the text of
the Constitution, preferring to quote himself.
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which
reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, Kennedy, a nominal Catholic,
wrote, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define
one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the
universe, and of the mystery of human life." This woolly
philosophizing has been widely lampooned -- in his
dissent, Antonin Scalia mockingly referred to it as the
"famed sweet-mystery-of-life passage" -- but Kennedy is
so proud of it that he repeated it in his sodomy opinion.
This kind of reasoning, to call it that, can lead
anywhere. If abortion is somehow an extension of a right
to define the universe, Scalia is quite sensible to
apprehend the future applications of a "right" to sodomy.
The lower courts teem with Anthony Kennedys; a Canadian
court has just ruled that the law must recognize
"marriage" between people of the same sex. It can happen
here, and probably will.
What's so appalling about O'Connor and Kennedy is
the utter triteness of their minds. They seem to have
studied metaphysics at the feet of Hugh Hefner, yet they
regard themselves as pioneering thinkers, philosophic
guardians of the Republic, entitled to reshape old
institutions to suit themselves. Their opinions are thick
with ill-digested cliches; and they get their cliches
from the wrong people. O'Connor claims, in the teeth of
every known opinion poll, "broad" public support for
racial preferences, and Kennedy claims an "emerging
awareness" that his benign view of homosexuality is
correct -- though, again, the polls show otherwise. Both
are avatars of what's loosely called "elite" opinion,
though the supposed elite is now a dwindling liberal
minority that still mistakes itself for an avant-garde.
One might as well seek the leaders of tomorrow in an old
folks' home.
Both rulings are nothing more than solemn judicial
whims, inspired by fading trends. In both cases narrow
majorities decided that the Court's recent interpretation
of the Fourteenth Amendment, already fantastically broad,
still isn't broad enough to suit them. It just keeps
emanating penumbras, which, as Kennedy's opinion
illustrates, are rapidly approaching infinity. No state
law is safe from the Court. The Tenth Amendment, with the
whole federal structure it expresses, is dead. Scalia
quipped that Kennedy's defining-the-universe dictum may
turn out to be "the passage that ate the rule of law."
Panning Peck
(page 6)
Monumentally handsome, Gregory Peck, who has died at
87, acted like a monument. Movies, even good movies,
could be made around him, but they never seemed to be
made by him. Like all monuments, he was an impersonal
presence. He belonged more on Mount Rushmore than on the
screen.
In real life, he was as decent as he appeared in his
films. Those who knew him all agree on this. He was
dedicated to liberal and charitable causes, but he was
conservative in demeanor, and if, during his lifetime,
Hollywood fell into aesthetic depravity, it wasn't his
fault. He stuck to an old code of propriety, and most of
the characters he played were irreproachable by any
standard. He always seemed to be playing himself. The
trouble is that that wasn't a very interesting character.
Peck couldn't pass for Hamlet or even Stanley
Kowalski. Or Sam Spade, or Norman Bates, or Rhett Butler,
or a Capra hero like Mr. Deeds or Mr. Smith or John Doe.
Atticus Finch, yes, of course. A lawyer of humorless
rectitude, tailor-made for Peck. But who can recall the
name of any other character he played? (Captain Ahab and
Doctor Mengele don't count.)
The congenitally noble Atticus, in TO KILL A
MOCKINGBIRD, was really no different from most of the
roles Peck played, except that he didn't carry a six-gun.
Otherwise he was hardly distinguishable from the
crypto-gentile Peck impersonated impersonating a Jew
(implausibly) in GENTLEMEN'S AGREEMENT. In both roles,
Peck played a mere symbol, showing up the stereotyped
bigots around him.
Late in his life Peck did a televised interview in
which he reminisced about his long career, but said
nothing about the craft of film acting. He left one with
the impression that he'd never given the subject a
thought. This was remarkable, since his career overlapped
with those of some of Hollywood's greatest actors, men
who really knew their business. These included Bogart,
Stewart, Tracy, Brando, and Montgomery Clift.
I want to stress that these were *film* actors.
Stage acting has its own tradition, growing out of
Renaissance rhetorical theory and practice, which put a
premium on large gestures and vocal projection. The
camera and the microphone made the older style obsolete,
by picking up the slightest gestures and the subtlest
intonations. Modern film acting is, accordingly, intimate
and naturalistic.
{{ Nobody understood this better than Brando. He
achieved powerful effects by scratching his chest and
digging wax out of his ears while speaking on camera.
Artifice, to be sure, but artifice that made other actors
seem artificial. }}
Peck never grasped this. He persisted in a stagy,
declamatory style of acting that never permitted intimacy
with the camera (or the film audience). Some of his
movies were good more in spite of, than because of, his
inflexible performances. Hitchcock, famous for minimizing
the need for acting in cinema, knew how to use him in THE
PARADINE CASE.
All this is not meant to attack Peck, but only to
call attention to a certain quality of conventional
Hollywood histrionics that he exemplified with unusual
longevity. The really gifted Hollywood actors understood
one thing Peck never grasped: that film acting means
reacting to the other actors. Tracy wasn't an especially
"versatile" actor; he "played himself," if you will, as
much as Clark Gable did; he seldom "disappeared into his
role." But he spoke every line with conviction, because
he spoke it in exquisitely sensitive response to the way
other actors had spoken *their* lines. And this is the
essence of real film acting.
Consider Clift. He is now nearly forgotten, but he
was as original as Brando. His career was brief; he was a
troubled man, alcoholic and homosexual, his beautiful
face was smashed in an auto wreck, and he died young. But
no actor was ever more sensitive to the camera. {{ In
Hitchcock's I CONFESS he is a priest framed for a murder
he didn't commit; he knows who the culprit is, but the
seal of the confessional forbids him to say so; and when,
under a detective's interrogation, he realizes that he is
the prime suspect, his darting eyes and halting voice
betraying both innocence and implication, we witness a
near-miracle of film acting. }}
Clift was so disarming because he could let his
interlocutors get the better of him without losing his
control of the viewer's sympathy. Even in showing
weakness, he remained the dominant actor in the scene.
Only Anthony Hopkins, as far as I know, has managed to do
this as well. It's a very rare effect.
Peck never achieved it, nor ever tried to. For him,
acting meant speaking his lines resonantly, never getting
the worst of an exchange; he hardly seemed to be
listening to the other characters at all. They held no
interest or surprise for him. He was an extremely good-
looking man, and the function of the other actors was
only to make him look better. Even when playing a Nazi
monster like Mengele (as if to prove he could be someone
besides Atticus Finch), he conveyed mere villainy rather
than evil. If he ever illuminated a character, I must
have missed it.
NUGGETS
CONFESSION: I'm writing in a swoon tonight. My stereo is
playing my favorite passage of music in all the world:
the slow second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.
I discovered it in high school, have listened to it
countless times since, and have never tired of it. I've
said it before, and I'll say it again: when he was in the
mood, Beethoven could knock off a symphony with the best
of them. (page 4)
DE HAUT EN BAS: At the Mideast peace talks, the Israeli
daily HA'ARETZ reports, President Bush explained his
recent actions thus: "God told me to strike at al-Qaeda
and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at
Saddam, which I did ..." (page 8)
ADIEU: No sooner had Strom Thurmond gone to his reward
than Lester Maddox followed him. My Confederate flag is
at half-mast. (page 8)
WILD ABOUT HARRY: On a recent Saturday I dropped in on
Borders Books and found a line longer than I'd ever seen
even during a Christmas rush. What had brought out the
intellectual community in such force? Ah, but of course:
the woman ahead of me reminded me that the latest Harry
Potter book had just been released. Maybe I should title
my next book HARRY POTTER AND THE SECRET OF SHAKESPEARE.
(page 9)
DR. COHEN'S DIAGNOSIS: Ann Coulter, says columnist
Richard Cohen, commenting on her new book TREASON, "has
lost her mind." For a guy dealing with a victim of mental
illness, Cohen's diatribe is strangely tinged with moral
indignation. He even likens her "nutso archconservatism"
to -- what else? -- "traditional anti-Semitism." Where's
liberal compassion when you need it? (page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
AH, THE USES OF EVOLUTION! A NEW YORK TIMES editorial
alleges an "evolving popular opinion" in favor of gay
rights. Got it? If it doesn't exist, just say it's still
"evolving" and act as if it's already a reality. The Gray
Lady's star girl columnist, Maureen Dowd, condemns
Justice Antonin Scalia as a "stegosaurus" who yearns for
"an airbrushed Fifties America that never really existed"
for his dissent in the Court's pro-homosexual ruling. You
don't have to refute his argument, it seems; just accuse
him of belonging to the past, while denying that that
past was real. The implication, of course, is that nobody
in his right mind believes in permanent norms of conduct.
Our only duty is to keep up with -- and to anticipate --
our (liberal, of course) evolutionary destiny.
THE BISHOP'S "WIFE": In New Hampshire, Episcopalians have
elected, subject to approval of the national convention,
their first openly homosexual bishop, V. Gene Robinson.
Robinson has long since divorced his wife (they have two
daughters) and is shacked up with his boyfriend --
without benefit of clergy, so to speak. The Episcopalians
have been evolving so fast for so long I'm surprised that
this is a first. I'd assumed that by now it was part of
the job description.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Now They Tell Us (June 3, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030603.shtml
* Hillary's Abiding Commitment (June 10, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030610.shtml
* Did Bush Lie? (June 17, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030617.shtml
* Attacking the Rich (June 19, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030619.shtml
* Celebrating Diversity (June 24, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030624.shtml
* The Court versus Federalism (June 26, 2003)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2003/030626.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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