SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
August 2004
Volume 11, Number 8
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> A Heavy Reckoning
-> The Moving Picture
-> The Glory of Destruction
-> Propaganda: A Lost Art?
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
A Heavy Reckoning
(page 1)
"But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms
and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together
at the Latter Day, and cry all, 'We died at such a
place,' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some
upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the
debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am
afeard there are few die well that die in battle; for how
can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is
their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to it."
So says Shakespeare's poor soldier on the eve of the
battle of Agincourt in KING HENRY V, not realizing he is
speaking to the king himself, who is visiting his troops
in humble disguise. Henry, his conscience stung, answers
lamely that war is God's "beadle," punishing men who have
evaded the law in peacetime. It's not the king's fault if
some of his soldiers are wicked men: "There is no king,
be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the
arbitrament of swords, can try it out with all unspotted
soldiers."
Of course this reply evades the whole thrust of the
soldier's challenge: "But if the cause be not good ..."
Henry has invaded France on a flimsy pretext: an obscure
and dubious claim to the French throne. The blood of both
sides will be on his head; for an unjust war is murder
writ large.
Recent debates on whether America should take
"military action"-- in Panama, the Balkans, the Middle
East -- have been remarkable for their abstractness.
Their tone is legalistic, though without the substance of
law: You'd never think that "military action" means a lot
of death and dismemberment, inevitably including
countless innocent noncombatants as well as soldiers. And
if that action is unwarranted, the soldiers who defend
their country against it are as truly innocent victims as
the child whose home is bombed while he sleeps.
Neither recent administrations nor most of their
critics seem to be disturbed by the possibility that
there may be a heavy reckoning for unjustified violence.
It seems to be assumed on all sides that when America
goes to war, even if unwisely, freedom is somehow being
defended, and that once the shooting and bombing start,
we must all "support our troops."
Perish the thought that a war for the wrong reasons
may be a "black matter" for those who wage it; that even
if the Iraq war were somehow justified, it could only
mean inflicting tragedy and horror on real people who
bore no responsibility for the actions of their dictator.
Has there been any note of regret or reluctance in
the hawks' avid calls for war? Even a civilized sense
that the only possible case for war can be tragic
necessity, accompanied by the dread of the guilt that
must belong to even an honest mistake? On the contrary,
the administration has declined to estimate the number of
civilian casualties in Iraq; only American casualties
count as the "cost" of war.
Not counted in the American ledger is Ali Abbas, 12,
who lost his parents, all six brothers and sisters, and
both his arms when an American rocket struck the family's
house in Baghdad.
THE MOVING PICTURE
(page 2)
I've been amusing myself by rereading the breathless
press accounts of John Kerry's primary victories over
Howard Dean last winter. How long ago it seems! At last,
the Democrats had come up with a winner -- a tested,
electable candidate who combined sobriety with charisma!
Kerry's "electability" was headed for a showdown with
George W. Bush's seeming invincibility. =Now= look. If
Kerry were anything more than a hopeless stiff, he'd be
mopping the floor with Bush, whose poll numbers continue
to sink. Kerry keeps trying to play down his liberal
record, reminding me of Harry Truman's advice to timid
Democrats: "If you give people a choice between a
Republican and a Republican, they'll vote for the
Republican every time."
* * *
Bill Clinton is back on the stage (again, already),
with his bloated and widely panned autobiography. His
eight years in the White House are beginning to seem like
the good old days, but we should remember that he was
responsible, albeit without much bluster or swagger, for
more deaths than both Bushes put together: He enforced
United Nations sanctions against Iraq, which killed
hundreds of thousands, and he ordered the bombing of the
former Yugoslavia. Clinton should be grateful for
suffering no worse than the modest historical infamy of a
crook, liar, and lecher.
* * *
Speaking of bloat, Marlon Brando has died at 80,
leaving memories of a powerful talent, a mostly wasted
career, and a worse than wasted personal life. As a young
actor in New York, according to his biographer Peter
Manso, he arranged "literally hundreds" of abortions; in
one case, he and a girlfriend kept the dead embryo in a
paper cup and gigglingly showed it to friends as "our
baby." Six women committed suicide after having affairs
with him. His depravity, which makes Don Corleone seem a
wholesome citizen by comparison, was reflected in the
sorry lives of his many unaborted children, one of whom
hanged herself after her half-brother killed her
boyfriend.
* * *
And writing in the NEW YORK TIMES, Garry Wills
likens abortion to cutting hair or fingernails. Brando
was way ahead of him.
* * *
I wonder if the TIMES is having second thoughts
about David Brooks, its new "conservative" columnist.
Brooks is in fact a =neo=conservative, though he has
lately been trying to deny it. His dogged defense of the
Iraq war has become more than an embarrassment; it's
almost an anachronism. He speaks for a sect that was on
top of the world a few months ago, but has gone out of
vogue as suddenly as -- well, John Kerry.
* * *
After telling a Senate Democrat to go bleep himself,
Vice President Dick Cheney said he "felt much better"
afterward, perhaps in part because of the applause he
received from Republicans who want to clean up the
airwaves. This is the party that used to express shock
when Truman said "hell" and "damn," now boasts of
restoring dignity to the nation's highest offices, and
resents charges of hypocrisy.
* * *
Same-sex couples now account for about 40 per cent
of all adoptions in Massachusetts. What makes such
figures particularly chilling, notes Steven Baskerville
on WorldNetDaily, is the ease with which courts may now
"seize children from their parents with no due process
finding that the parents have actually abused their
children." It doesn't necessarily take a village to raise
a child; just a judge and a couple of perverts. And it
could be =your= child.
The Glory of Destruction
(pages 3-5)
Few today question the heroism of Winston Churchill,
perhaps the most lionized statesman of the last century.
Yet a few historians have begun to look critically at the
myth. In fact Churchill himself, as the creator of his
own legend, may have realized its fragility. The wonder
is it has endured so long.
Until Pearl Harbor, polls showed that about 80
per cent of the American people opposed intervention in
the Second World War. This was only the common sense that
had prevailed since Washington and Jefferson. With two
oceans separating the United States from the belligerent
countries, Americans had no vital interest at stake.
Conquering the United States would be a logistical
impossibility for even the greatest power in the world.
And of course that is still true. But Pearl Harbor
caused the kind of outrage and panic stirred by the 9/11
attacks 60 years later, awakening fears of foreign
predators invading North America along with fantastic
fears of enemy agents already in our midst. Barely three
years ago we were likewise warned of al-Qaeda operatives
among us, ready to create chaos at a moment's notice.
Since then, sanity has quietly set in. We are in no
danger from abroad today, any more than in 1941.
But in a flash the Japanese "sneak attack" solved
the greatest problem facing Franklin Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill: making the American people want to
fight Britain's war. Adolf Hitler obligingly declared war
on the United States days later, and the previously
half-concealed North Atlantic alliance became official.
The Germans had always been Roosevelt's and Churchill's
chief target anyway, though most Americans reserved their
bitterest hatred for "the Japs."
Postwar propaganda has made the European theater the
main feature of the war, and Hitler, in contrast to the
Emperor Hirohito, has been ceaselessly demonized.
Roosevelt and Churchill have been divinized
correspondingly. Roosevelt's legend has been somewhat
tarnished by growing awareness of his mendacious
character, which was never much of a secret anyway; but
the Churchill legend, cultivated by Churchill himself,
has only grown. He remains the stalwart British lion,
warning a cowardly world against the Nazi monster and for
two years fighting it virtually alone. He made up for
military weakness with his singular courage and matchless
eloquence. Many still regard him as the greatest man of
the twentieth century.
The Churchill myth suffered its first great
challenge in 1961, when the British historian A.J.P.
Taylor published THE ORIGINS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR.
This was not at all an assault on Churchill's reputation,
but it did question the received notion that Hitler
himself was the sole cause of the war. The book stirred
furious controversy, calling in question as it did more
than two decades of official propaganda and journalistic
myth, which are still prevalent today.
Taylor simply reminded his readers of some obvious
facts: Another European war had been widely regarded as a
probable result of the Versailles Treaty, which had
punitively assigned Germany all the blame for World
War I. Britain had maintained its large military forces
during the 1930s, preparing for war while hoping to avoid
it; and Germany was of course the enemy it was preparing
for. Hitler too wanted no war with Britain, and though he
did a lot of bluffing, his actual military spending was
greatly exaggerated. All in all, Taylor argued, Hitler
had acted, under the circumstances, pretty much the way
any German ruler might have been expected to act. The
second war, like so many wars, issued from blunders and
miscalculations on both sides. But calling Hitler "evil"
-- as Taylor himself agreed he was -- wasn't an
explanation of events.
It is not true that Churchill rose to power in an
England that was unready for war. It was already at war
when he became prime minister in May of 1940; but it was
too weak to defeat Hitler. War had been declared the
previous year, after the invasion of Poland, by the
alleged appeaser, Neville Chamberlain, and his French
ally. In the spring of 1940, however, Germany had quickly
conquered France, routing the British at Dunkirk but
allowing them to retreat, Hitler still hoping to make
peace with Britain. But Churchill rejected Hitler's
overtures, insisting on a fight to the finish. He bet
everything on his ace in the hole: Roosevelt's support,
which he had been secretly (and quite irregularly)
currying while still a member of Chamberlain's cabinet.
Everything depended on Roosevelt's success in bringing
America into the war.
That Roosevelt was deceiving the American public,
violating the Neutrality Act, and breaking his oath to
honor the U.S. Constitution bothered the conscience of
neither man. Both were practised dissemblers, ruthlessly
unprincipled. Churchill sponsored a vigorous propaganda
campaign to promote American entry. His chief agent in
America, William Stephenson ("Intrepid"), was assigned
such tasks as smearing opponents of the war, intercepting
their mail, tapping their phones, and spreading false
rumors -- all of which, and more, Stephenson and three
hundred or so of his agents did, with Roosevelt's
clandestine approval and cooperation.
Here we encounter a curious feature of the Churchill
legend. Unlike Roosevelt, who at least had created a
lasting legacy of sorts with the New Deal, Churchill is
remembered almost solely for his role in World War II, a
role that has been greatly oversold. Without that war, he
would remain only a minor name in British history,
recalled only for a few brilliant aphorisms and
witticisms (and for fathering the disaster of Gallipoli
in World War I). Among those who knew him, he was
notorious for his hare-brained military inspirations, for
colossal vanity and rudeness, and for his great misplaced
self-assurance.
Strangely, Churchill has become a large symbol of
liberty and conservative virtues. But as the historian
Ralph Raico points out in a superb summary of his career,
he had no consistent philosophy, lurched from party to
party, laid the foundations of the welfare state, and
cynically pandered to the labor unions for political
advantage.
Only war excited Churchill's imagination, preferably
war with Germany, which he passionately hated well before
Hitler came along. He was so obsessed with victory over
Germany that he gave little thought to the consequences
until it was too late; by that time, Stalin commanded
Central Europe, including Poland, which he had joined
Hitler in invading in 1939. Surveying the political
results of the war, Churchill once confessed, in a rare
moment of self-doubt, "I am not sure that I shall be held
to have done very well," later adding that "we lie in the
grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted."
He wasn't altogether deluded by his own legend.
At one time he had been anti-Communist too, and
later, seeing how he had helped Stalin devour much of
Europe in order to defeat Germany, he adopted
anti-Communist rhetoric again. But as Raico observes,
during the war he had fawned on Stalin as shamefully and
fatuously as Roosevelt had. He had also supported the
murderous Tito in Yugoslavia, ignoring the pleas of the
anti-Communist Mihailovich. When a horrified aide
protested that Tito would rule Yugoslavia a la Stalin,
Churchill flippantly retorted, "Do you intend to live
there?"
At the war's end, he favored Stalin again,
needlessly, by agreeing to "repatriate" millions of
refugees from the Soviet Union, thereby sending them to
almost certain death. Many had never actually lived under
Communist rule; Churchill sent them back anyway. Some
killed themselves rather than accept this fate. Yet only
a few months later, Churchill was booming eloquently
against the "Iron Curtain" that he himself had helped to
bring down on the Continent. Like Roosevelt, like
Lincoln, he is chiefly remembered for ringing words that
were contradicted by his acts.
Raico notes that Churchill was possessed by the
warlike spirit all his life, beginning with his huge
boyhood collection of toy soldiers. "The story of the
human race is war," he once wrote; and he was determined
to be a hero of that story. He fought in the Boer War,
distinguishing himself for bravery under fire. But this
also led him to a shallow social philosophy. He lost his
religious faith early, becoming, by his own account, "a
materialist -- to the tips of my fingers." He adopted a
facile Darwinism, in which war was not the destroyer of
civilization, but a process of weeding out the unfit. The
peaceful achievements of men and the virtues of markets
meant little to him. In this, as Raico observes, he was
curiously like Hitler; but his admirers have largely
ignored his anti-Christian view of the world. His regard
for Christianity may be measured by one of his wartime
gestures: At the 1943 Tehran Conference, he presented
Stalin with a Crusader's sword. (Roosevelt also discerned
in Stalin "a Christian gentleman.")
After a visit to Germany, Churchill became an
enthusiast and promoter of Bismarckian collectivism. He
also fell under the influence of British Fabian
socialism; inspired by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, he
called for "a sort of Germanized network of state
intervention and regulation." So he wasn't altogether
anti-German: He savored the marvels of German statism.
Far from being a champion of liberty, Churchill, in peace
and war alike, worked to strengthen the power of the
state. As with so many conservatives, it's not obvious
what he was conserving.
During World War I, as first lord of the Admiralty,
Churchill led the way in implementing the naval blockade
that claimed 750,000 German civilian lives by hunger and
malnutrition. This was contrary to international law as
everyone but the British saw it, but it succeeded. The
bitter naval warfare also indirectly helped Churchill
achieve another goal: drawing the United States into the
war on the British side.
When World War II broke out, Churchill was again
head of the Admiralty, and again his chief goal was to
enlist American power for Britain. This time he had an
inside track: He found two eager co-conspirators in
Roosevelt and his top advisor, Harry Hopkins. The three
men labored to provoke a naval incident with Germany that
would repeat the history of World War I.
Here the ironies become almost unfathomable. World
War I, in our historical mythology, appears an accident
of tangled alliances, with no clear moral lesson for our
times. Kaiser Wilhelm II is no longer the monstrous
villain of the old propaganda, which related lurid
stories of Belgian babies impaled on German bayonets and
Belgian nuns raped by marauding German soldiers, all with
the kaiser's blessing. Today, even the official lies of
that war are all but forgotten. By contrast, the
propaganda of World War II is still repeated as simple
fact. Indeed, that propaganda has been intensified.
Hitler and the Nazis have become Absolute Evil in a way
that was not the case while the war raged.
World War II was fought by rulers who remembered,
and had played major roles in, World War I. As Churchill
had been first lord of the Admiralty, Roosevelt had been
assistant secretary of the Navy. The new war seemed an
extension, result, and repetition of the earlier war. Old
grudges were being avenged on both sides, except for the
new factor: the Japs. It was their perfidious sneak
attack, not the European broils, that outraged ordinary
Americans. American soldiers fought with far more fury,
and sheer savagery, against the Japanese than against the
Germans. (It helped that the Japanese were far more apt
to fight to the death, refusing to surrender, when the
odds were hopelessly against them.)
But, like Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt always
regarded Germany as their chief enemy, and they fought it
with a method even more cruel than the starvation
blockade of the Great War: what was nicely called
"strategic bombing." Not to mince words, this was a
policy of terror-bombing that turned whole cities into
gigantic furnaces, roasting countless men, women, and
children alive. Many of the desperate victims jumped into
rivers for relief, but the water was literally boiling.
The beautiful city of Dresden, "the Florence of the
North," was the most infamous case, but many other German
and Japanese cities met the same fate.
Brazen as he was, Churchill again turned flippant
when asked about Dresden: "I thought the Americans did
it." He knew quite well, of course, that the two
countries had shared the honors, the Americans bombing by
day, the British by night. Apologists for the war still
defend the terror-bombing of defenseless cities of no
military value. This is something to ponder. Some (the
"Holocaust deniers") doubt that the Germans were intent
on exterminating the Jews, but they don't deny that such
a thing, if it happened, was a horrible crime. The
champions of Churchill and Roosevelt defend an obscene
policy of whose occurrence there is no question.
Nor was this mere retaliation for German bombing of
English cities. The English had planned and prepared for
it even before the war, building a huge fleet of heavy
bombers; it was Hitler who belatedly retaliated with an
inferior air force, when he finally realized that the
British bombing of cities was no accident. Ordinary
Englishmen, outraged by the Blitz, didn't know that their
own government had provoked it. The truth leaked out
after the war, but by then it was too late to diminish
the Churchill myth.
Yet even that myth might have been impossible to
maintain if Churchill had achieved his heart's desire: to
do to the Eternal City of Rome what he did to Dresden.
"We will bomb Rome when the time comes," he wrote in a
1940 memorandum. In September 1941 he repeated this
threat publicly, in Parliament. Pope Pius XII warned
through diplomatic channels that he would protest any
such attack, rallying the world's Catholics against the
British. Others around Churchill, aghast, tried to
dissuade him from leveling Christendom's most venerable
basilicas, churches, and monuments, including St.
Peter's, St. John Lateran's, and many others, not to
mention the priceless remains of ancient Rome. Churchill
was willing, even eager, to destroy them all, along with
the city's huge population.
This was far beyond the beleaguered defiance of "We
shall fight them on the beaches." It was also far beyond,
though it included, mass murder. Luckily, it never proved
feasible. Even the Americans had reservations.
Such were Churchill's dreams of military glory. He
was fully as cynical as Stalin about how many divisions
the pope had. That he might incur eternal infamy as a
twentieth-century Nero never seems to have crossed his
mind.
Yet today Winston Churchill is revered as a savior
of Western civilization. Under the circumstances, the
question is not whether he was a great hero, but whether
he can even be described as sane.
Propaganda: A Lost Art?
(page 6)
{{ Material dropped from features or changed solely for
reasons of space appears in double curly brackets.
Emphasis is indicated by the presence of "equals" signs
around the emphasized words.}}
If you oppose the Iraq war, you find yourself, alas,
on the same side as Michael Moore, whose FAHRENHEIT 9/11
has broken box-office records for a documentary film and
may even affect this year's presidential election. Though
he is defiantly unkempt and mountainously
unprepossessing, Moore's self-confidence suggests that he
didn't get enough rejection as a child. He wants to be
the star of his own movie, even if this undermines the
serious purpose he claims for it.
Alfred Hitchcock {{ was overweight too, and he
also }} made a point of appearing in his own movies, but
it was a joke, almost defying the audience to notice him
in the second or two before he disappeared and let his
art do its stuff. Moore's art is not documentary, but
propaganda, and he's not very good at it, even when
working with powerful material. It doesn't occur to him
that propaganda =can= be an art, or that like other arts,
it can be enhanced by self-effacement. Moore sees it only
as an opportunity for uninhibited self-expression.
As a result, several liberal pundits, who also
oppose this war, have complained that FAHRENHEIT 9/11
only preaches to the converted. That might be all right
if it preached eloquently. {{ But in this case the }}
preacher insists on being right in your face, standing on
your shoes and clutching your lapels, shouting his
message, without having bathed or brushed his teeth.
And what is that message? That George W. Bush is a
jerk, a dunce, a liar, a crook, and a murderer. All these
charges are easy to support, and I can believe most of
them, but they aren't all of equal gravity. Moore begins
the film with a long rehash of the 2000 election,
stressing {{ the irregularities in the Florida voting and
vote-counting; }} he then asserts sinister long-standing
ties between the Bush family, the Saudi Arabian
government, and the bin Laden family. You don't have to
believe that the Bushes are selfless public servants to
find this a dizzying barrage of accusations. But how does
it explain the war? Something about oil, I gather.
{{ While he's at it, Moore also blames Bush for
unemployment in Flint, Michigan. }}
Nothing is too petty for Moore's Bush-loathing
attention. But we might have been reminded of Bush's
verbal maladroitness more subtly than by successive clips
of him mispronouncing "nuclear." Moore even enlists
physical disgust against the Bush team: we see Paul
Wolfowitz preparing for a TV appearance by licking a comb
to slick his hair down. But Moore is a very fat man on
very thin ice when he resorts to this sort of thing: At
least Bush appears to attend to grooming and personal
hygiene. Moore wants to be thought of as a righteous
slob, whose inattention to such vanities certifies his
authenticity. I thought this attitude went out with the
hippies. Is Moore making a statement against war and
corruption, or just grownups?
Not that the grownups here help their own cause.
Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, and Colin Powell
repeat (and repeat, and repeat) their own studied
propaganda lines about the Iraqi "threat," the fabled
weapons of mass destruction, the links with terrorists,
the mushroom clouds, and so on. It already rings utterly
false; no need to add sarcasm now. But it's good to be
reminded that not so long ago this solemn hysteria had
millions of Americans scrambling for duct tape.
But despite his pose as a fearless truth-teller,
exposing the dark motives that drove the war, Moore says
nothing about the Israeli-neocon forces that had been
plotting this war long before Bush became president, or
about Bush's unconcealed links with Ariel Sharon. This
explains far more than shadowy Saudi interests. To hear
Moore tell it, you'd think the Arab governments welcomed
U.S. military intervention; the opposite is true. It was
the Likud and its American Amen Corner that were
clamoring for the war. Moore can hardly have forgotten
that. An omission so gross amounts to a lie.
The most powerful part of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 is its war
footage, which Moore himself didn't film but got from
other sources, including the Arab media. The American
assault on Baghdad is terrifying, a city exploding in the
night with thunderous noise. Then we see the wailing Arab
mothers and disfigured faces of children, as American
pilots do their work with grim humor, while playing
obscene rock CDs. If Moore could leave bad enough alone,
this would have been quite sufficient to discredit the
war. {{ And without these sickening scenes, the whole
film would have little point. }}
As a connoisseur of propaganda, I recently watched,
once again, the seven WHY WE FIGHT films produced by the
U.S. Government during World War II, under the direction
of Frank Capra. It must be said that they are
masterpieces in their kind. Unlike Moore, Capra {{ treats
the war as a serious business, with no room for
frivolity. Capra's patriotism, however corny at times, is
devoid of personal egotism; he }} is trying to serve his
country, not himself. {{ Even jabs of ridicule against
the enemy are few. }} He repeats the official lies
because he really believes them, and his propaganda
carries a conviction Moore's lacks.
The difference isn't entirely to Capra's credit.
Under the constraints of his time, he couldn't have
criticized Franklin Roosevelt if he'd wanted to. It's a
blessing that Moore has a freedom Capra was denied (and
didn't miss). But it's also a pity that Moore has made
such poor use of that freedom. He's content to fight
official lies with dubious half-truths.
NUGGETS
RETIREMENT BENEFITS: Glad to see that Bill Buckley's
latest book, in the issue of NATIONAL REVIEW announcing
that he's finally stepping down as chief executive
officer, got a rave review. As have his previous four
dozen or so. The next four dozen will be the real test:
At 78, he threatens to outlive all his sycophants.
(page 10)
BLACK HOLES -- THE LIGHT SIDE: Who says the news is
always bad? Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking now believes
that black holes have had a bum rap. He is reported to
have concluded that light can sometimes escape them.
(page 12)
Exclusive to electronic media:
STILL YOGI AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: Now in his eighties,
Yogi Berra remains our greatest living wordsmith. Told
that Mike Piazza had surpassed his career record for home
runs by a catcher, he rose to the occasion: "I knew my
record would stand until it's broken!"
WELL, NOBODY'S PERFECT: The Communist Party of the United
States has endorsed John Kerry for president, generously
overlooking his Catholic convictions and his deep
personal opposition to abortion.
THAT'S A RELIEF! A spokesman for Michael Jackson has
categorically denied reports that a surrogate mom is
carrying Jacko's quadruplets. Why must the media always
go to such lengths to make the guy sound weird? I'll bet
it's only triplets.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* Land of the What? (June 3, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040603.shtml
* Is Bush Another Reagan? (June 15, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040615.shtml
* Hitler, Hitler Everywhere (June 22, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040622.shtml
* The Death of Shakespeare (June 24, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040624.shtml
* Bill Buckley's Sad Farewell (June 29, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040629.shtml
* Brando and His Imitators (July 6, 2004)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040706.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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