Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Two Popes and the War

(Reprinted from the issue of June 16, 2005)

Britain’s Tony Blair, just re-elected, has been in town to see President Bush. While here, he also denied the allegations of the 2002 “Downing Street memo,” leaked to the British press last month, which accused the Bush administration of manipulating evidence in order to promote war with Iraq. Though hardly reported here, the memo caused a sensation in England.

In any case, public support for the war keeps waning in this country. A new Washington Post poll finds a slim majority of Americans doubting that the war has made the United States safer from terrorism, and nearly 60% say it hasn’t been worth the cost. The official propaganda just isn’t flying anymore; a weary skepticism has set in. Colin Powell was wise to resign when he did; feigning optimism for four years must have been a strain.

Without the benefit of CIA intelligence, Pope John Paul II was very dubious about this war; so was the future Pope Benedict XVI. Perhaps the moral is that an ounce of moral wisdom is better than a ton of technical expertise.
 
Instruments of Darkness

In a ruling that split both liberal and conservative justices, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, that states may not authorize the medical use of marijuana if federal law forbids it. Antonin Scalia voted with the majority, while William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas dissented.

The issue in the case wasn’t the merits of marijuana, but the power of the federal government, which the majority upheld. Since 1942 the Court has granted Congress virtually limitless power to regulate anything it chooses to call “interstate commerce,” however broadly defined.

As Thomas observed in his separate dissent, if it can regulate the medicinal use of marijuana this way, it can regulate “virtually anything” — as in fact it habitually does, and has done for generations.

The Commerce Clause of Article I, Section 8 is one of those parts of the Constitution that the Court has used to swallow up the whole. If Congress has a power so broad, as Thomas also remarked, then this is no longer a government of “limited and enumerated powers”; it’s a simple Leviathan, out of the control of its constituent parts and therefore not, as it claims to be, federal.

Strange as it may seem, the United Nations is nearer to the federal model than the U.S. government! After all, the member states of the UN retain at least relative independence, and the permanent members of the Security Council can veto its actions. Its power isn’t centralized and consolidated. When you consider that its chief architect was the Soviet agent Alger Hiss, this bears reflecting on.

Be that as it may, in the present case John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, acknowledged that the ban on medicinal marijuana is “troubling,” since it prevents cancer patients from receiving some relief from their agony. Still, federal power must be upheld, no matter how irrationally and unconstitutionally it is applied. Prohibition required a constitutional amendment, the 18th, to authorize it; the “War on Drugs” was imposed by a mere executive order (by the first President Bush).

The older I get, and the more medical problems assail my family and me, the more sympathy I have with those who take unusual measures to preserve health, prevent disease, or alleviate pain. I’m also increasingly suspicious of those who are willing to subject young people to the unspeakable horrors of prison life.

The state always gives more or less plausible reasons for increasing its power over us. I often think of Banquo’s startled reaction when the Weird Sisters’ first prophecies about Macbeth are fulfilled: “What, can the devil speak true?”

Indeed he can. Banquo continues:

But ’tis strange;
And oftentimes, to win us to our harms,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray us
In deepest consequence.

I wonder if we sufficiently consider the possibility that our rulers may be “instruments of darkness,” whether they realize it or not. The state always tempts us to evil under the guise of doing good. As the poet Charles Baudelaire said, “Satan’s cleverest wile is to make us think he doesn’t exist.” And those who forget his existence are the surest to be seduced by him.
 
Something to Crowe About

The film star Russell Crowe was recently arrested in New York for throwing a telephone and striking a hotel employee in the face. His agent explained that it was an accident; yes, he angrily threw a telephone, but he didn’t mean to hit the guy with it.

This is but the latest of Crowe’s many reported rowdy acts, many of them under the influence of strong beverages. One of them, a couple of years ago, involved my daughter Chris. Now it can be told.

Chris, an avid sailor, was a technical consultant on Crowe’s hit movie of naval warfare, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. She’d signed an agreement not to talk to the press about doings on the set, but she was free to talk to her siblings, so the story got back to me. It was also reported in the National Enquirer, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, though her name wasn’t given.

It seems that one day Chris came upon Crowe when he was apparently drunk and attempting to beat up another member of the ship’s crew. She yelled for him to stop and put a half-nelson on him. The brawl ended there, and Chris became a heroine to the whole crew, who detested Crowe’s bullying ways.

One press account of the incident described her as “a muscular woman,” which amused me as much as it annoyed Chris. “Muscular” is an adjective that men find more flattering than women do, and though Chris is very fit — you have to be, if you climb tall masts for a living — she’s also decidedly feminine and, I dare say, strikingly pretty. But maybe the reporter assumed that any woman who could physically subdue the burly Crowe must have been pretty brawny.

By a nice irony, Crowe is currently starring in Cinderella Man, in which he plays the old heavyweight champ Jim Braddock. I dare him to get in the ring with Chris!


SOBRAN’S reviews the judicial destruction of the U.S. Constitution. If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran