Free Republic

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA—In his tremendous novel War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy observes that some men “choose their opinions like their clothes—according to fashion.” He adds that no matter how derivative their views are, such men may hold those views with all the passion of partisans. How true. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people parrot clichés as if they were voicing their own hard-won, independent convictions. In college, I had more than one professor whose political ideas seemed to have been culled from the bumper stickers in an academic parking lot. (They weren’t grateful when I pointed...

During the so-called presidential debates, I failed to hear a single mention of the U.S. Constitution, which should have been the chief subject. What are the proper powers of government, of the federal government, and of the president? These questions don’t even come up anymore. The debaters wrangle heatedly about “the economy”—a phrase that never appears in the text of the Constitution but preoccupies today’s pundits and politicians. Neither of the major-party presidential candidates, let alone President Bush, could have held an intelligent conversation with Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, or John Jay, the authors of The Federalist, our best known...

The Hive (Reprinted from SOBRAN’S, June 1999, page 3) Twenty years ago, I was struck by the way various sorts of political “progressives” — Communists, socialists, liberals, “civil libertarians,” “moderates,” “pragmatists” — all spontaneously cooperated with each other. It wasn’t a conspiracy; there was obviously no central direction. But the pattern was too clear to be denied. The word “left” was a dead metaphor; it said nothing interesting about the people it referred to. So I used the metaphor of an insect hive, which captured the way such people moved in harmony and communicated with each other. In a beehive,...

The Honor of Ron Paul by Joe Sobran "He may have become at last what he has always deserved to be: the most respected member of the U.S. Congress. He is also the only Republican candidate for president who is truly what all the others pretend to be, namely, a conservative. His career shows that a patriotic, pacific conservatism isn’t a paradox."

The Lesser Evil by Joseph Sobran Once, before appearing on a TV talk show, I was told I must not advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Government. I hadn’t actually been planning to foment revolution, but this warning gave me an idea: "May I advocate the violent restoration of the Constitution?" I got no answer. Some people think I’m a "purist," or even a "fundamentalist," for harping on the Constitution. Actually, it’s just the opposite. I’m willing to settle for the Constitution as a tolerable compromise. Really principled people, such as Lysander Spooner, the late, great Murray Rothbard, and ...

Obsessed With Jews By Jason Maoz He’s the columnist who complained that "Hitler died in 1945, but anti-Hitler hysteria is still going strong"; cautioned against "the excessive moral prestige Jews have in the media and the public square"; whined about "Jews deciding the standards, setting the criteria of humanity"; and observed, in chilling if artful prose, that because Jews "set themselves up as the arbiter, there is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a certain ‘kill the umpire’ impulse." He’s the writer who decried, in a column following the release of "Schindler’s List," what he called "all this Holocaust-harping" and characterized...

For the first time in living memory, Americans have to think about defense. Most of us (I include myself, until fairly recently) have assumed that our government was defending us. We equated military spending in staggering sums — sustaining heavily armed soldiers, sailors, and pilots around the world — with defense. And we thought that meant safety. It didn’t. Now we know better. All that military spending was making us enemies all over the earth. As a result, we have to worry about people who were no threat to us a few years ago — cruel, cunning men who have ...

We are being assured that Judge Samuel Alito, like John Roberts, and in contrast to poor Harriet Miers, is superbly qualified for the U.S. Supreme Court. He sounds good to me, but I wonder. Specifically, I wonder what "qualified" means. The people who insisted that Miers didn't measure up almost made me wonder what "up" means. Interpreting the U.S. Constitution shouldn't be all that difficult. It's written in plain English for ordinarily intelligent people. The only hard part is ridding your mind of all the false interpretations that have confused people about it. If you search it for something about...

A leading abortion advocate, Kate Michelman, says that if it had been up to Judge Samuel Alito, she might not have been allowed, many years ago, to have the baby she was carrying killed. As you may know by now, Alito once ruled in favor of a law requiring that a married woman get her husband's consent before aborting. For Ms. Michelman, this ruling brings both bad memories and dark forebodings. At the time of her abortion, she recalls, her husband had abandoned her, leaving her with two other children; even so, she says it was a "painful" decision. It...

How can the United States defend itself in the future? Some learned minds are wrestling with this question as new forms of conflict take shape. In the past wars were fought on battlefields the way football is played in stadiums. International law worked out rules of engagement to which most governments subscribed most of the time. "Alas," writes former undersecretary of defense Fred Ikle in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, "America's future enemies may not fight according to these Marquess of Queensbury rules." Mr. Ikle foresees the use of nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare "in that unanticipated region of warfare --...

Back in the 1930s, when white men were preparing for another round of mutual slaughter, few of them paid any attention to the Muslim world. They assumed it to be a backward region that history had long since passed by. One man saw it differently. The great Catholic polemicist Hilaire Belloc, an Englishman of French ancestry, remembered Islam’s past and predicted, in his book The Great Heresies, that it would one day challenge the West again. As late as 1683 its armies had threatened to conquer Europe, penetrating all the way to Vienna; Belloc believed that a great Islamic ...

The historian David Irving has lost his libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Mrs. Lipstadt had called Irving “one of the most dangerous spokesmen for Holocaust denial.” In a devastating ruling, Justice Charles Gray declared Irving a “racist” and “anti-Semite” who distorts historical facts in order to portray Adolf Hitler in what Gray, turning to British understatement, called “an unwarrantedly favorable light.” Under British law, Irving must now bear the $3 million in legal fees the defendants ran up. Gray didn’t deny Irving’s contention that Mrs. Lipstadt, with the assistance of other Jewish agencies, including the Israeli government, ...

One reason the Middle East has always baffled me is that we hear such contradictory things about the state of Israel. Israel’s defenders make it sound like heaven; its detractors make it sound like hell. On the one hand, its citizens, including Arabs, enjoy liberties denied by most states in the region; on the other hand, it deals harshly and cruelly with non-Jews, especially in the occupied territories. A Christian has to be particularly disturbed by the recent killings of innocent Christians, including children, in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ. The exact circumstances are unclear, because our news media don’t ...

Dear Dr. Johnson! Samuel Johnson, that is: eighteenth-century London's "literary dictator," most famous today for conversations he may not have even realized James Boswell was recording for a projected biography. Johnson also wrote poetry, of which only one couplet remains famous: How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! In this age of total government, these words remind us that government once played a far smaller part in men's lives than it now does. Under the rule of King George III, Americans paid only a few pennies per year in...

What Has Bush Learned? December 2, 2004 Freud once described neurotic behavior as persisting in doing the very thing that caused the problem in the first place — keeping on digging when you’re already in a hole. By that standard, government may be the most neurotic behavior of all. A neurosis is a mental block against learning from experience. Some years ago "The Atlantic Monthly" ran a long article showing that government programs to redistribute wealth don’t reduce inequality at all; they leave it about what it was in the first place. Everyone would be just as rich or poor...

As I grew up, my patriotism began to take another form, which it took me a long time to realize was in tension with the patriotism of power. I became a philosophical conservative, with a strong libertarian streak. I believed in government, but it had to be “limited” government — confined to a few legitimate purposes, such as defense abroad and policing at home. These functions, and hardly any others, I accepted, under the influence of writers like Ayn Rand and Henry Hazlitt, whose books I read in my college years. Gradually I came to see that the conservative challenge...

he Dying Mother Card October 14, 2004 I mean, like, seriously weird, dude. After managing to appear a more or less human being throughout three 90-minute debates, John Kerry played the dying mother card. Asked to name “the most important thing” he’d learned from the “strong women” in his life, he didn’t mention the one he’s married to. Instead, he spoke of visiting his mother in the hospital “a couple years ago.” He told her he was thinking of running for president. Then came the most important thing he’d learned, mind you, from any of the strong women in his...

No topic I write about stirs a more unexpected response than secession — the right of a state to withdraw from the United States. You might think the issue was settled forever in 1865, when the North crushed the South in the Civil War. But many Americans, North and South, still like the idea, and many others nearly panic at the mere mention of it. A few readers think I’m writing with tongue in cheek when I propose secession. Well, though I see the humor of it, I’m not exactly joking. I know it’s unlikely to happen, for the time...

JOHN KERRY'S RELIGION September 28, 2004 by Joe Sobran In his convention acceptance speech, John Kerry made a brief, vague reference to his "faith" and skipped over the subject even more quickly than he did his political career. A few months ago, it appeared that Kerry might have trouble with some Catholic bishops if he tried to take Communion, because of his consistent advocacy of abortion. But Kerry and his defenders insisted that he was a Catholic in good standing, and the issue faded away. Still, there were unanswered questions about how seriously Kerry took his Catholicism. Had he...

The book, Blind Baseball: A Father’s War, has now been published by AuthorHouse in Bloomington, Indiana (www.authorhouse.com). It’s not about baseball; it’s about a divorce, and much more. The title is an odd but apt metaphor explained late in the book. The author, Allen Green, writes with such passion it’s tempting to believe the tale is autobiographical, but it isn’t. The story’s hero, Barry Ballinger, has, to say the least, a troubled marriage. His wife, Sal, serves him with divorce papers, empties their bank account, and spitefully runs up huge debts in his name. She also means to take custody...

Back in the 1930s, when white men were preparing for another round of mutual slaughter, few of them paid any attention to the Muslim world. They assumed it to be a backward region that history had long since passed by. One man saw it differently. The great Catholic polemicist Hilaire Belloc, an Englishman of French ancestry, remembered Islam's past and predicted, in his book THE GREAT HERESIES, that it would one day challenge the West again. As late as 1683 its armies had threatened to conquer Europe, penetrating all the way to Vienna; Belloc believed that a great Islamic revival,...

 The Shouting Party  July 29, 2004  After listening to two nights of the Democrats’ Boston convention, I thought of the expression “It’s all over but the shouting.” This convention was almost all shouting. I’m writing on the final day; John Kerry will give his acceptance speech tonight. I’m going to take a wild stab and predict that he will shout too. He always does. Like his mentor Ted Kennedy, Kerry understands oratory as an assault on the audience’s eardrums. Kerry’s problem as a campaigner is said to be that he creates no excitement. I’d say his problem is that...

Over a decade ago, a column I wrote in these pages got me fired by National Review, as I figured it would, after twenty-one years of working with Bill Buckley. Those years were mostly very happy for me, thanks to Bill’s truly sweet nature. But tensions had arisen between us, first when I criticized the holy state of Israel, and again when I opposed the first Iraq war. When Bill threatened to fire me over the latter, I felt that it was he, not I, who had abandoned the conservative cause. Since my job was hanging by a thread, I...

Leftists have been yearning for an answer to Rush Limbaugh for some time, and they may have found him, not in radio, but in movies: the odious Michael Moore. Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is smashing box-office records for a documentary film, outgrossing the competition in the first weekend of its release. The film has even become a news story. The Disney studios backed out of distributing it — too controversial — but it won the first prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, where its anti-war, anti-Bush message got a warm welcome. Moore, capitalizing on the publicity, found another distributor. Moore...

The only thing sillier than a liberal is a conservative trying to outmaneuver a liberal. Consider the anti-sodomatrimony amendment that just suffered a first-round knockout in the Senate. Conservatives love the Constitution so much that every time a liberal court commits an outrage against it, they want to amend it. A state court — in Massachusetts, of course — has declared that the Fourteenth Amendment requires the legislature to certify homosexual unions as marriages. Equal protection of the laws, you know. Time for conservatives to swing into action! As usual in such cases, they chose the worst possible strategy. Amending...

Land of the What? June 3, 2004 I enjoy movies about World War II, especially those made during the war itself. I think it’s silly to talk about the men who fought it as “the greatest generation,” but they were my father’s generation and I love the style of manhood they represent — the unassuming masculinity of an older America, responsible rather than macho. What the war movies don’t show — and what they wouldn’t have been allowed to show if they’d wanted to — was the deceit by which Franklin Roosevelt tried to bring on the war. The historian...

The Greatest Generation? June 1, 2004 I’ve always revered old men. America’s youth-worship has always struck me as silly, and its neglect of old people is everyone’s loss. Saner societies realize that the wisdom of their ancient members is precious. But for that reason, I’m put off by all this raving about World War II veterans as “the greatest generation.” The survivors among them are old now, but during that war they were young. And it’s not as if they had any choice. They did what they were told, like the young men they fought against, with little comprehension of...

They Aren’t What They Used to Be May 27, 2004 If I had to sum up American history in one sentence, I’d put it this way: The United States aren’t what they used to be. That’s not nostalgia. That’s literal fact. Before the Civil War, the United States was a plural noun. The U.S. Constitution uses the plural form when, for example, it refers to enemies of the United States as “their” enemies. And this was the usage of everyone who understood that the union was a voluntary federation of sovereign states, delegating only a few specified powers, and not...

Little as I care for President Bush, I must say I’m relieved to find him leading John Kerry in the polls. No question, Bush is a disaster for conservatism. That’s bad enough. But Kerry would be a disaster for Catholicism. The Church in America has enough troubles already. But they would all be compounded if a bad Catholic — one who defies Church teaching on abortion, sodomy, and all the rest — were to win the presidency. Of course Kerry claims to be a Catholic in good standing. He says he received an annulment of his first marriage and married...

"The last thing most Americans want to do now is to restore the original constitutional republic, with severely limited powers, and with neither a huge welfare state at home nor a military colossus abroad. Does this mean 'blaming America first'? I don't blame the U.S. Constitution, which, if adhered to, would have kept us out of the Middle East cauldron that has now scalded us. I don't blame ordinary Americans, who hardly know what their government is and does. I don't even blame our present government for the crimes of bin Laden and his allies; the blood of thousands is ...

Same-Sex Marriage and the Living Document March 4, 2004 “According to definition,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “the ideal citizen of this Modern State must be free to act on his individual judgment of morals, must reach conclusions on all matters by private judgment, but must accept the coercion of any law whatsoever when it has been decided by a majority of such individual citizens so concluding.” That about sums it up. The Modern State, now called Democracy, has no moral principles, but we have a duty to obey it anyway. Why? Majority rule, you know. But sometimes the courts overrule the...

When I was a much younger man, I almost worshipped Shakespeare. He seemed to me almost literally “inspired,” the most eloquent man who ever lived. And he nearly filled the place in my life that Catholicism had briefly occupied after my teenage conversion. When I returned to the Catholic Church in my early thirties, I began to see him differently. As a professional writer myself, I still admired him immensely, realizing how impossible it was that I should ever emulate him. But I no longer regarded him as a god. I had another god — namely, God. I began to...

Bush and the Warmest Body By Joseph Sobran Rarely has a candidate suffered so abrupt a deflation as Howard Dean did in the Iowa caucuses. Dubbed the Democrats’ front-runner by the media, clutching a handful of endorsements from such towering figures as Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and Tom Harkin, Dean was poised to lock up his party’s presidential nomination in the depths of winter. Instead, he finished an ignominious third, far behind John Kerry and John Edwards. Having pronounced Kerry dead long ago, the pundits are now hailing his miraculous resurrection. My own view is that he’s still dead; he...

A Strategy for Kerry January 29, 2004 After the first President Bush betrayed conservatives by raising taxes, in spite of his promise never to do so, many conservatives didn’t bother voting for him in 1992. This was one of the reasons he lost to Bill Clinton, who re-energized the conservative movement and brought about a Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections. In the meantime, Clinton’s ambitious national health-care plan flopped. Principled conservatives should hope that history repeats itself in 2004. If John Kerry wins the presidency, Republicans may start acting a bit like conservatives again. Under the current...

After the first President Bush betrayed conservatives by raising taxes, in spite of his promise never to do so, many conservatives didn’t bother voting for him in 1992. This was one of the reasons he lost to Bill Clinton, who re-energized the conservative movement and brought about a Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections. In the meantime, Clinton’s ambitious national health-care plan flopped. Principled conservatives should hope that history repeats itself in 2004. If John Kerry wins the presidency, Republicans may start acting a bit like conservatives again. Under the current President Bush, party loyalty has made them...

In 1960, when I was 14, I was nuts about JFK. The first one, John F. Kennedy, not the current one, John F. Kerry. I got about thirty JFK buttons from the local Democratic headquarters, pinned them all to my shirt, and wore them to school. Mr. Elliott, my former math teacher, who had a wonderfully dry sense of humor, took one look at me and said, "Why, Joe! Have you thrown subtlety to the winds?" I loved that man. His deadpan ribbing always made me feel like an adult, which is a nice way to help a boy grow...

An Honest Mistake February 3, 2004 “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I’ve always loved that ancient saying, whose author seems to be unknown. But in the age of democracy, it needs to be adapted: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man loses every election.” Not quite as snappy, maybe, but it meets the facts. By now every blind American has heard that arms inspector David Kay has exploded the Bush administration’s justification for preemptive war on, and regime change in, Iraq: the dogmatic accusation that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” One-eyed...

Election-Year Forecast January 15, 2004 Secretary of State Colin Powell now admits, or acknowledges, or however you want to put it, that he hasn’t seen a “smoking gun” proving that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or terrorist connections, though he says it was nonetheless “prudent” to suppose so “at the time.” The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that the Bush administration misrepresented the “threat” from Saddam Hussein. Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s former secretary of the Treasury, says Bush was determined to depose Saddam Hussein as soon as he took office, long before the 9/11 attacks, and...

Brown Reconsidered January 13, 2004 Judicial review was originally proposed (most notably in Federalist No. 78) as a method of making sure legislatures didn’t pass unconstitutional laws. Today it has become a method of changing the very meaning of constitutions under the guise of interpreting them. The problem was highlighted this past November, when the supreme court of Massachusetts handed down the sensational ruling that the state’s constitution required that same-sex “marriage” be recognized in law. The court didn’t even bother citing any specific passage of the constitution that might be construed to mean this; obviously it couldn’t find one....

One Nation, under Secularism? January 8, 2004 Everybody’s getting religion these days. By everybody, I mean of course all the presidential candidates, especially Democrats concerned with outreach to voters far from Vermont. Responding to this trend, Susan Jacoby, writing in the New York Times, notes regretfully that “secularism has become a dirty word.” In an essay titled “One Nation, under Secularism,” she argues that the Framers of the Constitution were driven by “secular convictions” when they wrote “the nation’s founding document.” She wants us to appreciate “the nation’s secular heritage.” She deplores “the misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that...

Purging the Neocons January 6, 2004 Did you know that the word neoconservative — often shortened to neocon — is an ethnic slur? Neither did I, but some, er, conservative pundits have set me straight. David Brooks of the New York Times says of “the people labeled neocons” that “con is short for ‘conservative’ and neo is short for ‘Jewish.’” So when other people call these people “neocons,” you see, they’re really calling them Jews, which for some reason is anti-Semitic. This must come as a surprise to Irving Kristol, who long ago cheerfully, indeed proudly, accepted the term. Though...

All We Like Sheep January 1, 2004 Once upon a time, my father bought Time magazine every week, as I do now. He paid 20 cents per issue; I’m paying $3.95. In my teens I bought paperback editions of Shakespeare’s plays for 35 cents each; now they cost about five bucks. I’m no economist; these are just some of my rough indices of how prices have risen in my memory. Things in general now cost ten to twenty times as much as they used to. Don’t even ask about groceries or cars. If prices increased 1000 per cent overnight, we’d...

A Commie Christmas Gift December 23, 2003 Christmas this year is brightened by the news that nominally Communist China has taken a big step toward enshrining private property rights in its constitution. For some reason it reminds me of a Christmas story told by the late Leonard Read, a champion of property rights and market economics. One year, on the day before Christmas, Read greeted his heavily laden mailman and asked him how he was doing. The man groaned, “Worst day we’ve ever had!” Later that day Read went to a local store for a bit of last-minute shopping. It...

The Bush administration has won a major political victory: the biggest expansion of Medicare in the 38-year history of that jewel of the Great Society. The details are complex; the cost will be staggering — ultimately, trillions of dollars. This is not only a victory over the Democrats, but a triumph over any principled conservatives who remain in the Republican Party. The GOP leadership in Congress steamrollered those who have supported Bush in the hope and belief that he stood for a return to limited and constitutional government. President Bush, to put it briefly, has finally removed his conservative mask....

Triumph! December 16, 2003 So Saddam Hussein, who hasn’t broken any American laws, will stand trial under the supervision of President Bush, who has pretty much shelved the U.S. Constitution. Saddam — we’re all on first-name terms with him — doesn’t deserve a lot of pity. True, it’s hard not to be touched at the thought of an old man suddenly going from a diet of lobster and caviar to baloney sandwiches every day; but he’s probably in no position to gripe about prison conditions. Anyway, he’ll always have Paris, so to speak. “Good riddance; the world is better off...

Attacking” President Bush November 27, 2003 “Some are attacking the president for attacking the terrorists,” says a new Republican TV ad for President Bush. In its verbal sloppiness, this message is fully worthy of the president himself. Of course nobody is “attacking” him in the same sense that he is “attacking the terrorists,” with real bullets and bombs. Various people are criticizing him, some with measured language, some with verbal abuse, but all of them are well within the limits of the “freedom” and “democracy” he says he wants to promote around the world. So why does he allow and...

Master of the Quiet Style November 25, 2003 Forty years ago, on November 22, 1963, I was as shocked as billions of other people by the murder of John F. Kennedy. I didn’t even notice the passing of another man the same day, whose name at that time I barely knew: the English writer C.S. Lewis. But within a few years, Lewis was my favorite modern writer, and he has remained so. He is best known as a Christian apologist, but he was also a literary scholar of great distinction as well as an immensely popular writer of science fiction...

The Neanderthal Creed November 18, 2003 Senator Edward Kennedy, who prides himself on opposing discrimination against all minorities, committed a gaffe the other day. Speaking of President Bush’s judicial appointees, he pledged that the Senate won’t confirm any “Neanderthals.” As a Neanderthal, I find that shockingly insensitive. Senator Kennedy is, after all, the uncle-in-law of California’s new governor, who achieved great fame playing Neanderthals in the movies. How can he be so openly contemptuous of the concerns of the Neanderthal community? President Bush hasn’t even nominated any real Neanderthals to the Federal judiciary. His choices are all far too “progressive”...

The Age of Rage November 13, 2003 The comedian Jackie Mason used to do a routine about visiting a psychiatrist. “You hate your father,” the shrink told him. No, Mason protested, I love my father very much. “Then you hate your mother.” No, said Mason, I love my mother. Told that he didn’t hate his brothers or sisters either, the shrink suggested, “Maybe you’ve got a cousin?” Reversing Tolstoy, the twentieth century decided that unhappy families were all alike. According to Freud, it was natural for boys to hate their fathers. And their brothers too. Phrases like Oedipus complex and...

November 11, 2003 New York leads the country again, paying $141 per thousand dollars of personal income in state and local taxes. This is 72 per cent more than the national average, according to a new Citizens Budget Commission study. New York has been traditionally liberal — meaning, in practice, that it has been dominated by rapacious pressure groups, each seeking to live off the taxpayer. It illustrates Frédéric Bastiat’s description of government as the system through which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else. Even if your self-respect prevents you from being part of the greedy...