Abused Girl Makes Good Despite Failure of Child Protective Services

British barrister Constance Briscoe is a poster child for the meritocratic society. Daughter of Jamaican immigrants to Britain in the 1950s she went to college and became a barrister, a Queen’s Counsel, a level in the British legal hierarchy that poor old Rumpole of the Bailey could never quite rise to.

Only there is a little more to her story than that. One of six children, she was brutally abused by her mother, who did everything she could to abort her desire for education and advancement. The story is told by Briscoe in Ugly.

In an interview with Deirdre Fernand timed to coincide with the release of her book in Britain, Briscoe speaks in

measured, almost flat, tones recalling her troubled childhood. As she rehearses the violence, starvation and deprivation she endured, she could be reciting a shopping list...

When she asked her mother why she treated her so badly, she replied: “Oh, just the fact that you breathe...”

I thought all this child abuse was supposed to be a thing of the past, now that we have professional child protective services in every advanced nation. How could this abuse go on when there are squadrons of eager helping professionals organized into mighty bureaucratic armies intended precisely to seek out and put a stop to child abuse?

In the case of Constance Briscoe, she only got to escape from her mother when a teacher at her school informally took her in. For,

Eventually her mother attacked her so badly that her headmaster called her mother in. Briscoe refused to go back home with her but would not say why. A teacher, Miss K, agreed to take her in. Life proved sweet at Miss K’s flat in Streatham and her grades soared. She became prefect and captain of games.

And then she went on to university and qualified as a barrister. Now she is “Miss Recorder Briscoe”, a municipal judge.

Her son, now at university himself, could only get half way through her memoir.

But what should we do about this gross abuse? Can we say that the German bureaucratic method of credentialed experts has failed? Should we return to the Burkean “little platoons” of informal community to protect the least among us? What is to be done?

The End of the Bork Era

Nineteen years ago, Senator Edward Kennedy rushed onto the floor of the United States Senate and opened the Bork era. He said:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizen’s doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

That was then. Nineteen years later, Senator Kennedy is just another ageing Democratic senator with a taste for bullying witnesses.

This is now. Despite the nastiness of Senator Kennedy’s questioning of Judge Alito, who cares? Who cares what white-haired liberal senators think and do? Their time is past. They are voices of the past, mumbling the ideas of the past. Liberal ideas have consequences, and liberals would rather not talk about it. Because

Ted Kennedy’s America is a land in which mourning women cannot forget how old their aborted baby would be if it were alive today, blacks have been taught to hate the nation that confessed and honestly atoned for its Original Sin, rogue gang-bangers make life a misery for poor people, schoolchildren are not taught much of anything, writers and artists are censored at the whim of the politically correct, and the doors of the federal courts are slammed shut on the fingers of ordinary people to avoid disturbing the latest elite séance channeling a new constitutional penumbra or emanation.

But with Ted Kennedy now a rutted bully rather than the rutting bull of his prime, we can see the Bork era coming to a close. Conservatives have learned how to beat the bork. You nominate a brilliant, mild-mannered appeals court judge who can talk for days and days about the law and about the nice legal issues in this case or that case, and with every word demonstrate that he knows more about the law and about judging than any senator past, present, or future.

And, of course, after being roundly borked, insulted, demeaned, and humiliated for a month or two, the new justice has been thoroughly vaccinated against the disease of Strange New Respect, that malady discovered by political epidemiologist Tom Bethell that often turns good conservative justices into blithering liberals, just so that they can say to the Washington social elite: “You like me! You really like me!”

Democrats Smear Alito: What's the Point?

Why do they do it? Why are national politicians like Senators Kennedy and Schumer descending to cheap attacks and witness baiting in the hearings to confirm Judge Samuel A. Alito to a seat on the United States Supreme Court? Are they crazy?

It is common in political controversy to represent the other side as idiots. Private people often call politicians they disagree with as fools.

But this is a mistake. Politicians are not fools, even if they often act like it. National politicians like Kennedy and Schumer, who led the attack on Judge Alito in the confirmation hearings this week, are not fools. They are highly successful national politicians who have won state-wide campaigns time and time again. These are smart, successful people.

So why do they turn the Alito confirmation hearings into a playground brawl?

Is it because it worked in the Bork hearings, and almost worked in the Thomas hearings? That’s what Rush Limbaugh suggests when he says that Democrats are calling plays out of a 30-year-old playbook. It worked in the past, and so the Democrats will keep using it until the Republicans intercept a couple of passes for touchdowns.

Is it because the Democrats want to keep their base on a permanent war footing? That seems to have been their tactics ever since the election of 2000. But you wonder whether that is really paying off for them. When you keep your base on a war footing, it also keeps the opposing base on a war footing. Democrats are enraging Republicans just as much as they are encouraging their Daily Kos and MoveOn.org enthusiasts.

Are they just going through the motions for the left-wing groups like People for the American Way and the Alliance for Justice? Ralph Neas and Nan Aron run these liberal activist groups for what appears to be the sole purpose of promoting liberal judges for the federal bench and opposing conservative judges. But surely the Democratic senators have the power to say to Neas and Aron: cool it.

You have to hope that the Democrats are looking at polls that show that their slash-and-burn tactics are backfiring.

You’d like the tactics to backfire because you’d like to live in an America where a judicial candidate could tell the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Yes, Senator. I’m a pretty conservative guy: Two kids, two cars. One wife. But I’m not going to go onto the Supreme Court and reverse every liberal court decision of the past 50 years. That’s just not the way the law works.”

Senator Biden complained this week that the confirmation hearings were turning into a sham where the nominee wouldn’t tell the senators anything about his views. Well, senator, that couldn’t be because Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, ever since the Bork hearing in 1987, have tried to lynch any nominee that expresses a political view that liberals dislike, could it?

The Global Problem of the Natural Resource States

There is a difference between a state like the United States and a state like Saudi Arabia. In the United States, the people are a resource. In Saudi Arabia, the people are a cost.

In other words, the leaders of the United States need us, the American people. Our energy, our wealth-producing activities, our knowledge, our patriotism are the foundation upon which the power of the political leaders is built.

But the same is not true of a state like Saudi Arabia, where national income and wealth comes from pumping oil out of the ground. In Saudi Arabia (and in other natural resource states) the people are an annoying cost that reduces the revenue of the political leaders.

This model can be applied globally. States like the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, and China are nations that depend upon their people for their wealth. States like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, and now even little Bolivia are natural resource states. They do not produce much of anything that the world wants except their oil or their natural gas.

So when Russia turns off the gas to Ukraine, writes Irwin M. Stelzer, maybe we ought to pay attention. Maybe Russian President Vladimir Putin is sending

a warning to major energy-consuming countries that their long-term prosperity is in the hands of very dangerous people.

The joke is that the natural resource states need us much more than we need them. In the long term, if they push prices above the market then the energy-consuming countries will find other ways of getting energy. In the short term, certainly, they can swing their weight around and cause inconvenience.

Of course, there is no reason why the natural resource countries and their tin-pot dictators should have the influence they do. There are plenty of ways we can reduce their influence. We can build out nuclear power. We can aggressively prospect for oil and natural gas in the mainland US and offshore. But we don’t. We don’t do it because significant portions of our educated elite in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world belong to a post-Christian religious cult that experiences the earth as an expression of the divine. They experience the land outside the cities as a sacred place that should be kept apart. Characteristically, they want to force their religious beliefs onto other Americans.

But that will change. Eventually the people states will deal with the natural resource states. The only question is, shall we do it now, when the cost is manageable? Or shall we let the natural resource states wax in strength and pride and in their ability to cause mischief before we deal with them?

Lefty Professors Don't Get It

While the pontificators are pontificating for the cameras at the Alito nomination hearings, David Horowitz and others are testifying to a select committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature about academic freedom. The legislature is taking up Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights that protects students from abuse from their teachers, particularly one-sided presentation of controversial subject matter. As Horowitz says: how can students get an education if they only get half of the story?

And of course to back him up Frontpagemag.com has a horror story about a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia who runs a cartoonish left-wing course on “Urban Society: ‘Race,’ Class, and Gender in the City.” Needless to say, all the readings are left-wing, and anyone that disagrees with the teacher, associate professor Melissa Gilbert, gets an earful, as this student reported on ratemyprofessors.com

“Racism and Sexism are only one side. She is one of the biggest feminists I know — Oh and if you’re a white male, you can’t ask her a question, she yelled at me after class for asking test structure. She’s hypocritical and a HUGE Feminist. Very bad teacher.”

You feel sorry for the kids being subjected to this abuse, but maybe it is good for them. Maybe they need a bit of abuse from the lefties. Who knows? Maybe left-wing teaching is the biggest factor creating conservatives here in the good old USA.

Sam Alito: Independent Jurist or Conservative Extremist?

It is Monday morning, and the Democrats are threatening filibuster, according to Charles Hurt. Says Senator Charles Schumer about Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito:

"If he continuously, given his previous record, refused to answer questions and hid behind ’I can’t answer this because it might come before me,’ it would increase the chances of a filibuster."

Notice the use of the passive voice here.

On the other hand, Alito supporter Senator John Cornyn voices support for President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee.

A 2004 study by two law professors found him to be the fourth most independent federal appeals-court judge in the United States.

But you can understand the passion of the liberal interest groups. They know that their mountain of progressive legislation and their pile of liberal court decisions are under attack. Their great liberal monuments are under attack because America has moved on from the polity and the economy of liberal clientage, except in the benighted liberal cities where schools rot and liberal activist groups entice troubled Americans into lifelong dependency.

All over the nation young families are moving from blue states to red states to get away from the expense and the tyranny of liberal government, to find the jobs they need and to find housing they can afford and schools they can trust. They know that they need to get away from liberals if they are going to be able to realize their dreams.

And liberals want to stop them.

No wonder liberals have sworn to stop the nomination of Samuel A. Alito to become associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. They feel their power slipping away, and they will do anything to keep it.

Naomi Wolf: She admits she was wrong

God bless Naomi Wolf. After a fine career of best-selling feminist titles like The Beauty Myth and the daring Promiscuities Naomi has decided at the grand old age of 40 that the patriarchy, in the person of her poet father Leonard Wolf, was right after all.

And now she has written a book about it, The Treehouse : Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See.

It’s delicious, isn’t it. Democrats are holding their heads in horror insisting that Samuel Alito completely blotted his copybook twenty years ago with a rather enthusiastically conservative job application. But it’s perfectly OK for liberal Naomi Wolf to confess the error of her ways. Yes, all those years wearing the “same straight-leg black jeans and black boots that every other young Marxist” was wearing and all those books railing against the patriarchy: that was then. Hey, anyone can make a mistake!

So Naomi determined that she wanted her poet father to teach her

formally, what he had taught his students for the decades during which he gave a famous class in poetry and creative writing at San Francisco State University.

I realised that when I had gone astray it was because I had deliberately ignored, or insisted on forgetting, as daughters do who are trying to forge their own identity in the world, one of those 12 lessons about literature — lessons that are really, or equally, about life.

Instead, Naomi now wondered:

What had I lost? Was it peace? Was it the need to get closer to a sense of God? Was it the longing to quit work in the public dog pit — where one must strive, compete, and produce the way men have traditionally produced — and to do more of the traditionally “female” work of planting seeds and watching children? ... I wanted to listen to a child, not a meeting. I wanted peace, not war. God, not Mammon. Family, not itineraries. Poetry, not polemic.

Well, good. I mean, what’s not to like? And a gentler, kinder Naomi Wolf can still indulge in the occasional rant against evil Republican neo-cons and corrupt Republican lawmakers and lying Republican presidents without it harming in the least her new role as a wise old crone.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to buy the book.