When in "Doubt"

When I saw a trailer for the Meryl Streep movie “Doubt” I was turned off. You could just tell what a movie about accusations of sexual misconduct at a Catholic school would be all about.

But then, reading reviews, I started to wonder. Maybe it was doable, after all.

After seeing it last night, I can say that the movie is a miracle. No, the miracle is not the acting of Streep as the Catholic high school principal nun or Philip Seymour Hoffman as the priest that the nuns suspect is abusing a young high-school boy. Make no mistake. Their peformances were excellent. No, the miracle is the screen-play by writer-director John Patrick Shanley. The plot beautifully lived up to its title.

(Plot spoilers ahead) Did Father Flynn actually abuse the boy? We never know for sure. Is the authoritarian go-by-the-rules style of Sister Aloysius a relic of the Stone Age? The movie does not say. Is Father Flynn a practiced liar? Who knows? Was Aloysius right to pursue Flynn out of the parish? And what good did it do if he just gets shifted to another parish and another school? Good question. The movie, miraculously, doesn’t tell us what to think.

We also get charming cultural touches. We see the celibate nuns eating in solemn silence under the baleful eye of Aloysius; but the celibate priests laugh and smoke at their meal.

I’ll tell you. Just when you think that Hollywood cannot be redeemed, Hollywood comes up with a movie called “Doubt”that really deserves to be called a triumph.

Liberal Law Takes Freedom Away

It’s amazing how many people look at the current sue-mad society and wonder what’s the problem. It isn’t that hard.

The problem is fairly simple. It is the tangle introduced into the law by powerful government. Today we have the notion of law as the balancing of interests competing with the liberal law of “rights” all gummed up with the forest of adminstrative law that arises out of the enormous reach of government.

President Obama has called for a new era of responsibility, writes Philip K. Howard. It’s a wonderful idea. Just don’t try it out yourself or you’ll get creamed.

But there’s a threshold problem for our new president. Americans don’t feel free to reach inside themselves and make a difference. The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices.

The examples are all around us.

Most doctors say they wouldn’t advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can’t even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.

Again. It’s not that hard. These problems are all problems because politicians, acting with the consent of the voters, have injected government power into areas that didn’t used to have government involved.

We have taught people to expect miracles from medicine. So people sue when medicine isn’t perfect. We have created vast bureaucracies to second-guess private actors. And it’s not surprising that teachers need to watch their step. They are acting as custodians of the nationi’s children in government custodial facilities. Of course their every action should be governed by administrative law.

Philip K Howard thinks he has a solution. He just wants to create a zone of freedom.

Freedom has a formal structure. It has two components:



1) Law sets boundaries that proscribe what we must do or can’t do — you must not steal, you must pay taxes.



2) Those same legal boundaries protect an open field of free choice in all other matters.

That’s all very well, but you can’t allow government officials “an open field of free choice.” The whole point of government is that government spending and regulation must be tightly regulated or it will descend into corruption, and spending money for no return.

If you want an open field of free choice then you’ve got to take the government out of it. So if you want teachers to touch children again, you’ve got to scale back government schooling. If you want doctors free of lawsuits you’ve got to take 3rd party payment out of the equation so that doctors have a one-on-one relationship with their patients.

But that goes against the very grain of modern society. The whole idea of modern society is that an educated elite gets to call the big shots on everything, generally through big government adminstrative programs or through big government administrative law.

You can’t have responsibility in that kind of a culture. Instead you get jealously guarded rights and endless second-guessing and punitive lawsuits.

Don’t like the era of rights and second guessing? Then get government out of the way.

Rove Sets Out Bush Legacy

People haven’t been obsessing about Bush’s legacy the way they obsessed over the Clinton legacy eight years ago. What was that Clinton legacy, anyway, and does anyone care?

But Karl Rove knows his duty, and so he’s set forth his list of has boss’s achievements.

• First, Bush was right about Iraq
  
• Bush was right to go after nations that harbored terrorists.
  
• Bush was right to fight AIDS in Africa.
  
• He was right to cut tax rates, on wages, dividends, and capital.
  
• “Mr. Bush was right to match tax cuts with spending restraint.”
  
• He was right to do Medicare Part D drug benefit.
  
• He was right to do No Child Left Behind.
  
• He was right to be pro-life.
  
• He was right not to respond to Democrats who called him “a liar and a loser.”
  

It’s helpful to have Karl Rove’s take. It provides a benchmark on what the Bush administration thought it was doing, and wants us to think of it, now that it’s all over. For this conservative, what is palpably missing is a serious effort to start a movement away from the welfare state culture of compulsion.

The truth is, I’m not sure I know where to start.

Actually I do. The effort to reform the welfare state and move towards a welfare society begins with women. When women decide that they don’t want the important things in their lives—health care, education, and welfare—run by the government on a model of universal compulsion and brute force masquerading as compassion, then things will start to change.

It’s up to us to help in any way we can.

The Liberal Tipping Point

I sent this to some liberal friends on January 20:

I think we should remember the generation before mine that did the heavy lifting on civil rights and that made today possible.

• The African Americans who fought in WWII in an army that was desegregated by President Truman after they came home.
  
  
• Liberals like Hubert Humphrey who had the courage to split the Democratic Party over civil rights in 1948.
  
  
• Lawyers like NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall who argued segregation before the Supreme Court rather than in the streets.
  
  
• Activists like Dr. King who led African Americans in an exemplary campaign of non-violence.
  
  
• The African American rank-and-file who overcame their fears to offer their bodies and their lives in the cause of freedom.
  
  
• The young freedom riders, often Jews, who went into the South to register voters at risk of their lives.
  
  
• President Johnson, a Southerner, who pushed the civil rights and voting rights acts through Congress even though he predicted that Democrats would lose the South for a generation.
  
  
• And so many more.

We are inheritors, standing on the shoulders of those who came before. And I am glad to know several liberal men now in their 70s and 80s and appreciate the generosity of spirit that still shines from that generation as it heads for the exits.

What I did not say was this:

Right after the triumph of the civil rights acts came the Tipping Point (to coin a phrase). In 1965 a young Assistant Secretary of Labor put out a report entitled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” which “hypothesized that the destruction of the Black nuclear-family structure would hinder further progress towards economic, and political equality.” That man was a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and he was told to shut up.

The year 1964 was liberals’ finest hour. The year 1965 began the descent into hubris. It began the descent into the liberalism of today: cruel, corrupt, unjust, and deluded.

After the Bailout

Many conservatives are skeptical about the bank bailout last fall. All that money thrown at Wall Street fat cats and what do we have to show for it, we grumble.

It is annoying, but the simple fact is that the government cannot let the credit system collapse. Period. And anyway, the banks are not really true private sector institutions. They are GSEs like Fannie and Freddie, only not quite as government-sponsored. Only a little bit pregnant.

No doubt, as Donald Lambro writes, the money expended in the bank bailout in purchase of toxic assets, in preferred shares and so forth, will come back to the government and reduce the deficit. (That will create a new problem, as solons decide they want to spend it rather than save it.)

No, the bigger problem is the way the government has learned to use the credit system to subsidize its favorites and to imagine that it can ease the business cycle. In Britain, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown used to boast that he had abolished “Tory boom and bust.” Now they are ramming his boast down his throat weekly at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Let’s stipulate that the government can do something to ease the business cycle. The question is: how much is enough? And when should it be done and when should the government just get out of the way? Obviously the credit operations of Fannie and Freddie are egregious errors, worse than a crime, a blunder. But we obviously need the government to print money and issue lots of debt when it has a war to fight.

The fact is that the way that the government “helps” in a down cycle is by the resort to inflation. That’s what happened in the Great Depression. That’s what happened in the inflationary/recessionary Seventies. And that’s what happened when Alan Greenspan brought interest rates down in 2001-2003. The key to these interventions is to know when to stop. And the record shows that the government doesn’t know when to stop. That’s why it took $20 to buy an ounce of gold in 1900 and now it takes $800. Today’s dollar will buy the same amount of gold as 2 1/2 cents in 1900.

But why worry? Government bonds are yielding 3 percent right now. From the government’s point of view, it doesn’t matter what it does to the value of the dollar as long as it can sell its bonds on the world market.

Well, it may not matter to the government and all the folks who got to eat lunch in the Capitol Rotunda on January 20. But it matters a lot to the rest of us. Debauching the currency is a crime. It is a crime upon the ordinary people that put their hard earned savings in bank accounts and fixed income securities.

But will we mend our ways after staring into the abyss last fall? Don’t bet your nestegg on it.

Godspeed President Obama

President Obama issued a strong call to service in his inaugural speech today. Recognizing the crisis he spoke firmly about the need for all Americans to participate in the effort of recovery. First he spoke about the problems:

Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

He remembered the previous generations, who toiled that we might enjoy our present prosperity. He celebrated our mongrel heritage.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.

Then he urged America to come together to solve the problems.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies...


Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true... What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

All this is true, and glorious. And in these words we can see in President Obama’s words the opportunity for greatness.

As a conservative, what comes through to me clearly today is that the whole liberal project has come down to this great moment, the day when an African American became president. All over the United States our liberal friends are fulfilled. Today the risks and the courage of the early civil rights movement, when it was dangerous to advocate for civil rights, are redeemed.

For that we say to our liberal friends: well done thou good and faithful servant.

But we reminid our liberal friends of the costs they have burdened on our nation as they pursued this vision. These include the devastation of the low-income family, the gigantic size and weight of government, the truculence of liberals in their government sinecures, and the flight from responsibliity to “rights.”

When President Obama invokes the old things: “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” conservatives shake their heads. Where have you been all this while, Mr President? And what chance do you have in turning your political base, which advocates for people who don’t work much, which doesn’t believe in manly courage, which calls its adversaries haters and worse, and which sneers at patriotism when it’s not accusing people of questioning its patriotism?

When I look at America, I see liberals in the schoolhouse door, liberals making health care cumbersome and expensive, liberals mucking up the housing market, liberals devastating families, liberals discouraging thrift and good husbandry. In January 2009, more than ever, the word must go forth: physician, heal thyself.

If President Obama can turn liberals from hate and the worship of political power to love and the old things, then he will truly take his place as a great President of the United States.

MLK Vision Fulfilled, say Blacks

On the first Martin Luther King holiday since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, most blacks say the King vision is fulfilled, according to a CNN Poll.

The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King’s vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech — roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.

So, you can say that the election of Barack Obama has about doubled the faith of blacks in America.

But then there are whites, and whites are less inclined to believe that King’s legacy has been fulfilled.

"Whites don’t feel the same way — a majority of them say that the country has not yet fulfilled King’s vision," CNN polling director Keating Holland said. However, the number of whites saying the dream has been fulfilled has also gone up since March, from 35 percent to 46 percent.

What does it all mean, anyway? To ask whether King’s vision has been fulfilled is a “feelings” question. It really asks whether the respondent feels good about race relations.

When blacks are asked about King’s vision, what to they think it means? When whites are asked about King’s vision, what do they think it means?

The truth is: whatever people feel, the objective facts are that blatant racism, expressed in laws that limit the rights of non-white races in the public square, is a very small problem today.

And that’s a good thing.