Elian: So Much For "Compassion" For Children

For many years now, the liberal Childrens Defense Fund has featured as a sort of logo a childrens drawing with the scrawled-out words, "Dear Lord, be good to me, the sea is so wide, and my boat is so small." For many of those years, Hillary Rodham Clinton chaired the groups Board of Directors. Its extraordinary that CDF has nothing to say about six-year-old Elian Gonzalez and his plight at sea, and now Hillary is saying to little Elian: get back on a boat to Fidel Castros Cuba.

Spokesman Howard Wolfson recently explained that "Hillary Clinton knows that we must take politics out of this decision." But this clashes mightily with her law review articles in the 70s and 80s complaining, "The pretense that childrens issues are somehow above or beyond politics endures and is reinforced by the belief that families are private, non-political units whose interests subsume those of children."

Elians plight underlines that for liberals, it is not really about "compassion" or "the children," but about maximizing the power of government, even if it means looking like hypocrites while they spit out phrases they loathe, like "family values," over the Cuban boys dilemma. They still have warm feelings for Fidel Castro and his revolution, and dislike the idea that America somehow offers a better life to a child than Cuba.

For the press, it means striking the ancient "objective" pose of moral equivalence. As Times Tim Padgett declared, "In the end, the drama may reveal how fed up both societies are with the Dr. Strangelove hysteria of U.S.-Cuba relations." Padgett and other reporters went looking for local experts to declare anti-communist Cuban exiles are "damaging their cause in most Americans eyes."

Cuban-Americans are the medias least favorite minority today. Throughout the controversy over Elian, they have been described with words like "hard-line," "militant," "dysfunctional," "opportunists," "zealots" running a "jihad." An MSNBC graphic on Cuban exiles pledging to surround the Gonzalez home actually declared, "Captors or Saviors?" Anchors like Katie Couric perpetually wonder if these zealots are going too far. What other minority in America gets this kind of media treatment? This would never happen with most blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, even homosexuals. Imagine the lefts differing reaction years ago if Chiles Pinochet or South Africas Botha demanded the return of a child to a distant father.

Too many reporters are making themselves available vehicles for ridiculous Cuban propaganda. NBCs Jim Avila, for example, filed a "Nightly News" piece suggesting that if Elian would go home, he would be a "a four-foot tall deity in a country that officially does not believe in God." The evidence of his holy status would be living the "Cuban good life," defined as - I kid you not - an extra 15 bucks a month of rice, beans, and shaving cream, and five free monthly gallons of gas. That seems like low-balling it a bit for a demi-god, dont you think?

The week before, Avila was insisting that "Cubans point to the good things about their country. An education system that is the envy of Latin America, virtually everyone in Cuba reads and while life may be hard in Cuba, child psychiatrist Bennet Leventhal says children there can be just as happy as here."

Avila can be refuted by ABC reporter Cynthia McFadden, who celebrated Cuba a few months ago during ABCs all-day New Years festivities, but announced "in the classrooms we visited yesterday there was certainly no computers and almost no paper that we could see." Theres no paper in the classroom, but its the educational utopia of Latin America.

More recently, ABCs paternalistic Peter Jennings put the debate in its proper leftist perspective: "Once again the government has failed to get the kind of cooperation from the relatives that might allow the case of this young boy to end in a civilized manner that is best for him." Jennings cant even see the point of a debate over whether a life under Castros tyranny and "Young Pioneer" indoctrination is actually "best" for the child.

Liberals will no doubt spend the forthcoming months ridiculing George W. Bushs claims to be a "compassionate conservative." But their willingness - no, eagerness - to dishonor his mothers dying wish and force Elian Gonzalez back to boot camp with Castro reveals once again the emptiness of their own "compassionate" poses.