OLD AND BUSTED: “Get Clean for Gene!”
The New Hotness?
More details here: Hillary Clinton says migration ‘went too far’ and ‘needs to be fixed in a humane way.’
While in Germany for the Munich Security Conference, Hillary Clinton participated in a panel titled, “The West-West Divide: What Remains of Common Values.”
During the panel, Clinton appeared to take a stronger approach to her previous stance on border security.
“There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration,” Clinton said.
“It went too far, it’s been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people and how we’re going to have a strong family structure because it is at the base of civilization,” she added.
Elián González has entered into the conversation:
Media claims of authoritarianism? On the contrary, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times famously wrote in 2000:
I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart. They should put that picture up in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: ”America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it. Come all ye who understand that.”
And I was also warmed by the picture of Elian back in his father’s arms. Some things you can fake — like a 6-year-old wagging his finger on a homemade video and telling his father to go back to Cuba without him — and some things you can’t fake. That picture of Elian and his father illustrated the very parent-child bond that our law was written to preserve.
Hats off to Janet Reno for understanding that the Elian Gonzalez case was about both of these pictures: the well-being of a child and the well-being of our Constitution, on which all good things in our society rest. But hats off twice to Ms. Reno for understanding that these two noble virtues are not equal. The fear of causing some trauma to Elian by rescuing him could never outweigh the need to uphold the rule of law.
One only hopes that this affair will remind the extremists among the Miami Cubans that they are not living in their own private country, that they cannot do whatever they please and that they may hate Fidel Castro more than they love the U.S. Constitution — but that doesn’t apply to the rest of us.
One also hopes that now that Ms. Reno has ended the kidnapping of Elian by the Miami Cubans, the other hard-nosed lady in the cabinet, Madeleine Albright, will end the Miami Cubans’ kidnapping of U.S. Cuba policy as well. Ms. Albright could start by relaxing the embargo on Cuba.
Fortunately, Albright didn’t take the advice of a columnist even further to her left, and as a result, as Glenn asked last week at his Substack: Will Cuba be Libre soon, and if so what happens next?
