One issue with Barack Obama -- inevitably -- tapping some Clinton era veterans is that the media get to relive their pathetic standards of the Clinton era. Before there was much of an Internet to keep them in line (Media Whores Online excepted). So here's National Review's Byron York doing some of the issue-digging on Eric Holder (Obama's nominee to be Attorney-General) --
About two weeks before the raid [on the Miami home where Elian Gonzalez was being kept by relatives], Tim Russert asked Holder, "You wouldn't send a SWAT team in the dark of night to kidnap the child, in effect?" Holder answered, "No, we don't expect anything like that to happen." Then the Department did precisely that.
The US Department of Justice did not kidnap Elian Gonzalez. Their special team took him from his relatives to return him to his father, his only surviving parent. It's black-letter law that parents have priority over any other relative in custody disputes, unless some abuse is proven. And the only abuse that the relatives could ever claim was that Elian's father didn't want to leave Cuba and thus wanted to raise Elian there.
In a strange way, the Elian Gonzalez dispute had its echoes (and not just by being in Florida) of the Terri Schiavo fiasco, in which Republicans now sought to deny the priority of a husband to make the life-ending decision for his wife. Both situations have in common the trashing of the supposed primacy of the family for political expediency.
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