What Is It Like To Be A Bat?
Via the files of DC Media Girl, some excerpts from Peggy "Magic Dolphins" Noonan on the Elian standoff a few years back:
"From the beginning it was a story marked by the miraculous. It was a miracle a six-year-old boy survived the storm at sea and floated safely in an inner tube for two days and nights toward shore; a miracle that when he tired and began to slip, the dolphins who surrounded him like a contingent of angels pushed him upward; a miracle that a fisherman saw him bobbing in the shark-infested waters and scooped him aboard on the morning of Nov. 25, 1999, the day celebrated in America, the country his mother died bringing him to, as Thanksgiving.
And of course this Saturday, in the darkness, came the nightmare: the battering ram, the gas, the masks, the guns, the threats, the shattered glass and smashed statue of the Blessed Mother, the blanket thrown over the sobbing child’s head as they tore him from the house like a hostage. And the last one in the house to hold him, trying desperately to protect him, was the fisherman who’d saved him from the sea -- which seemed fitting as it was Eastertide, the time that marks the sacrifice and resurrection of the Big Fisherman.
It is interesting that this White House, which feared moving on Iraq during Ramadan, had no fear of moving on Americans during the holiest time of the Christian calendar. The mayor of Miami, Joe Carollo, blurted in shock, “They are atheists. They don’t believe in God.” Well, they certainly don’t believe the fact that it was Easter was prohibitive of the use of force; they thought it a practical time to move. The quaint Catholics of Little Havana would be lulled into a feeling of safety; most of the country would be distracted by family get-togethers and feasts. It was, to the Clinton administration, a sensible time to break down doors.
Which really, once again, tells you a lot about who they are. But then their actions always have a saving obviousness: From Waco to the FBI files to the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory during impeachment to taking money from Chinese agents, through every scandal and corruption, they always tell you who they are by what they do. It’s almost honest.
........
Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend. Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and searing tragedy has occurred, and none of us knows what drove it, or why the president did what he did.Maybe Congress will investigate. Maybe a few years from now we’ll find out what really happened.
.......
And some of us, in our sadness, wonder what Ronald Reagan, our last great president, would have done. I think I know. The burden of proof would have been on the communists, not the Americans; he would have sent someone he trusted to the family and found out the facts; seeing the boy had bonded with the cousin he would have negotiated with Mr. Castro to get the father here, and given him whatever he could that would not harm our country. Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable assumption that God’s creatures had been commanded to protect one of God’s children. And most important, the idea that he would fear Mr. Castro, that he would be afraid of a tired old tyrant in faded fatigues, would actually have made him laugh. Mr. Reagan would fear only what kind of country we would be if we took the little boy and threw him over the side, into the rough sea of history. He would have made a statement laying out the facts and ended it, “The boy stays, the dream endures, the American story continues. And if Mr. Castro doesn’t like it, well, I’m afraid that’s really too bad.”
But then he was a man." (Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2000)
"From the beginning it was a story marked by the miraculous. It was a miracle a six-year-old boy survived the storm at sea and floated safely in an inner tube for two days and nights toward shore; a miracle that when he tired and began to slip, the dolphins who surrounded him like a contingent of angels pushed him upward; a miracle that a fisherman saw him bobbing in the shark-infested waters and scooped him aboard on the morning of Nov. 25, 1999, the day celebrated in America, the country his mother died bringing him to, as Thanksgiving.
And of course this Saturday, in the darkness, came the nightmare: the battering ram, the gas, the masks, the guns, the threats, the shattered glass and smashed statue of the Blessed Mother, the blanket thrown over the sobbing child’s head as they tore him from the house like a hostage. And the last one in the house to hold him, trying desperately to protect him, was the fisherman who’d saved him from the sea -- which seemed fitting as it was Eastertide, the time that marks the sacrifice and resurrection of the Big Fisherman.
It is interesting that this White House, which feared moving on Iraq during Ramadan, had no fear of moving on Americans during the holiest time of the Christian calendar. The mayor of Miami, Joe Carollo, blurted in shock, “They are atheists. They don’t believe in God.” Well, they certainly don’t believe the fact that it was Easter was prohibitive of the use of force; they thought it a practical time to move. The quaint Catholics of Little Havana would be lulled into a feeling of safety; most of the country would be distracted by family get-togethers and feasts. It was, to the Clinton administration, a sensible time to break down doors.
Which really, once again, tells you a lot about who they are. But then their actions always have a saving obviousness: From Waco to the FBI files to the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory during impeachment to taking money from Chinese agents, through every scandal and corruption, they always tell you who they are by what they do. It’s almost honest.
........
Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend. Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and searing tragedy has occurred, and none of us knows what drove it, or why the president did what he did.Maybe Congress will investigate. Maybe a few years from now we’ll find out what really happened.
.......
And some of us, in our sadness, wonder what Ronald Reagan, our last great president, would have done. I think I know. The burden of proof would have been on the communists, not the Americans; he would have sent someone he trusted to the family and found out the facts; seeing the boy had bonded with the cousin he would have negotiated with Mr. Castro to get the father here, and given him whatever he could that would not harm our country. Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable assumption that God’s creatures had been commanded to protect one of God’s children. And most important, the idea that he would fear Mr. Castro, that he would be afraid of a tired old tyrant in faded fatigues, would actually have made him laugh. Mr. Reagan would fear only what kind of country we would be if we took the little boy and threw him over the side, into the rough sea of history. He would have made a statement laying out the facts and ended it, “The boy stays, the dream endures, the American story continues. And if Mr. Castro doesn’t like it, well, I’m afraid that’s really too bad.”
But then he was a man." (Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2000)
posted by Anawim | 11:51 AM
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