TheAgitator.com
A Bit More on Holder
Thursday, November 20th, 2008National Review relays two troubling stories on Obama AG nominee Eric Holder’s role in the Elian Gonzalez case.
In the period before armed agents seized the child, the Justice Department had been leaking its intention to avoid any sort of armed intervention. It would all be done quietly, they suggested. When top Department officials were asked about it, they said nothing to change that impression. About two weeks before the raid, 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 day after the seizure, Holder appeared again with Russert, who asked, “Why such a dramatic change in position?” “I’m not sure I’d call it a dramatic change,” Holder answered. “We waited ‘til five in the morning, just before dawn.”
It’s one thing to not want to tip your hand about what you’re planning. It’s something else to be retroactively smug about sending armed agents into a private home to pry a kid out his relatives’ arms at gunpoint.
Eric Holder, the deputy attorney general, appeared on Fox News a few hours after the raid that morning. Judge Andrew Napolitano accused the Justice Department of taking the child at gunpoint. Mr. Holder denied the charge. What he didn’t realize was that he was appearing on a split screen, the other half showing the Alan Diaz photo. “Not taken at gunpoint?” an incredulous Napolitano shot back. “Have you seen the photograph?“
He probably he hadn’t. Which is why he thought he could get away with lying about how Gonzalez was seized.
Hat tip for both stories to Rob Port.
When Ira Magaziner filed a perjured affidavit with a federal court in the Health Care Working Groups case, it was Holder who decided not to prosecute.
Little-known fact: Vince Foster was legally culpable for the work on that affidavit.
I’ve always said so: no culture that could tolerate the Clintons can possibly come to anything good.
You didn’t actually believe that Obama was running on a platform of change for the better, did you?
What I’m waiting for is the left to figure out that if they wanted a return to the Clinton years, they should’ve voted for a “real” Clinton.
It’s nice to see that the election of Obama has encouraged a lot of latent Clinton haters to spin up their nonsense machine again. Happy days are here again…surely.
I’m not interested in clicking on any National Review links, thanks anyway. It’s obvious to me that, in the wake of the GOP’s stunning electoral losses, they’ve decided to purge their publication of anyone who doesn’t hew closely to the party line. The intelligent, contrarian publication of William F. Buckley is a well and truly dead.
The Elian Gonzalez thing still continues to confound me. The relatives holding Elian refused to surrender him to the custody of his father, despite being ordered to do so by the courts. They further intimated that they would not give Elian up and they would do what they could to keep him from going back to Cuba.
I’m not sure what the government is supposed to do at that point. Were they supposed to say pretty please or perhaps just give up and say, “oh well, nothing we can do here.”?
if some of your dead wife’s relatives were holding your son and refused to give him back to you, what would you expect the police to do?
@Chuchundra:
For starters, not send in a paramilitary force to rip a screaming child, at gunpoint, from the arms of a relative.
I’m with Chupacabra. The National Review has gone from being the finest voice for conservative ideals to a dumbed-down populist shill for the R team. You can’t give up on ideas and remain relevant.
If Bush himself had seized Elian with a bear trap and gouged out his left eye to accomodate Cheney skull-fucking the poor boy in the orifice, NR would have come out in full supoort of the president.
“When faced with the war on terror,” wrote [insert cornerwhore here], “you have to break a few eggs to make an omlette.” Seriously, if you are willing to get behind John Yoo’s child nut-cracking in the name of team spirit, you’ve lost all intellectual and moral authority to comment on the mistreatment of Elian.
I should mention I’m with Chumbawumba on the part about the National Review sucking, not the part about sending Elian back to Cuba. That part, and all of the details surrounding it, sucked.
I’m with Chuchundra too. Elian’s US relatives had no right whatsoever to keep him, and that was affirmed by the courts. Where the authorities too heavy-handed with the guns? Maybe. But if you have time to get worked up over a case, there are much better ones than this. There are miscarriages of justice much more egregious than this.
I believe the rights of a parent are greater than the rights of the state where their children are concerned.
“I believe the rights of a parent are greater than the rights of the state where their children are concerned.”
That presumes that Elian’s father had rights in Cuba.
Don’t be fucking ridiculous.
Cuba itself thinks he did have the right to have his kid back. US courts agreed. And I agree. Strangely, you being crude and insulting hasn’t changed this opinion.
It’s nice to see that the election of Obama has encouraged a lot of latent Clinton haters to spin up their nonsense machine again.
It’s important to remember that there are a lot of folks, like myself, who loathe the Bush administration and think several members of it should be in prison, who also loathe the Clintons for being the habitually lying, authoritarian opportunists that they are.
I hate unnecessary SWAT raids as much as the next libertarian, but I don’t know what choice the feds had since the folks holding Elian had not only refused to allow him to return to his father, but suggested they would violently resist attempts to remove the boy.
That presumes that Elian’s father had rights in Cuba.
This is poorly reasoned. Because Cuba doesn’t recognize people’s rights means that we shouldn’t recognize a Cuban’s right to raise his son?
“If Bush himself had seized Elian with a bear trap and gouged out his left eye to accomodate Cheney skull-fucking the poor boy in the orifice, NR would have come out in full supoort of the president.”
I love uninformed comments like this. Clearly you haven’t bothered actually READING the site for the last 8 years, other than cherry picked posts linked from KOS or DU.
I would be most interested in what you disagreed with in those links. Of course, that would require you to actually read them. Which, since it appears you prefer to argue absent the facts, is something you are unlikely to do.
buzz lightthinker:
I read the corner every day douche-nozzle. I’m a libertarian who agreed with WFB’s stance on many issues. And on the issues on which we disagreed, I usually respected his thoughtful consideration of the issues.
Pre-internet, I was an NR subscriber. While earning my Ivy degree in political philosophy I studed conservate ideas and thought under Jeff Hart, an NR editor.
I’ve don’t often read Kos or DU. And if you, young feller, could read, you’d notice my post wasn’t about the links, but the duplicitous nature of NR’s team-spirit stance when it comes to tormenting youngsters.
Also, I fucked your mother.
#11 Les: “This is poorly reasoned. Because Cuba doesn’t recognize people’s rights means that we shouldn’t recognize a Cuban’s right to raise his son?”
Excellent work, Les. If libertarians (and liberals like me who haven’t forgotten their classical liberal roots) believe in the concept of natural rights, or at least believe that government should assume that we have such rights, then it follows that the Cuban regime’s views on rights should be irrelevant. The only reason the state should have an interest in removing a child from his or her birth parents is if that child is being physically abused or very seriously neglected. Unless you have substantial proof that Mr. Gonzalez mistreated Elian, then you would be hard pressed to find a reason why the U.S. should have deprived Mr. Gonzalez of his son. The fact that Elian had the misfortune of being born into an authoritarian, state socialist society does not justify this kind of intrusion by the state. Elian’s mom died, so Elian needed to be with his dad, pure and simple. As for the raid, I don’t think it necessarily had to be done that way, but the family in Miami did have some culpability in how it played out.
I’m not an expert, but I think Jefferson may have stepped over the boundries of “civil discussion”. Obviously not a Princeton man.
Oops. I forget about the kindler, gentler comment section. My apologies!
Holder is a Statist asshat.
Obama is living down to my expectations.
We saw so many conservatives give GWB a free pass on the un-conservative things he did. He ignored privacy rights, spending was out of control, and the powers of the government went virtually unchecked. Just about every conservative pundit out there had excuses. I don’t expect for a second that liberals will be any different. “Statism we can believe in!”
Please name me the last Attorney General that wasn’t a statist asshat. It kind of goes with the job. I mean, who did you expect him to appoint? Lawrence Lessig?
A SWAT raid in predawn hours was appropriate, given the feelings expressed and threats made by the local Cuban community. These were the same folks, after all, who bombed a local art gallery because it dared to present a show including works of art by Cubans who actually lived in Cuba. The Cubans style of politics is rather different, and the threat of violence bubbled a little closer to the surface than most Americans are used to. It’s only in the last few years, as the younger, American born or at least American raised generation has started to make its presence felt, that things are returning to normal.
Which means that the possibility that some people would fight the police to prevent Elian being taken away was more likely than you might expect.
The whole argument that Elian should be kept in Florida was based on two premises: that his mother was a martyr for liberty and her last wishes should be honored–those last wishes being interpreted as Elian should live in the USA, without allowing for the possibility that had she known he would be living with remote cousins and not with her, she might have preferred him to stay in Cuba (and ignoring the fact that by taking him on the trip, she actively placed his life in danger); and the accompanying premise that Elian’s father really wished his son to live in the USA but was co-erced into demanding him back by the Castro regime, without considering the likelihood that he was in fact a supporter of the regime and really wanted his family to be raised under Castro’s rule.
Keeping Elian in Florida was justified on the grounds that Castro’s regime was a massive piece of government interference in raising a child, and ignoring the fact that by keeping Elian in Florida, the US would be interfering to an even greater extent.
And I should mention that most non Cubans in South Florida complained not that the Clinton administration should not send Elian back to Cuba, but that it had pandered to the Cuban community and waited too long to do what it should have done.
Anybody who thinks an Obama/Democratic administration won’t be just as bad (or worse) than the supposedly Hitler-like Bush administration suffers from severe cognitive difficulties.
Yeah, I have to agree with Scott, witness Jefferson’s gratuitous insults- does not say much for civil discourse- especially from a college “educated” person- where I grew up, in the lumber camps and fishing villages, someone who said stuff like that would get his butt kicked PDQ. Of course, we were just dumb working stiffs, what did we know?
“This is poorly reasoned. Because Cuba doesn’t recognize people’s rights means that we shouldn’t recognize a Cuban’s right to raise his son?”
He didn’t raise his son and that was never a serious prospect. It’s astounding to me how many people thought it was. Go look at that kid today. He always belonged to the state.
You people are as wrong about this as you were the day that Reno’s goons yanked him.
The Castro regime is raising Elian? So? Isn’t the American regime raising every American kid it can get its hands on? And how does massive governmental interference on the part of one regime justify massive governmental interference on the part of another regime?
You may not realize how badly the Cuban style of politics warps things here in Florida. There are plenty of goons among them, and more than a few of those goons were out on the streets at the time pissing off the rest of us. The whole Elian affair was simply two sets of people trying to claim one boy as a propaganda prize–Castro on the one hand, and el Exilio on the other hand. Castro had the advantage of having the father as trump card to play as he wished. But don’t mistake the Florida community of Cubans as a group that actually had Elian’s best interests at heart.
Elian’s father is his only surviving parent. I’m not going to tell a father he can’t see his son because I have a problem with the guy who runs the country he lives in. If you really would do that, all that tells me is that you are not a father. If Cuba thinks it owns Elian, Cuba is wrong. If you want to agree with Castro that he owns Elian, that’s your business. A father raising his son is a natural right, and I mean that in the same sense Helmut meant. The fact that you have a beef with Castro does not change that.