Your friend Jim George thinks you'd be a great addition to Ricochet, so we'd like to offer you a special deal: You can become a member for no initial charge for one month!
Ricochet is a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing about and discussing politics (usually of the center-right nature), culture, sports, history, and just about every other topic under the sun in a fully moderated environment. We’re so sure you’ll like Ricochet, we’ll let you join and get your first month for free. Kick the tires: read the always eclectic member feed, write some posts, join discussions, participate in a live chat or two, and listen to a few of our over 50 (free) podcasts on every conceivable topic, hosted by some of the biggest names on the right, for 30 days on us. We’re confident you’re gonna love it.
That Black Rifle Coffee is potent and delicious.
On Elian Gonzales:
That was a U.S. federal agent who took the kid from his father. But the outrage didn’t last nationwide, though obviously the Cubans in Florida took much longer to forget.
Elian Gonzales was and probably still is treated pretty well in Cuba. He was still a Communist prole, but the Cuban government decided to make him an example of their “socialist paradise” and Gonzales played along (or was brainwashed).
I considered it a tragedy at the time, but if he had never left Cuba in the first place, he would probably have had a life that was much more oppressive.
Of course the government that treats him well is morally corrupt, and he benefits from it.
He probably doesn’t realize what he lost.
I got that wrong. He was taken from Cuban-American relatives. He was returned to his father who lived in Cuba. It was his mother who spirited him away to Florida in a raft, but who died enroute.
But, another key technicality: he was not “returned to his father”, because in Cuba the government has rights over all children, not the parents. Children stay with their parents only at the pleasure of the government, not unlike other socialist and communist communities. So he was in fact returned to Communist Cuba and Fidel Castro, by Bill Clinton and Janet Reno.
His father, of course, was property and in no position to assert his true desires. Failure to understand this is another reason why you don’t want Democrats running foreign policy.
But there was a certain poetic justice. Every once in a while, I’m sure Al Gore wakes up in the middle of the night, and thinks, “If I had criticized the decision, I would have won the Presidency.”