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Apr 27, 2000 | Shame on Janet Reno
BY DAVID HOROWITZ
(04/25/00)

Question: Did David Horowitz need a bile transfusion after he finished his recent screed, "Shame on Janet Reno"? This column crossed the line between commentary and temper tantrum in every way, surprising since Horowitz himself alluded to the fact that Elian might be a "hostage" in an earlier column.

-- James A. Dittes

Horowitz requested one reason it is better to be poor in Havana rather than Little Havana. OK. In Big Havana, you get medical care regardless of your income level. It may not match the level of care available to the highly insured in the U.S., but it is care that 35 million Americans cannot afford.

-- Dick Paddock

After reading David Horowitz's assertion that the reduction in the press's access to six-year-old Elian Gonzalez was evidence that he was being brainwashed by government agents, I immediately became suspicious of many of my co-workers and friends. After all, I see them eight hours a day at most. Might the other 16 hours be given over to attending sinister government re-education programs, where adherence to the Communist Party line was enforced through torture and psychological manipulation, aided by the regular administration of super-secret mind control drugs? How was I to know, since TV coverage of their lives was nonexistent? So I stewed, tormented by the question, "Why are these people hiding behind a total news blackout?"

Imagine how dismayed I was when I realized that I, too, had not been on TV since I was about five, when I appeared on a circus-themed show on public access. Good Lord, every untelevised moment of my life since was suddenly under suspicion. Luckily, I retain enough sanity to know that I must submit myself to a battery of psychological tests to ensure that my free will remains intact. I plan to go as soon as I report my friends and co-workers to the proper authorities. Their protests -- that their lack of television exposure reflects their desire for privacy and peace and a stable environment in which to raise their families rather than any subversive motive -- will fall on deaf ears.

-- Tyler Steward

In his diatribe against Janet Reno, Bill Clinton, Elian's father, Fidel Castro, Rev. Campbell and everyone else who believes Elian should be with his father, David Horowitz sounds even more hysterical than Marisleysis. He flings about inflammatory words like storm troopers, disgrace, reprehensible, shame, slimy, criminal, etc. But all this rich rhetoric cannot conceal the poverty of his cause: to kidnap an innocent child, use him as a pawn in a cynical political game and turn him against his own father.

This was not a custody battle -- what right does a great-uncle who never met Elian before this circus began have to contest custody with the boy's father? It was from the very start an exploitive political game controlled behind the scenes by the corrupt political machine of the Miami anti-Castro Cubans. Janet Reno did the right thing, albeit several months after she should have.

-- James Hoeffner

Hooray for David Horowitz, who had the guts to wrap this hideous episode up in a neat, tightly written nugget for the apologists to try to swallow. I have asked all along why we were knuckling under to that dastardly little dictator (Castro) and pointed out the discrepancies in what Reno was saying and then doing. All that Americans seemed to be able to think about was "Elian belongs with his father." What a crock! Elian was obviously given over to the custody of his mother, who chose freedom, which the slimy little Miguel cannot seem to see is better than the mansion (with pool) he has been promised in Cuba.

-- Lizbette R. Cox

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