Bill, Hillary, Chelsea and … Elian?

By Paul Sperry

“It’s really a sad situation,” the first lady said of the international
tug-of-war over 6-year-old Cuban refugee, Elian Gonzalez.

While expressing her sorrow for the motherless boy in January to
David Letterman, Senate tease-candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton struggled to
come up with a way to resolve the problem.

That’s easy. If your heart really goes out to the boy, tell your husband
to cancel the lad’s deportation papers and draw up adoption papers. That’s
right: You are still looking to adopt, aren’t you? Or was that just
another campaign ploy?

Recall that during the 1996 race, as the family-values rhetoric heated
up, St. Hillary planted the idea in the media that she and Bill were
thinking of adopting a child.

“I must say we are hoping to have another child,” she confided in Time
magazine in May 1996. “My friends would be appalled, I’m sure. But I think
it would be terrific.”

She added that she and the president “continue to talk about” adopting a
little brother or sister for daughter Chelsea, then 16 — though the idea
wasn’t likely to get far until after the busy election year.

The election came and went and — surprise — so did the issue of
adoption. What happened? It took the alternative media to follow up.

In a Dec. 15, 1996, interview with C-SPAN, Papa Bill demurred: “I think
it is very important for people to bond with an infant, and it would require
massive amounts of time that I don’t know whether we could guarantee the
child at this moment.

“But I’ve always been kind of interested in (adoption),” he added. “And
heaven knows, maybe when I leave here I’ll still be young enough to do it.”

Indeed he would. At 54, Clinton would be the
youngest president next to Teddy Roosevelt to leave office.

After the interview, White House spokesman Barry Toiv confirmed that
Hillary still had the maternal itch. “They don’t rule out adopting later in
life,” he said, referring to the first couple.

So how about it, Hillary? Elian even fits your idea of the model child
for adoption.

“I have worked hard to promote adoption, particularly for older kids and
across racial lines and kids with special needs,” she told Time. It’s a
match!

The Clintons even have, finally, a home of their own in which to raise
the lad. More precisely, a $1.7 million mansion in Westchester County, New
York.

“I just think that giving a child a chance and sharing what you have with
a child is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, as well as a
child,” said Hillary, who in a 1973 paper advocated liberating “child
citizens” from the “empire of the father.” “So I hope something will come of
our thinking about it.”

Stop thinking, already. Adopting Elian would be a Solomonic solution to
this tragic affair.

The boy would enjoy freedom and material trappings, while still getting
schooled in crypto-collectivism by a radical leftist lawyer (sans beard). He
could live in America, land of the free, while still getting a regular taste
of his communist heritage.


Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily.

Paul Sperry

Paul Sperry, formerly WND's Washington bureau chief, is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington." Read more of Paul Sperry's articles here.