— What if Elian Gonzales’ father requested asylum and was turned down by the INS? It may have happened according to this in Transterrestrial Musings
I’m seeing some reports from people on the ground in Florida that a story’s going to break tomorrow that Juan Gonzales (remember, Elian’s poppa?) requested asylum three times from Janet “Roast the Waco Kids” Reno while he was holed up in the Cuban embassy in DC, and was repeatedly denied.
Surprised that Janet Reno would be callous to the welfare of a child after building a career prosecuting men falsely charged with sexual abuse of children? Naw, it’s too perfect, and even Reno’s not that dumb. My guess is Juan waffled on asylum and finally decided against it because of the reprisals Castro threatened to bring down on his parents. The INS destroyed the evidence of his waffling, probably, in hopes of avoiding a November surprise.
My guess is that the entire story is nonsense and just another pathetic ploy by the ultra-right paranoid crowd to take a jab at the Clinton administration. Thank god we have a real attorney general these days. A nutcase so out there the very conservative people of Missouri found him too extreme and decided to vote for a corpse instead.
I, too, suspect that the story is false, but I don’t share April’s views on Ashcroft. He’s so out there that he was selected as leader (by the Attorneys-General of all 50 states) as their leader while he was the Missouri Attorney-General, that he was selected (by the governors of all 50 states) as their leader while he was governor of the state of Missouri, and that he was elected as Senator the first time. His defeat at the polls in November 2000 was partially due to sympathy towards Carnahan’s widow (Ashcroft was slightly ahead in polls prior to the crash), partially due to a lackluster career as a senator (he was not one of our shining lights in the senate, which applies to more than half of the members of that august body), and might have been affected by the blatantly illegal ruling by a state judge to keep the polls is heavily Democratic St. Louis open past their mandated closing time.