he Elián González affair has now taken on all the familiar contours of a Clinton operation. There is the shady lawyer with his questionable funding. There are the private meetings between Clinton emissaries and foreign despots, with unknown deals being struck and unknown favors being traded. There is the gearing-up of the slander machine: James Carville has not yet appeared to tell us that Cuban-Americans are unstable, like Kathleen Willey, or trailer-park trash, like Paula Jones, but the smash-mouth operation against this patriotic and hard-working minority is well under way. By the time Clinton’s media shills have finished their work, Cuban-Americans will have approximately as much credibility as Idaho militias.

There is the careful, ominous silence from Clinton himself. (Do you really think our president would have anything to do with this dirty stuff? No, no; it’s just some overzealous underlings.) There are, alas, impeachment-whipped congressional Republicans, dithering and ducking, anxiously checking their polls; and congressional Democrats, already practicing their triumphant sneers. There is the Democratic presidential candidate, triangulating wildly; and there is the Republican candidate, saying approximately the right things but very, very q-u-i-e-t-l-y.

Lost in all this is any conception that America has a role of moral leadership to play, and that this has been an excellent opportunity to play it. How one longs for someone—anyone—in our public life to stand up and say those things that the Clintons and Renos will never say, because they are not even capable of thinking them. That this nation loves liberty. That we detest Communism. That we will, on every possible occasion, strive to vex and humiliate Communist dictators and all others who boast themselves our enemies, to frustrate their designs, to diminish them in the eyes of their own people, to hasten their downfall by any means our laws and ethics permit.

The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once suggested that any Western policy towards Communists should be evaluated by the following test: What does it look like to the men and women in the camps? In Castro’s camps, they are weeping