Liberal Democrats would like to use the lame-duck session of Congress to squeeze out passage of the "DREAM Act" to provide a "path" for citizenship to illegal-alien students. So The Washington Post ordered up another round of sympathetic press-release coverage for Sunday's paper with the tableau of a Thanksgiving dinner, complete with a beautiful "exemplary student" named Anngie Gutierrez who wants to be a medical examiner. The headline was "Undocumented youths chasing a dream." The story used the favored liberal word "undocumented" seven times (including headlines and captions). Reporter Shankar Vedantam relayed:
Gutierrez attended Thanksgiving dinner last week at the home of one of her high school teachers, Elias Vlanton. A group called United We Dream organized 300 to 500 events where DREAM Act-eligible students could share Thanksgiving dinner with citizens - and also perform various acts of service - according to Jose Luis Marantes, a senior organizer at the group.
"All teachers push every day to get our kids to go to college and work hard, and then you have kids who want to do that and are being denied," Vlanton said as he talked about what an exemplary student Gutierrez is. "It's painful - it's painful to you as a teacher."
Vlanton's quote was put right next to a picture of Gutierrez (and above the Thanksgiving tableau) on the front page of the Metro section. Vedantam did not add that Vlanton wrote an op-ed in the Post supporting amnesty for illegal students back in 2006.
United We Dream hates "dumb" opponents like conservative Sen. Jeff Sessions, who's awarded a mere two paragraphs in this mostly sympathetic article to explain why someone might oppose it. Sessions advises his "fellow conservatives" to oppose the DREAM Act, but none of the liberal amnesty activists are labeled as liberal or favoring amnesty.
The Post offered obviously incorrect sentences from illegal students including this one from 18-year-old Jaime Mauricio: "I was 9 years old [when his family brought him to America from Honduras.] This is the only country I know." The first half of his life is a complete blank?
Vedantam's article ends with the lament that if the roles were reversed, American hypocrites would quickly become the law-breakers:
"I guess they don't see it from our point of view," she said of the measure's opponents. "If the U.S. was an impoverished nation, if Guatemala was the rich country and the one with education, I bet then Americans that are opposing this would say, 'Hey, give us a chance!' But since they have it, they don't realize how important it is to us."
The Post doesn't select anyone less than sympathetic as its front-page exemplar of the illegal alien who arrives in America at 8 -- skipping over a Carlos Martinelly-Montano, the illegal who killed two nuns in a drunk-driving accident.
