Update: Oh, My Gosh! They're All Pod People

Update: Townhall.com has risen to the occasion. When I posted yesterday, I emailed them and explained. The picture was changed today. Thanks especially to Mary Katherine Ham. Sometimes we just need to raise their consciousness, I guess.

Children walk through the streets while banging on makeshift drums in Old Havana September 29, 2007. Cubans are celebrating the 47th anniversary of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). The CDRs are assigned to every block of houses in Cuba to take care of medical assistance if needed and to guard neighbourhoods by controlling people's movements and activities. REUTERS/Claudia Daut (CUBA)

In a reprise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the conservatives at Townhall.com, a web site I really enjoy, seem to have been replaced with by left wing clones. Of course, the more likely explanation is that damage wrought by the propaganda machine is more pervasive and more insidious than even I thought.

Anyone who clicked on the link to "Elian II: The Sequel" by Kathleen Parker in the post below was treated to some dillies:

Projecting our own values, it's easy to imagine that E would be materially better off in America. We'd all prefer to live among prosperity in a free country than in relative poverty under a communist dictatorship.

Just whose values are we supposed to use in deciding? Osama bin Laden's? And what values would those be? I mean, aren't we using our values when we decide that the father's rights are paramount. Try the next sentence. It seems that while we prefer to live in prosperity, those little brown people down there don't. They must like waking each day with the knowledge that they must somehow improvise to find food to eat that evening. And then there's the "prosperity" versus "relative poverty." Please note that it's not poverty per se. I'm sure it reassuring for Cubans to learn that the abject misery in which they live is not poverty. It only seems that way in comparison to the living standard in the United States.

And...

The sad truth is that E should have been put on a plane back to Cuba as soon as her mother was determined unfit.
E had a father then. She has one now.

Here she betrays an ignorance of the facts of the case that is hinted at throughout the article. The point is that the child did not have a father. As in the Elian case, it was only when it became a means of scoring political points for the regime that the impulse of fatherhood overcame him.

As if that weren't enough, the article is accompanied by the picture and caption above. Here the culprit is Townhall itself. The happy natives are celebrating the 47th anniversary of the Committees for the defense of the revolution, you know the kindly folks who help in local medical emergencies and guard neighborhoods. I would like to know in what part of their anatomies their brains were reposing when they published this. It is the equivalent of celebrating the anniversary of the SS or the Stasi. The committees are the ground troups of the machinery of repression. Their primary reason for existence is to spy on their neighbors.

That Reuters would publish it does not surprise me, but that Townhall would does. They don't get it. I can only surmise that they can't see the colonialist bias and ignorance because they share in it.

For the article, click here.