Feeding the feelings

What a difference in two pitches for Mexican immigrants on succeeding pages of today's Sun-Times.  Mary Mitchell did very well in running an e-mail from a Chi public school employee -- my guess is a security guard -- who writes of Mexican kids arriving for school, who 

alway greet me, and parents always with a smile because they love their kids and bring them to school because its part of life and want the best for them. Black parents come to me to complain because the kid ia gettin a uniform letter because they want to dresa them in sean john and jerseys when there is a dress code.  [Spelling as is]

This is better reporting than Mark J. Konkol's in his page-one-splashed story about illegals whom he depicts as deserving to stay:

Wailing police sirens frighten the Barrios children to tears. They know that any day now officers might storm the family's Berwyn bungalow and take "Papi" away -- forever.

 

And when that time comes, Papi will be sent back where he came from, Zacatecas, Mexico -- a faraway land the kids know only from stories their parents tell. Tales of true love and total poverty.

This is tear-jerking stuff, dished out for the masses to convince them.  How obvious can you get?  Come on.

 

Elsewhere in the news, the Christian Science Monitor stringer says she issued her pro-terrorist statement with guns pointed at her head and has recanted.  Good.  Few of us would have taken death as Patrick Henry said he would as the price of liberty.  But should we do special honor to the hostage American who was found shot to death a few weeks back in the fair presumption that he refused to make a pro-terrorist statement?