PRESTOPUNDIT -- "An intense brain-buzz, guaranteed" (2blowhards)

"The story of six-year-old Elisa Isquierdo made headlines in New York in 1996. A dark-haired, large-eyed little beauty, Elisa was born crack-addicted. Custody was granted to her father at birth, but he died when the child was five. Though his family fought to gain custody of the little girl, the court granted custody instead to the mother - still crack-addicted, unmarried, and the mother of five other children. Social workers, court officials, and teachers all noticed signs of abuse. Yet Elisa remained with her mother, who reportedly believed her daughter was 'possessed by the devil.' When Elisa was six and a half, she was beaten to death. Her body was found to be covered with wounds from cigarette burns and other injuries, some old, some new. Her hair was almost completely gone."

That is just one horrific story from Mona Charen's Do Gooders .. In this new work, Charen turns her extraordinary memory and her remorseless pen to the home front. Do Gooders is a book about ideas, terrible ideas, and the real people who suffered as a result of them - people like little Elisa. Elisa was sacrificed to the child welfare establishment's over-riding concern for "family preservation." As Charen notes, however, "The term 'family preservation' is bitterly ironic. ... In every other context - parental notification laws for abortions, waiting periods for divorce, the debate over gay marriage - liberals tend to disdain the idea that families are in any way sacred. Yet when it comes to mothers who are drug-addicted, irresponsible, and abusive, liberals suddenly decide that in the words of Robert Little, head of the Child Welfare Administration of New York under former mayor David Dinkins, 'All families have strengths as well as weaknesses.'"