Anything it takes

...to get Hannah Montana tickets:

An essay that won a 6-year-old girl four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert began with the powerful line: "My daddy died this year in Iraq." While gripping, it wasn't true _ and now the girl may lose her tickets after her mom acknowledged to contest organizers it was all a lie.

This little girl's mother, after being cornered with the bald faced fact that "daddy" (not married to mommy in this case) was not killed in Iraq, explained it all by saying:

"We did the essay and that's what we did to win," Priscilla Ceballos, the mother, said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. "We did whatever we could do to win."

Here's a video from WFAA in Dallas [from the video]:

They say they never dreamed of having to do background checks on essays from little girls. They say the real truth of what happened is "even more disturbing." But so far, they won't say what that is.

Not sure the 6 year old needs the punishment here. Perhaps they could send her on the trip along with the runner-up (after a background check of course) and her family and let mom stay home or even answer to petty fraud charges.

But gee, what could be 'even more disturbing' than a little girl being told it's OK to lie to win a contest by using a fantasy killing of her father; then winning; then having it stripped away? Are they illegals? Are they even related at all? Where's the real dad and what does he think? Did he put them up to it?

Speculating wildly, should they eventually turn out to be 'undocumented' it makes a certain sense--most people who come across our border illegally possess an "anything it takes" mindset. This has been pointed out by many on the pro-enforcement side as a possible future by-product (or for you Ron Paul fans 'blowback') of granting blanket amnesty, ie, if they didn't abide laws when coming here and end up being rewarded, what incentive is there to ever follow a law?

But let's face it, no major company in America would ever describe being undocumented as 'disturbing' so it's probably something else. Not sure of their politics, but it's easy to imagine a scenario where they picked her as the winner thinking it was a "win-win": she was Hispanic and her father had been killed by the evil Bushitler's unjustified war. Very chic.

Whatever the case (and the facts may change) it's certainly not the first time a parent has irresponsibly coerced their child to lie for a cause. The major point here was the callousness and shamelessness of the method. Which says something.