Posted by Cockney Robin | Were you taken aback by the thoroughgoingness, viciousness, and fury of the attacks on an injured 12 year old kid called Graeme Frost by American right wing so-called pundits and conservative bloggers? I was, but Damozel wasn't. "Don't you remember how they treated Chelsea Clinton?" she asked. I didn't, but now I can very easily imagine. The following is from TIME Magazine:
If you listen closely to the two-minute radio address that 12-year-old Graeme Frost delivered last week for the Democrats, you can hear the lingering effects of the 2004 car crash that put him into a coma for a week and left one of his vocal cords paralyzed. "Most kids my age probably haven't heard of CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program," he says in a voice that sounds weak and stressed. "But I know all about it, because if it weren't for CHIP, I might not be here today."
Graeme, whose sister suffered worse brain injuries when their family SUV hit a patch of black ice, was making an appeal for President Bush to reconsider his veto of legislation that would have expanded the program designed to provide health coverage to children of the working poor — those who are too rich to qualify for Medicaid but unable to afford private insurance.
"Poor little mites," you are probably thinking. "This anecdote would surely make even an intellectually challenged adult with a heart made of granite, snails, chipped ice, and raw sewage see why it is that health care MUST be made available to all persons in the world's most affluent country, but especially to young children." But you would be mistaken. Conservatives of a certain ilk decided---based, it turns out, on incomplete evidence---that the Frost family was not 'needy' enough to deserve assistance with their horribly injured children.
Since then, Frost and his family have been introduced firsthand to something else that most kids his age haven't: the reality of how brutal partisan politics can be in the Internet age. It started over the weekend, when a blogger calling himself Icwhatudo put up a post on the conservative website Freerepublic.com noting what he had found by scavenging around the Internet: that Graeme attends a private school, lives in a remodeled house near one that had sold for $485,000 in March and is the child of parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times. The post also noted that his father purchased a $160,000 commercial space in 1999.
That was just the beginning of what turned into a Category 5 hurricane on the blogosphere. Typical of the tone was what Mark Steyn wrote on National Review Online: "Bad things happen to good people, and they cause financial problems and tough choices. But, if this is the face of the 'needy' in America, then no one is not needy." Nameless commenters to conservative blogs were even harsher. "Let 'em twist in the wind and be eaten by ravens," wrote one one on Redstate.com, who was quoted in the Baltimore Sun. "Then maybe the bunch of socialist patsies will think twice."(The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost)
"Let 'em twist in the end and be eaten by ravens." Mark that. Nice turn of phrase, 'Redstate' berk, especially as applied to a child. As for Mark Steyn, I hope he never has to find out the meaning of 'needy' as a result of a family health care crisis. I wish no one, not even the "Let 'em twist in the wind" geezer, any ill. It's enough to know that they were wrong, not just in their conclusions, but in their premises. As in the case of Al Gore and the 'nine errors,' they jumped on the issue on strictly self-serving and partisan grounds without really delving into the evidence.
It turns out, however, that not everything about the Frosts' life pops up on a Google search. While Graeme does attend a private school, he does so on scholarship. Halsey Frost is a self-employed woodworker; he and his wife say they earn between $45,000 and $50,000 a year to provide for their family of six. Their 1936 rowhouse was purchased in 1990 for $55,000. It was vacant and in a run-down neighborhood that has improved since then, in part because of people like themselves who took a chance. It is now assessed at $263,140, though under state law the value of that asset is not taken into account in determining their eligibility for SCHIP. And while they are still uninsured, they claim it is most certainly not by choice. Bonnie Frost says the last time she priced health coverage, she learned it would cost them $1,200 a month.
In short, just as the radio spot claimed, the Frosts are precisely the kind of people that the SCHIP program was intended to help. The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost
Horrifying as that is, at least political satirist/'sensible conservative' Jon Swift (to whom Damozel referred me) was on hand to explain why Frost must be considered "fair game" for adult conservatives.
When 12-year-old Graeme Frost dared to criticize the President’s veto of the SCHIP program in the Democrats’ weekly radio address, he became “fair game,” as Mark Steyn ...put it. Conservative bloggers (spurred on, apparently, by an aide in Mitch McConnell’s office) began digging for dirt, poring over the Frost family’s financial information and splashing it over the Internet. They made harassing phone calls to the Frosts and sent them nasty emails all in an effort to send a message to others who might dare to speak out and participate in the political process on the wrong side. Never have I been so proud to be a conservative. (Fair Game; links in original).
In case you think the attacks were nastier than seemed easily conceivable, Jon Swift has an explanation:
"The nastiness caught me by surprise," said Graeme Frosts's father and many liberal bloggers seemed taken aback by the intensity of the attacks on the Frost family. Unfortunately, these naïve liberals don’t understand that we are at war and that war calls for different rules, which is something that conservatives have known for long time. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh put it best when he compared this dangerous little boy to a suicide bomber, reusing a metaphor he also used to describe phony soldiers who don’t support the War in Iraq (like all conservatives Limbaugh hates rhetorical waste as much as he hates government waste so he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking up new metaphors when he can still squeeze something out of the old ones.) When confronted with a child suicide bomber with explosives strapped to his tiny body, a soldier doesn’t have time for sentimental thoughts about the terrorist’s youth. He just shoots on sight.....(Fair Game)
And, after all, at least these right wing prats are, as Mr. Swift so truly observes, taking a stand on principle...or rather on their principles (which I once saw referred to in a Matt Groening "Life in Hell" strip as "Manson Family Values). The following might be one of my favourite quotes ever.
Being a conservative means never saying you’re sorry for what other conservatives do. It means justifying the means if you support the ends, whether that involves ruining people’s lives and reputations, invading people’s privacy, violating people’s constitutional rights or torturing them. It means seeing anyone who is not with you 100% as an enemy and seeing every issue as black and white. It means doing whatever is necessary to defeat the enemy even if you sometimes have to violate your own principles to do it and seem like a hypocrite. Being a conservative means scoring political points by going after easy enemies and racking up victories instead of wasting a lot of time with the much harder job of persuading people with the rightness of your cause. It means doing it to them before they do it to us. It means seeing everyone opposed to us, even a 12-year-old boy, as “fair game.” Yes, I am very proud to be a conservative. (Fair Game; links in original)
We have right wingers in the UK, and some of them are....no, Damozel won't let me use that word, so I'll say 'nutjobs.' But anyone who launched that sort of attack would be doorstepped by reporters till Hell wouldn't have it if they directed their venom at an injured. I don't think it would ever happen, to be truthful.
Why are American conservative extremists still called the Right when they almost always turn out to be wrong, I wonder? It's an unfortunate convention, I think. I shall try to think up another name (other than the obvious ones) for them.
I'm a Brit, so I basically believe that no one should have to pay for health care. In a civilised society, every person ought to have the right to health care. So I'm not especially able to put myself in the place of American liberals who want to argue that the attack was unmerited because the family did qualify for SCHIP. But I am as appalled as any of them that a child became the center of such a shitstorm of a controversy.
Here's a quote from Digby (found via Crooks and Liars), which sums up how I would feel if I weren't so bloody polite.
This is so loathsome I am literally sick to my stomach. These kids were hurt in a car accident. Their parents could not afford health insurance — and sure as hell couldn’t get it now with a severely handicapped daughter. And these shrieking wingnut jackasses are harassing their family for publicly supporting the program that allowed the kids to get health care. A program, by the way, which a large number of these Republicans support as well.
They went after Michael J. Fox. They went after a wounded Iraq war veteran. Now they are going after handicapped kids. There is obviously no limit to how low these people will go...(Fetid Compost Where Their Hearts Should Be.)
I'm not going to link directly to any of the Frost-smearers. Here are some of the responses by their critics:
Paul Krugman responded in this article: Paul Krugman, Sliming Graeme Frost (The New York Times)
All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate. If service members oppose a Republican war, they’re “phony soldiers”; if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he’s faking his Parkinson’s symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case for a government health insurance program, he’s a fraud.
Meanwhile, leading conservative politicians, far from trying to distance themselves from these smears, rush to embrace them. And some people in the news media are still willing to be used as patsies. . .
And there’s one more point that should not be forgotten: ultimately, this isn’t about the Frost parents. It’s about Graeme Frost and his sister.
I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical care should get it, period. .
A US Representative, at Think Progress, discussed why Graeme Frost and his family were chosen. Representative Murphy on Smear of Graeme Frost:
The Frost family was chosen specifically because their problems are the problems of many lower-income American families:
[The Frost family is] not living in destitute poverty, but they’re playing by the rules, doing everything that we ask them to do, paying their taxes and contributing to society. […] And so this is the kind of family that we’re talking about. A family that’s done everything we’ve asked. A family that’s getting by, but because their son has an injury that excludes him from most private insurance, he has no other recourse than the SCHIP program, a stop gap solution until the family can try to find some insurance program that will cover them.
Referring to the right-wing smear campaign, Murphy said, “It’s pretty indicative of how low the other side is prepared to go to try to undermine children’s health care.”
The Wall Street Journal (via Crooks and Liars) in Schip Howlers wrote:
Unfortunately, that narrative was bolstered this week by some conservative bloggers. After the Schip veto, Democrats chose a 12-year-old boy named Graeme Frost to deliver a two-minute rebuttal. While that was a political stunt, the Washington habit of employing “poster children” is hardly new. But the Internet mob leapt to some dubious conclusions and claimed the Frost kids shouldn’t have been on Schip in the first place. As it turns out, they belonged to just the sort of family that a modest Schip is supposed to help.
Though you shouldn't infer from this that WSJ is on the side of the bipartisan bill that Bush vetoed either because even a simple Brit can see that they are very much not, though for reasons that strike me (being from a universal health care-having country) as distinctly specious.
Because, just in case I haven't been clear on this point, I am simply astonished---speaking as a Brit---that there are prats who don't realise that it is in their interest as well as anyone else's to push the government to provide health care to all citizens. Do they not worry about growing old? Losing their jobs? Their shirts? Their children? Ah well, it's not something I'm ever likely to understand. In Britain, even conservatives don't question the need for universal health care.
Crooks and Liars published ongoing coverage of the attacks:
- Graeme Frost: What Would You Do If This Was Snooping Around Your House? (Updated)
- Malkin Debases Herself With Further Attacks On A 12 Year Old. C&L Exclusive Quote!
- Olbermann And Maddow On The Right’s Jihad On 12 Year Old Boy
- Krugman on the anatomy on a smear
- Malkin Debunks Malkin over Health Care: WSJ calls them the “Internet Mob”
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