Family Fued

All that and a bag of S-chip: Conservative bloggers are in an introspective mood after the blogburst of outrage, much of it now retracted, over the economic status of the family of 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who gave the Democratic response to President Bush’s radio address on Sept. 29. (See this story in The Times for details.)

“Captain Ed” Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters thinks the Democrats were “demagoguing the debate by using the 12-year-old boy to make their political argument for them, then screaming about how heartless it was for Republicans to question the Frost’s qualifications for government assistance,” in the form of the health insurance program known as S-chip. Still, Morrissey also concedes that bloggers on the right made a tactical error by focusing their wrath on the Frost family. He writes:

Like it or not, means testing is part of S-CHIP; in fact, it’s the entire debate. That puts questions like assets, real income, and personal choices on the table. It’s rather strange to consider someone who owns over $200,000 in home equity (not $400,000 as reported before) and commercial real estate as someone in need of government assistance. It’s doubly strange when the children of the family attend private schools, even on scholarship. That calls into question whether the family has made choices to be without health coverage, or really have no resources to get it for themselves.

However, the response on the Right sometimes outstripped reason. Rather than just argue the facts, some in the comments section here and elsewhere went too far in speculating about finances and motives of the Frost family. Certainly, their argument was fair game, as well as their claim on federal assistance, which is after all public money. The S-CHIP debate doesn’t just focus on the Frosts, though (and we find out that the expansion argument wasn’t even relevant to them). We have plenty of reasons to oppose the S-CHIP expansion that have little to do with the Frosts, and we should be focusing on policy, not personal anecdotes.

The Frosts volunteered to serve as the poster family for this debate, but they have been exploited by partisans on both sides of the argument. The Frosts will have S-CHIP regardless of whether the veto gets upheld or not. Let’s leave the Frosts alone and get back to the real policy debate — and ask ourselves why we’re taking $30 billion from poor and working-class Americans to subsidize health care for people better off than they are, for “children” in their twenties, and for people whose choices are not our responsibility.

Anonymous conservative blogger AJStrata, who writes at The Strata-Sphere, says “the handling of this issue has crippled conservatism because it was led by thoughtless reactionaries. Why would anyone align with people like this who are vile and political incompetents to boot?” He later adds:

The Frost family is of very modest income for the area they live. They make $45K a year in an area where the medium income is about $86K a year. To qualify for S-CHIP in MD they cannot make over $61K. They are not rich by any standard. And liquidating all they own and becoming totally destitute would not cover the medical costs of two kids with serious injuries and a long road to recovery. I know, I have seen the cost of simply delivering premature twins. The folks whining about their choices need to start from the facts and the fact is they needed to get help for their kids and help was available to them.

They are self sufficient entrepreneurs who try to give their kids the best. They supposedly paid their taxes, which in my mind gave them the right to access those government programs. They have 4 6 wonderful children and they have stayed together as a family. As one leftwing site noted yesterday they are really a poster family for the GOP. And that is what should have been leveraged instead of the low-brow attack mode some have lazily come to rely on for political discourse.

The Frosts had an emergency and we, their neighbors, were going to subsidize them one way or the other. Either through taxes or insurance premiums we were going to help out. So to say they are free-loading on the rest of us through their decisions is mindless bunk.

AJStrata also takes an implicit parting shot at Michelle Malkin, who has driven much of the coverage of the Frosts in blogland. He writes, “I doubt we will respect someone who decides to repeatedly tear down the stage of public discourse with erroneous claims and cries of victimhood when called on it.”

Not every blogger thinks the critics of the Frosts were in the wrong in this dustup, however. Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House writes:

I can’t seem to find a single example from any conservative blog where one negative word has been written about a 12 year old little boy suffering the pain and trauma from an automobile accident. Not one. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

There has, of course, been plenty written about his parents. Even Rush Limbaugh’s accusations of the kid “lying” are not based on anything the child came up with on his own but rather what he was handed to say. Unless the critics are saying the kid wrote that response all by himself, blowhard Limbaugh (whose shtick is really getting rather tiresome) was spot on. The Democratic response, written we are told by Democratic staffers, was full of lies, exaggerations, and distortions of the conservative position on the issue. This is not the fault of Graeme Frost but of the supposed grown ups – including his parents – who used him as a prop and human shield in their propaganda war against the right.

The point is simple and worth repeating; not one single righty blogger that I have read has criticized a 12 year old boy. Despite all the hand wringing, wailing, fake outrage, and deliberate obfuscation of the truth, to charge conservatives with the crime of piling on an injured child is outrageously false and, since the left knows it’s not true, a blatant lie.

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www.nothingtoseehere.com

Zephyr Teachout, who was Howard Dean’s director of online organizing during the 2004 presidential campaign, says the content on the Web sites for the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates is so vapid that it is “irreponsible and slightly offensive.” She writes at techPresident, a group blog that follows the 2008 campaign online:

Try searching (without a search box) for “Iran” on any of them. At best Edwards site mentions that Iran exists. But you certainly wouldn’t know from any website that there is a serious foreign policy discussion going on about how to deal with Iran, and real conflict between the candidates that could help us make a decision.

I expected spin on the websites, but not a boycott of critical issues.

So I quit. Until Senators’ votes are listed on the websites, until the combative press releases, along with the ra-ra ones, are posted, until the websites start being useful to me, as a potential voter, I’m actively boycotting them (except for articles for Techpresident), and I will tell any undecided voter to stay away as far as possible.

Chris Suellentrop