Five Before Chaos

I’m sure most of you know about the right-wing smear campaign against the 12-year old boy, Graeme Frost, who delivered the Dem radio address in response to the Bush veto of SCHIP. It’s pretty typical… a nasty tirade, followed by a huge distortion fabrication of facts, which are uncritically accepted by unthinking knuckledraggin’ ‘base’. When a backlash occurs, of course, the messengers like to play the ‘poor little ol’ me’ card.

There’s a good diary over at Kos that deals with this, “The Wingnutosphere’s Politics of Hate Laid Bare”. A good analysis, with some various reactions to this. This one from former (thanks to this) Republican John Cole summs it up aptly:

In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter [...]

I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.

Questioning a political General is treason, bullying a 12 year old is patriotic.

Now, one of the few concrete realities of life is that for many conservatives, just believing something is evidence enough for it to be true, and when confronted with real facts, the cognitive dissonance that comes with having a compartmentalized mind kicks in. Enter Charity, my fellow VT blogger. Sweet as pecan pie (and I say that in all seriousness), but the sweetness is no match for the wily charms of the idiots at National Review Online (and seriously, would Bill Buckley behave like this? I think not). Charity, a few days ago…

If it is sleaze to look into the question of whether this family is indeed unable to provide health insurance for their children, I ask, then why isn’t it considered sleaze to exploit a 12-year-old child for political gain?

At that point (while notably ignoring the many times Bush has used children for political props) she goes into the typical tirade against gov’t run healthcare, while offering no real factual basis why the private sector, which has failed miserably at this, is somehow better. She even throws in some constitutional blather and the dreaded, tired, “socialized medicine”, which had me looking over my back to make sure Stalin wasn’t creeping up behind me. The real nugget is this, however:

For one, any parent can tell you, if there was no tax-payer funded health insurance, the parents would have found a way to pay for the insurance. If they were making $45,000 a year and insurance was going to cost them $14,400/year, they would have still been at 150% of the poverty limit.

Yeah, having a quarter of your income go to health insurance is no big deal, right? Just eat Spam and Kraft Mac and Cheese four nights a week. Or maybe the Lard will provide. And she doesn’t seem to get that in some areas of the country, even making 60 or 70 thousand dollars is still barely getting by, due to the cost of living in those areas. But, hey, tough shit, right? Go show her some love, will you?

UPDATED: Charity responds, by quoting a rightwing free market think tank. Surprised?