I was more than ready to forget about the nonsense over the latest jihad launched by the Citizen Stalkerists of the Right Slimeosphere. But then Rox tipped me off to this bit of joy from Dan Riehl, who is not merely swine, but also a total asshole. Luckily, I saw that Jillian & Dr. Rocket have this one covered, so I'll defer, and I am goddamn ecstatic to do so, because, you know, Dan Riehl's happy asshole shtick is inexpressibly wearisome.
Still, I can't quite give this a rest quite yet. I see that, joy of joys, this very wingnutty, very stupid smear campaign has sufficiently slithered its way far upwards enough to attract the rheumy gaze of the New York Times, which it was of course always meant to do. You know -- once again, crap was supposed to trickle upwards from freeperdom to CNN, and then we'd have three weeks' worth of horseshit pundit gasbaggery with the Frosts publicly exposed as frauds, and, I dunno, Dan Rather hired back and then fired again. Which is why this garbage matters, to the extent that it does matter (not that I don't have sympathy for those who ask why on earth it should). It matters for two reasons: one, to minimize the damage wingnuts can and will do to those people they choose to target, and two, in order to discredit the system by which slime bubbles up from the wingnut cesspits and ends up as Conventional Media Wisdom. Given that stories with such origins never make very much sense, you'd think discrediting them would be pointless. Gosh, who'd ever take these things seriously when they're absurd on their face!
Journalists. Lamentably.
Anyway, let's see how the NYTimes does in fielding their latest gibberish.
when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.
Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.
In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.
OK. So they accused the kid's family of fraud, essentially. How does the NYTimes do in fact-checking the asses of the right blogosphere?
The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.
One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.” As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.
Certainly the Frosts are not destitute. They also own a commercial property, valued at about $160,000, that provides rental income. Mr. Frost works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder, while Mrs. Frost has a part-time job at a firm that provides services to publishers of medical journals. Her job does not provide health coverage.
Under the Maryland child health program, a family of six must earn less than $55,220 a year for children to qualify. The program does not require applicants to list their assets, which do not affect eligibility.
In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.
That's a pretty thorough refutation of every single accusation the wingnuts could come up with against the family. So, good. I myself would add that there never really was any reason to take their frenzied posts seriously in the first place: the crap about the private school, and their real estate assets supposedly affecting how much they could pay for health insurance, were obviously absurd from the start. There never was any need to "investigate" these claims: common sense should have said, "irrelevant."
In other words, if, as the NYT has it,
But what on the surface appears to be yet another partisan feud, all the nastier because a child is at the center of it, actually cuts to the most substantive debate around S-chip. Democrats say it is crucially needed to help the working poor — Medicaid already helps the impoverished — but many Republicans say it now helps too many people with the means to help themselves.
... It's pretty clear that yes, the Frosts are a good example of the kind of people the program would help, and it's also pretty clear that the reason the wingnuts went after them and their kitchen counters (!) was that their example is in fact a very persuasive one.
Most Americans know perfectly damn well just how messed up our heathcare system is, and they want relief from the constant stress this mess imposes upon them, and they'd really think it is kind of neat that you might not have to lose your home because your kids get in a serious car wreck. What are their "arguments," anyway? That it's too costly? When money is shamelessly being flushed away by this administration on all sorts of harebrained schemes, most notably the wildly unpopular Iraq debacle, how's that one going to fly? That it could lead to eeek socialism booga booga? When people might think to themselves, "is this constant worry over healthcare, which causes me to make constant sacrifices and affects even so basic a question as what do I want to do with my life and what kind of a family do I want to have, actually what American liberty is supposed to be all about? Constant fear?"
You can see why they decided to fling slime on the Frosts' kitchen counters instead.
Reading the article, this all seems to me pretty clear, though naturally I'd like it spelled out more firmly.
But the real news in the article is this:
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance, have backed off.
An aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed relief that his office had not issued a press release criticizing the Frosts.
And that is good news. If the GOP party leaders are backing off, then the media very likely won't feel the need to plaster the Frosts all over the damn place over essentially nothing. And that is a Good Thing.
We can also hope that the media will start getting much more skeptical about "stories" that come from this source. (It's too much to ask that the GOP leadership does; they're not really a separate entity from Greater Online Wingnuttia, as Digby points out.) I'm not holding my breath -- nor my fire, the next time the freepermalkins pull a stunt like this, which I'm guessing will be, oh, five minutes from now.
Some further points I'm too tired right now to wrap up properly: the NYT reporter does interview Malkin by email, where she makes the ridiculous argument that the family has "considerable assets" and that this means something somehow, as if you can really use a house to buy health insurance. And then she blares:
If Republicans don’t have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that the Republican Party follow this wisdom.
But as always the best fun with Malkin is at her site, where she is venomous not least to the unnamed McConnell staffer:
Oh, swell. So he feels “relief” because he doesn’t have to ask the hard questions about the continued entitlement creep approved by both big government parties? Well, wipe your brow and pat yourself on the back! Crikey.
Again, I cannot be more clear: every single Malkin fan, flood McConnell's office with offended emails! Phone calls! Letters! Dead animals! Tell him that he must do your bidding and demand that he send out factually inaccurate press releases and spread your meanspirited and comically easily debunked slander all over the MSM and even from the Senate floor! Go! Go now! Crikey! What are you waiting for! That's a clear winner for you!
And this is just riotously funny:
Dan Riehl has some questions the NYTimes didn’t get around to asking.
No shit.
Malkin then has some further blather about how she wasn't stalking the Frosts, she was reporting, omigod! But we've been over that before, and there really is nothing else to say but "wow, what an astounding asshole."