I've not given up entirely on the Frost/smear affair. (Malkingate?) I do think it's dead, and that the last savage whimper was bleated out by CNN, appropriately enough. I am thus gathering clues for the post-mortem.
How did it all go so horribly wrong for the Citizen Stalkerists? Wherever did they make their fatal error?
Now, you and I might have our theories about this, such as to do with the part where they totally whizzed the actual facts of the case and made shit up in a ridiculously slipshod fashion. But what do the wingnuts themselves think of their failure? Or, at least, what are the speculations of those of their breed sentient enough to actually recognize that they failed? (These would be the ones capable of swatting away an impressive two-thirds of the total number of flies that habitually alight on their noses.) What do they think? Or, at least, what orthographical symbols approximating human written communication do they reproduce as they repeatedly pound their keyboards with their horny, Worf-like brows?
When you have questions of this nature you won't ever go too far wrong by checking in on Rick Moran, who is not very smart but who makes up for this deficiency through sheer dint of petulance. Hear his savage bwawk:
I didn’t want to write about the SCHIP imbroglio again today but frankly, I find it fascinating that simply by writing about it, I am accused of “smearing” or “swiftboating” a 12 year old boy.
Are many on the left brain dead? If you don’t say anything negative or snarky about a 12 year old boy and, in fact, express concern over his condition, would someone please explain to me how that constitutes a “smear?”
A “smear” is a lot more than simple criticism – something no one has directed toward young Graeme Frost. A “smear” is “a usually unsubstantiated charge or accusation against a person or organization” according to Webster. Very well. Let’s give the left the benefit of the doubt and say that the original round of criticisms of Mr. and Mrs. Frost (not Graeme or any other child) were “smears” in that the Freeper who googled up the information that most conservative blogs relied on to originally comment on the issue was incorrect and flawed. Of course, it was “substantiated” to the extent that the Freeper supplied links to his information much of which was later proved to be false or exaggerated. But let’s ignore that little detail and acknowledge that the information was incorrect and further, was disseminated in order to show up the Frost’s and, by extension, the Democrats.
Where does the smear of little 12 year old Graeme Frost come in?
There are two issues here. First, please note the unpersuasive defensive befuddlement, of the variety which I last saw upon the face of my three year old on the occasion of an inquiry as to the origin of the urine my wife and I detected on the kitchen floor.
The freeper pulled a bunch of shit out of Google Ass, which is like Google News only smellier, and then every single fucking wingnut moron from Glenn Reynolds on down went "bwah-ha busted" without anyone engaging the lone brain cell necessary to recognize that the freeper post was asinine on its face.
Hmmmm. I regret to inform Dr. Moran that "whoopsies" is, lamentably, insufficient as any sort of explanation of the behavior of Greater Wingnuttia in this instance. (It would also suck ass as an apology, for the record, but since I've not noticed any of the civil discoursers of the right actually offering one of those, I offer this point merely as an academic footnote.)
Second, Rev. Moran appears genuinely incapable of grasping where the "attack" on the 12 year old came in. In an effort to promote comity and genuine mutual comprehension, I now propose to explain to Mr Moran exactly why many people have drawn this conclusion. For the sake of kindness, in doing so I will use certain brief words of Anglo-Saxon derivation, so as to leave as little space as possible for misunderstandings.
Ahem.
DOZENS OF RIGHT WING BLOGGERS ACCUSED HIS PARENTS OF FRAUD, GRAFT, AND TAX EVASION BASED ON A FUCKING DUMBASS FREEPER POST THAT WAS OBVIOUS BULLSHIT. THEY CALLED HIM A "TOOL OF THE LEFT" WHEN HE'S OBVIOUSLY SMARTER THAN DON FUCKING SURBER DESPITE HIS AGE.
Or...
YOU MOTHERFUCKERS TOLD HIM THAT HIS FAMILY HAD BEING FALSELY ACCUSED OF FRAUD "COMING" BECAUSE HE AGREED TO TALK ABOUT HIS HORRIBLE INJURIES ON THE RADIO.
I'm really very fascinated by this theory that you can tell a young person who has been horribly injured and gone through a painful recovery that his parents used his sufferings in order to defraud the government, but all the while you are not giving him a hard time. Especially when your basis for such accusations is a fucking freeper.
I mean "fascinated" here in a clinical sense.
Fuck.