Editor's view: Political right's smearing of 12-year-old over SCHIP appalling By John Rouse
Just when you think the nasty elements of the political right wing in this country couldn't stoop any lower, they do. Last week extreme conservatives pontificated viciously from the depths of the political ooze, lambasting a 12-year-old Maryland boy, Graeme Frost, who delivered a radio address for the Democrats after his parents went public with how the State Children's Health Insurance Program helped them after a 2004 car crash left two of their children comatose.
We in Bowie are certainly familiar with right-wingers. We have our share of them. They have been regular contributors to the Readers' views section of these pages, sending forth blistering diatribes whenever their ire was raised by other letter writers, columnnists or editorials whose views fell foul of their self-righteous conservative convictions. But even they have never attacked a 12-year-old. Well, not yet.
In the two-minute address Graeme delivered, the lingering effects of the car crash that put him in a coma for a week and paralyzed one of his vocal chords could be heard. "If it weren't for SCHIP, I might not be here today," he said. Graeme's sister suffered brain injuries in the crash and continues to need therapy. The youngster was appealing to President Bush to reconsider his veto of legislation that would have expanded health coverage to children of the working poor, which are those people considered too rich to qualify for Medicaid but unable to afford private medical insurance. There are millions of children in this terrible situation. Oh, my, that couldn't go unchallenged by the right wing, could it? The legislation would have cost $35 billion. Too much, said Bush. And how much is it we spend every day on that fiasco of a war in Iraq? More than $200 million, $12 billion a month, isn't it? Our children aren't worth three months' of war costs?
This being the age of the Internet, the loony right plunged into Google and discovered that Graeme attends a private school (on a scholarship, a fact they ignored), his dad, Halsey, is a self-employed woodworker and he and his wife Bonnie earn between $45,000 and $50,000 a year to keep their family of six fed, housed and clothed. They bought their far-from-new Baltimore row house in a rundown, dangerous area of the city in 1990 for $55,000. The neighborhood has improved greatly since then, and the house is now assessed at $263,000. Mr. Frost's business was dissolved in 1999. State law mandates that the house asset not be taken into account in determining their eligibility for SCHIP. The family is still uninsured, though not by choice. They simply can't afford premiums of around $1,200 a month. These facts have been documented in the media. This is the sort of family that SCHIP was intended to help. They are not millionaires trying to rip off the system. We have greedy private contractors in Iraq to do that.
Maryland has restrictive rules for SCHIP eligibility: Children must come from a family with income under 200 percent of the poverty line. A family with four children could earn no more than $55,220. Clearly, the Frosts qualified.
But then the critics stood chest-high in the political slime and launched their all-out smear campaign against the boy, claiming he was actually a rich kid being pampered by the government. The right-wing bloggers and bloviators sputtered, absurdly, that Graeme and his sister attend wealthy schools that cost "nearly $40,000 per year for tuition" and live in that costly house they have been working on for years.
A real gem of a far-right blogger, reportedly the darling of the Republican fruitcake brigade, Michelle Malkin, got her knickers in a knot and launched a frenzied attack on the family from the depths of the Blogosphere. I don't much care for blogging. I find that in general the nastiness and foolishness far outweigh reasoned, intelligent debate. One poster might, for instance, offer thoughtful arguments in favor of the SCHIP legislation. That will be immediately followed up by a smear on the family that is so far beyond acceptable standards of debate that your eyeballs quiver uncontrollably. It's easier, even locally, to ignore the bloggers. But millions read them faithfully. Each to his own, I suppose. Others joined in the right-wing fray, including the former pill-popper and radio yak show host Rush Limbaugh. Another insufferable voice of the nutty right, Mark Steyn of National Review (I believe he's Canadian, so why's he so outraged?), wrote: "The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a seventh-grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man's job, then the boy is fair game." Oh, yuck.
The family's address was given out and all the details of their lives were pumped up to the Internet, and elsewhere. So this is how the Republicans' rabid attack dogs argue their opposition to SCHIP, by smearing a 12-year-old and demonizing his family? The viciousness of the attack on the Frosts by Malkin and her ilk is gutter politics at its most mindless. As one columnist pointed out last week, these are the same whackos who continue to blame the people of New Orleans for the national trauma that followed Hurricane Katrina.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats defend the Frosts, saying that their income makes them precisely the type of working-poor Americans that the SCHIP was intended to help. She also said, "I think it's a really sad statement about how bankrupt some of these people are in their arguments against SCHIP that they would attack a 12-year-old boy." And that's the truth.
The Republicans, of course, were ready to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance, but they have backed off a bit after they saw the outrage. And I would think so, too, considering the fact that the Frost family has been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. "We work hard, we're honest, we pay our taxes," Mr. Frost told the New York Times. "There are hard-working families that really need affordable health insurance." Precisely.
The insufferable Malkin insisted that Republicans should hold their ground and not pull punches over the SCHIP issue. She added, "If Republicans don't have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats." What a charming woman. And then Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, contributed to the smear campaign, sending an e-mail to reporters that said, "Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?" Gee, Mitch, could the Republicans have done a better job vetting those costly and deadly firms who send mercenaries to Iraq, where they now stand accused of randomly slaughtering people?
Right-wingers fear that SCHIP is a first step toward "socialized" medicine. It's a start. This country badly needs a national health service. I think all American children who need medical care should get it. I guess these zany right-wingers don't want that. Rather than take up a serious discussion of such an important issue, the right resorts to baseless smears.
This whole, sorry episode says one thing to me: The right wing is more interested in keeping its ideology pure (by its standards, anyway) than it is in taking care of this nation's children. That's pathetic, especially when the Republicans claim self-righteously that they are the party of "family values." Really? And they prove this how, by attacking decent, hardworking Maryland parents who just want to protect their children? The right-wing and their bloviators should hang their heads in shame. But they won't. It's all a conspiracy on the part of the awful liberals and their media echoes, you see. Boy, that's a laugh. I hope all those conservatives who enthusiastically attacked this injured Maryland child and his family will seek forgiveness as they sit in church on Sunday. But I wouldn't bet on it.
