Ire Misplaced

Well, the story of young Graeme Frost and his family has turned into a full-blown kerfuffle, complete with all the point-missing and chest-thumping you’ve come to expect from teh blogosphere. The Baltimore Sun featured the Frosts in the fluffliest of marshmallow pieces today, painting them as victims of mean old conservative hardhearts who really wished their child would have died.

That’s not really true, but it doesn’t stop the Sun and plenty of others from saying so.

Criticisms and my rather arch take on things after the jump.

First, let’s go to Shaun Mullin who is so very ashamed of the blogosphere that he nearly weeps blood:

The vicious underbelly of the blogosphere is in full-howl display over the story of Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old who gave a Democratic Party radio rebuttal to President Bush’s veto of a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that had passed Congress with broad bipartisan support.
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It’s one thing for a blogger to help try to kill a health-care program because he or she believes that it is an end-run toward national health care, or for any number of sound if arguable reasons.

But that does not excuse piling on a defenseless 12-year-old and further discredits the blogosphere as a place where wing-nuttery of the most malicious kind is encouraged and celebrated.

First, let’s get the story straight. The bill that the President vetoed would have expanded the program by 35 billion dollars instead of the 5 billion dollars he recommended. Even under the veto, young Frost and all the other little Frosties would have been covered. Let’s just go ahead and stipulate that, no matter who the Dems trotted out to make their case, they would have prevaricated. Let’s look at what Frost said about the veto:

I don’t know why President Bush wants to stop kids who really need help from getting CHIP. All I know is I have some really good doctors. They took great care of me when I was sick, and I’m glad I could see them because of the Children’s Health Program.

I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me.

This is the focal point of the whole controversy, regardless what handwringers like Mullin may contend. President Bush does not want to “stop kids” from getting help. Exactly the opposite is true. Young Frost did not see his doctors because of S-CHIP. He saw them because you and I paid for him to do so even though his parents quite evidently had the means to provide for that care themselves.

As Michelle Malkin has amply documented, at some risk to her privacy, Mr. and Ms. Frost have made a number of choices in their lives that led to their using the S-CHIP program. Neither of them work full-time. They own a house that has appreciated drastically in value, yet they do not seem to have used the equity built up in the house to get a loan to pay off the bills. Mr. Frost has a pretty well-off father he does not seem to have used for help. Far from being a “smear” what had been written to this point was a basic investigation about the truth of Young Frost’s statement. He said some pretty bold things at the behest of his parents and their political buddies. There was nothing wrong whatsoever with holding thse claims up to the light of day and seeing if they were as substantial as he made them appear. They didn’t and that, folks, is the real story.

It is not unfair to do that kind of basic journalism. It’s certainly not “sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly”. It only seems unfair to do the type of journalism that exposes the left’s lies and half-assed attempts to sneak some stale socialism under your radar. When you reduce this whole kerfuffle down to its basic elements you find that the object of most bloggers’ criticism was not the Frost family but the Democrats who misrepresented the Frosts’ financial situation and gave Graeme a speech loaded with lies. Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Frost deserve to be ashamed for letting their son act as a ventriloquists’ dummy for a bill that would take our money and give it to a lot of people who have plenty of other options to pay for their medical care. It is, I think, a credit to the vast majority of the right that the Frosts didn’t draw more direct criticism for pimping their son out to Nancy Pelosi and Herry Reid and the rest of the leftist cash-grabbing crew.

The Democrats should be more ashamed for hiding behind a 12 year-old boy who still hasn’t recovered from his injuries. What strikes me as simply amazing about the story today is how little the left seems to care about the other Graeme Frosts out there. There’s more ire from the left about the bloggers’ reasonable attempts to see if a program that’s touted as necessary to help the needy is going to people who are actually needy than there was about those Democrats wheeling out a wounded pre-adolescent to beg for money on their behalf. How backwards is that? How ultimately damaging to a program that could definitely be worthwhile, when applied to the families that really need it? Those would be the families who don’t live in $360,000 houses and own commercial property and have well-off parents and a support network that doesn’t include taking our money when they clearly have other options.

Well, it’s not particularly backwards to them, I suppose. After all, nothing is out of bounds for folks whose only concern is grabbing more and more political power regardless of any consequences.

If you’re interested in reading more on the firestorm, including a veritable ice Age of overreaction and melodramatic ululating, memeorandum has a ton of links.