I completely agree. We need to know more of the truth, not less.

“What Graeme Frost said was not true.”

I think you need to look at the evidence again. Have you seen specifically what he said? I see very little in there that could possibly be “wrong” – his age, his injuries and their treatment, generalities about SCHIP being nice, and that’s it. Please point out to me the lie in what he said. And explain how you think how its accurate to say he called The Pres (metaphorically, even) a “callous blackguard.” Is the kid Errol Flynn?

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2007/09/12year_old_to_give_dems_weekly.html

“Surely you do not believe that we should let people dip from the public barrel without bothering to see if they have exhausted a few options on their own first, do you?”

No of course not. People should rely upon themselves primarily. Government is essentially an insurance program for all kinds of risks and shared enterprises.

Dipping from the public barrel, you should check out how the defense contractors are doing. We’re back to the days of the $4000 toilet seat. Why doesn’t that offend everyone who chips into that public fund?

I’m starting to believe that no matter who is in office, Dems or Republicans, they’re going to be deep into your pockets. Republicans talk about low taxes, but money is power and once the government has the power to make you pay, you better believe you’re paying. That 40% of your income to taxes – it is gone, for good. You’ll never get that back.

In that case, I figure, I might as well get something for my money.

“One of the things I think is incredibly important is that the Frosts made conscious decisions not to purchase health insurance.”

Again, I agree – but I might someday make the “decision” to go without health insurance if I lose my job and run out of COBRA and I get unlucky with my or my family’s health. Making a bad decision – taking a calculated risk that doesn’t pan out – doesn’t mean you’re an irredeemable person. And what the hell does that have to do with their kids? Is a 9 year old responsible for his father’s decisions? Where is the long-term benefit to society of not trying to adequately care for a child who’s going to grow up and have to fend for himself as an adult some day?

That’s I guess where I don’t buy the statement that the Frosts consider my paycheck their first best safety net. They weren’t on welfare before. If things had turned out a little different and their kids weren’t injured, their decision to go without health coverage would not have been catastrophic. They took the risk that going without health insurance for a time was 95% sure not to be catastrophic. Cost-benefit analysis.

You know, there’s probably a 1% chance (or smaller I hope) that a particular kind of medical issue could wipe me out financially somehow. And I probably could spend an extra amount of money to insure myself against that risk but I don’t. I’m basically doing a cost-benefit analysis of the risk versus the return of investing in insurance. If I’ve calcuated right – the chances are 1 in 1000 I’ll need it and the money is better spent elsewhere – but my number comes up, should my kids bear the burden of that?

“Despite those things being true, the President wasn’t coming anywhere close to ending the program as he as accused of doing. He recommended a pretty hefty spending increase that was a good bit less than the Democrats wanted.”

This is the meat of it. OK – I need to learn more about the specifics. But not about the Frosts’ countertops.

In your original post you said something like no-one had ever heard of the Frosts before they gave the speech. No. I knew almost nothing other than “some kid was on the radio for the Dems”. I didn’t think twice about it. After the speech I heard zilch. It wasn’t like America had fallen in love with the Frosts. Who knew about them? It was Malkin et al that brought the Frosts to my attention. They weren’t the issue before. She turned them into the issue. Not because showing something about their countertops actually proves anything about the policy, but because they’d spoken out. Its easy, lazy and stupid to play Nancy Drew sniffing around Ms. Frost’s sock drawer if your point is that SCHIP is bad policy.

First, it is not an attack to make sure that what someone says is true. What Graeme Frost said was not true. Yes, he did not make up the words, but his parents stood by them insofar as they allowed him to take the national stage and speak them. They have a responsibility to make sure those words are true. They were not.

Second, if someone is using my money, I not only have the right but the responsibility to make sure they are using my money wisely. The government has decided that the S-CHIP program is not fully means and asset-tested. I believe that is unwise and, since the Frosts were obliging enough to ask us for a lot more money for the program, it seems prudent to see whether their financial situation warrants their spending my money to cover their expenses. Surely you do not believe that we should let people dip from the public barrel without bothering to see if they have exhausted a few options on their own first, do you?

Third, no blogger to my knowledge published the Frost’s home address and phone number on the web. Michelle Malkin does not appear to have done so. So far as I know, she didn’t even fully identify where Mr. Frost worked. The one person she interviewed was enthusiastic about giving his opinions and agreed to be quoted. She was, in short, being the journalist she is. On the other hand, Ms. Malkin’s personal information did get posted on the web by a blogger from the left against her will and without her permission and was only removed because a reporter told the blogger that there’s be a newspaper piece on the matter, not because Ms. Malkin asked that it be done.

This isn’t a matter of views. This is a matter of real money – yours and mine. Your situation isn’t all that different from mine. We both have health insurance, and I bet there’s something we’d both rather buy with our money than health insurance. Nevertheless we made a responsible decision. One of the things I think is incredibly important is that the Frosts made conscious decisions not to purchase health insurance. Those choices left them vulnerable and, instead of turning to their assets on hand or their family and friends, they used our money to cover the bills. Do you not see how that might offend someone, even a little? Do you really not see the implied message that you and I are perhaps a little foolish for spending our money on health insurance when we could just have taken it from our friends and neighbors and spent our own money on a house or a new car or a rental property, or maybe have just decided to quit working full-time? And how much more foolish must we seem to know that, thanks to the reactions from the left and the media, we could have done all these things and be completely beyond examination?

You will never find that I have condemned anyone, at any time, for using a welfare program when they had no other option available to them. I do not like welfare – I think it is the most inefficient way of helping people – but I understand why people need it and I don’t have a real problem with people using it when they must. But that’s the thing about S-CHIP. It’s not a program of last resort, as we’ve seen quite amply this week. It’s not covering families who need to pay medical bills and have no other way of getting them paid. It’s covering people who have plenty of other options. It’s not just covering kids, but adults as well. Despite those things being true, the President wasn’t coming anywhere close to ending the program as he as accused of doing. He recommended a pretty hefty spending increase that was a good bit less than the Democrats wanted. The Democrats knew they didn’t have to votes to override the veto and they’d have to negotiate to get what they wanted but they didn’t do that. They turned to prevarication and victimization instead of arguing on the merits. And I’m the bad guy who’s losing the voters? Because I want to know who receives my tax money and udner what circumstances?

Really…look at the questions I asked in my post. I hardly think they’re unreasonable. But let me add one more: Why is adding 5 billion dollars to a program that already covers people like the Frosts not enough?

Some things are better left unsaid. Doesn’t mean they aren’t true though.

What is new and threatening are the blog swarm tactics.

Would you feel comfortable posting your address and job location on the web and inviting people to come by your neighborhood, interview your neighbors and co-workers, check into your family life to affirm that your life is foursquare with the views you publicly espouse? Of course not. Should that be the cost of admission to public expression? Of course it shouldn’t. Any blogger including Malkin would squeal like a pig – rightly – if they were scrutinized like this simply for expressing their opinions. At some point, it clearly is not about furthering a policy debate, it’s about attacking and intimidating an enemy. The tactic is almost exclusively the province of the right.

“After all, it wasn’t Republican campaigns that were hiring bloggers who made racist jokes or mocked people of faith.”

You’ve got me there, Jim. Everyone knows Republicans don’t make racist jokes or mock “people of faith.” “The left” including me are the ones that do that. What a phony strawman.

Which leads me to my main point, Jim, and please try to understand this. Five years ago calling me the “left” would make someone who knows me laugh. I’m not coming at anything from the “left”. I’m a traditional moderate, middle age, middle class guy. My parents were not rich. I’ve been married for a long time, since I was young. Me and my wife both work hard, we pinch to put away money for college and pay the mortage, we have kids, we go to (mainline) church, we pay taxes, we pay attention to the issues, we vote. When I pick up a book, its usually something about American history. Hokey as it sounds, I’m teaching my kids to admire the Founders and I teach them to be proud of the Constitution. I don’t have cable TV because I don’t want my kids watching MTV and other crap. I obey all the laws except maybe speed limits.

I also think there’s obviously some problems with health insurance. I know that I’m better off than the Frosts, I’ve made mostly pretty good financial decisions in my life – and I also know that if me or my wife got sick or lost our jobs or something tragic happened I would be in a world of hurt, not really through any fault of my own. I worry about it a lot, even though I’m insured, etc. And I know if one of my kids got sick, I would do anything to help them.

You guys are losing people like me. People who are not itching for another civil war. People who think that actual issues matter more than made-up crap about the villian du jour. People who care about what is going to happen to their kids if they get sick and can’t work and who could frankly care less whether the Frosts have granite countertops or whether their grandparents are rich. Cry all you want about the “left” doing what the right is doing but from where I’m standing, the leftists who are angry frothing lunatics are mostly obscure idiots while the right’s lunatics are their biggest most prominent stars.

Republicans are apparently giving up on winning over people like me. They are basically looking to appeal to the perpetually angry, the ranting, the unreasonable, the culture warriors. They can have them. Wonder why Republicans are losing the suburbs and independents? Because you are pushing away people like me with your crap and there are a lot of people like me. Ten years ago, if you’d go to a barbeque at a friend’s house where I live in Northern Virginia you’d find a pretty good mix of Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans are getting pretty thin on the ground around here, now, and are pretty embarassed to talk about it.

I know what you’ll probably do – say that I’m lying about myself for some reason. You’ll probably think I’m some kind of straw-man leftist – What, living on a commune? On welfare and crack-addled? Married to a box turtle? In love with a terrorist? – Whatever. But don’t believe me, keep pushing what you’re pushing and see how it turns out.

Michelle Malkin didn’t “attack” the Frost family. It’s not an “attack” to point out, to people who would not have otherwise known because no news outlet has ever reported it, that the Frosts are not poor and that they had several other ways of potentially paying for their own bills that didn’t involve taking our money to do so.

The fact is that many folks on the right have made good arguments about S-CHIP. One of them is the argument I made in this very post, which you can sum up as “it is not the job of government to pay your bills”. It’s hardly an original argument but I do admit it seems novel enough these days to come as a surprise to people.

And rococo, it’s hard for me not to laugh as you lecture me from the left about what a nasty road it is to make ad hominem attacks. After all, it wasn’t Republican campaigns that were hiring bloggers who made racist jokes or mocked people of faith.

But let’s be honest – this has nothing to do with policy prescriptions. If Malkin proved that the Frosts’ kitchen countertops were made of solid granite from the most exclusive mountain in Vermont, or that the Frosts’ grandparents had season tickets to the Opera and wore tophats, capes and monocles to every show, how would a reasonable person weigh that into a debate about the merits of extending SCHIP benefits? Logically he could not and would not. These facts could not make any difference in deciding whether SCHIP is good policy or bad policy. SCHIP’s merits can be debated and the clash of viewpoints would tell us something; any reasonable person understands that discussion of the Frosts’ relatives’ finances or 1990 wedding announcement placement is a waste of time on its own merits and ultimately tells us nothing about whether SCHIP should be extended or not.

I think the people attacking the Frosts are not doing it because they think proving something about them as individuals proves something valuable about SCHIP. I don’t think they’re that stupid. They attack to send the message that you shouldn’t speak out about certain issues unless you want people aggressively scrutinizing every aspect of your lives, down to your home decor, your neighbors’ opinions of you and your parents’ finances. It’s about showing people that they can be found by people who disagree with them. It’s about intimidating those who are identified as political enemies. It leads to bad policy decisions and worse it leads to a brutal and debased society.

Free speech and open debate are essential to democracy. They must be protected through cultural mores even more than by the Constitution. If I need to be afraid that I will be personally vilified or my house menacingly scrutinized by strangers simply by speaking out reasonably on an issue of public importance, then I will not speak out. Malkin knows this and thinks its good. I think we all lose something very valuable.

Where the Right is heading on these issues is not conservative, and you guys should think about this some more before you take it much further down this path. We’re headed towards some very ugly places, frankly, and you’re the ones taking us there without much thought.