When the right attacks 12-year-olds
As the George W. Bush enters his last year in office, I suppose we can expect ever more disgusting incidents like the vicious attacks on a 12-year-old Maryland boy, Graeme Frost, who gave the Democratic response to President Bush's weeklyradio address last week to voice support for the Democratic effort to expand the Children's Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP. All he did was tell how S-CHIP, as it is known, saved his family after he and his sister were seriously injured in a car crash.
Rightwing bloggers trying desperately to prevent an override of President Bush's veto of the S-CHIP expansion reacted furiously. Young Graeme has been declared fair game by right wing bloggers like Mark Steyn of the National Review Online . They have harassed the Frost family, who live in Baltimore, with telephone calls. They thought they had found proof that young Graeme was the 21st century equivalent of Ronald Reagan's Cadillac-driving "welfare queen."
Oh, the whooping and hollering when the rightwing bloggers, especially the loathsome Michelle Malkin, "discovered" that the Frosts--get this--had granite countertops in their $400,000 home and sent Graeme and his sister to an expensive private school. The parents' wedding was in the New York Times in 1992, which meant, ipso facto, that they were fat cats. Gotcha! Just like we nailed Dan Rather, we nailed you lying liberals again! Read the back-slapping, congratulatory comments posted to one of the articles in Free Republic if you want to get a sense of the mentality behind the attacks.
Trouble is, none of the accusations against the Frosts, other than the wedding announcement in the Times, were accurate. As the New York Times reports today, the Frosts bought their home in a then-bad section of Baltimore for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth $260,000. The countertops are concrete. Graeme gets a scholarship to the private school, and his sister's tuition is paid entirely by the state of Maryland because of her injuries. The Frost family income is about $45,000 a year. But In short, the Frosts are a classic example of people S-CHIP is designed to help.
The rightwing bloggers who thought they had nailed the Frost family failed the most basic tenet of journalism--check your facts. The granite countertop accusation, for example, was apparently based on one writer's judgment that in an online photograph, they looked like granite. This should be a cautionary tale the next time--and there will be a next time--the amateur journalists of the rightwing blogosphere engage in the politics of personal destruction.
And no, I can't think of a single instance when Democrats went after one of the many children President Bush has used to make a political point. Attacking a 12-year-old for simply stating his beliefs lacks class and common decency, two qualities in short supply among Graeme Frost's vicious critics.