The breathtaking right-wing attack on the Frost family, who dared to suggest publicly that the State Children’s Health Insurance Program deserved to be expanded to help more low-income children, is starting to get noticed.
[W]hile the Frosts were helping a bipartisan majority in Congress sell a plan to expand the program, they were not prepared for comments such as this one, posted over the weekend on the conservative Web site Redstate:
“If federal funds were required [they] could die for all I care. Let the parents get second jobs, let their state foot the bill or let them seek help from private charities. … I would hire a team of PIs and find out exactly how much their parents made and where they spent every nickel. Then I’d do everything possible to destroy their lives with that info.” […]
“Hang ’em. Publically,” [a Redstate] contributor wrote. “Let ’em twist in the wind and be eaten by ravens. Then maybe the bunch of socialist patsies will think twice.”
The Frost family isn’t wavering in its support of S-CHIP, but it is taken aback by the right’s viciousness. “I’m just trying to understand this moment of nastiness,” Bonnie Frost said. “The nastiness caught me by surprise.”
To an extent, I think it caught a lot of people by surprise, even me. The right smears reflexively, lashing out wildly and sadistically against anyone who gets in their way, but most of us assumed they also had a sense of politics. The right looks bad opposing healthcare for poor kids, but the right looks ridiculous smearing a 12-year-old who favors an S-CHIP bill endorsed by lawmakers and governors from both parties.
Speaker Pelosi said yesterday, “I think it’s really a sad statement about how bankrupt some of these people are in their arguments against S-CHIP that they would attack a 12-year-old boy.”
And the right-wing smear machine seems anxious to prove her right.
There’s still some question about whether Republican leaders are helping drive this pathetic smear or not.
Manley cited an e-mail sent to reporters by a Senate Republican leadership aide, summing up recent blog traffic about the boy’s family. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to comment on Manley’s charge that GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about Frosts. (emphasis added)
And why decline comment? If McConnell’s office isn’t involved in smearing a 12-year-old boy and his family, who did nothing wrong, shouldn’t the senator’s spokesperson say so? The NYT reported that a McConnell aide “expressed relief that his office had not issued a press release criticizing the Frosts.” But does that mean the Senate GOP leader just outsourced the smear to Freepers and Malkin?
And speaking of outsourcing, instead of detailing my disgust for the right’s conduct, I’ll just quote Ezra, who was quite eloquent on the subject.
Something has gone wrong on the Right. Become sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly. To visit Michelle Malkin’s cave is to see politics at its most savage, its most ferocious, its most rageful. They say they’ve spent the past week smearing a child and his family because that child was fair game — he and his family spoke of their experience receiving health care through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. For this, right wingers travel to their home, insinuate that the family is engaged in large-scale fraud, make threatening phone calls to the family, interrogate the neighbors as to the family’s character and financial state.
This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.
The shrieking, atavistic ritual of personal destruction the right roars into every few weeks is something different than politics…. This is not politics. This is, in symbolism and emotion, a violent group ritual. It is savages tearing at the body of a captured enemy. It is the group reminding itself that the Other is always disingenuous, always evil, always lying, always pitiful and pathetic and grotesque.
One final thought. Malkin now insists the left is trying to “silence” the right. She has it backwards. By smearing the Frosts, the right-wing machine has long since given up on political discourse, and is trying to send a message to the nation: stand up for progressive ideas and we’ll come for you next.
There’s something very wrong with these people.