[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."
Please make sure you take this all in. A family was volunteering to help Congress on a bill that had benefited them, so that it could help others. For their trouble, a commenter over at Redstate (I refuse to link, sorry) wants them to die. Is their any further need to argue over the moral chasm that divides liberals and conservatives?
Some more from the Sun piece:
The onslaught began over the weekend, a week after 12-year-old Graeme Frost delivered the Democrats' weekly radio address with a plea to Bush to sign the bill. A contributor to the conservative Web site Free Republic noted Graeme's enrollment in the private Park School and the sale of a smaller rowhouse on the Frosts' block for $485,000 this year and questioned whether the family should be taking advantage of the state program.
That post was picked up by the National Review Online and other Web sites. By Monday, Rush Limbaugh was discussing the family's earnings and assets on the air, and the blogger Michelle Malkin was writing about her visit to Halsey Frost's East Baltimore warehouse and her drive past the family's Butchers Hill rowhouse.(emphasis added) Liberal bloggers, meanwhile, were complaining that the Frosts were being "swift-boated."
"It's really frustrating," said Bonnie Frost, 41, who stated she is upset by the angry Internet posts, e-mails and telephone calls targeting the family. "The whole point of it for me was that this program helped my family, and I wanted it to help others. That's the message, and I can't believe the way the spotlight has been taken off of that."
"It's a distractive technique," said Halsey Frost, also 41. Speaking from their cluttered front room yesterday, the Frosts said they would continue to advocate for government-funded health care.
The Sun, which published articles about the Frosts when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced Bonnie and 9-year-old Gemma at a news conference last month and again when Graeme delivered the radio address, also has drawn criticism from posters on conservative Web sites for not reporting the details of the family's financial circumstances more fully.
At issue is the proposal to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program - also known as SCHIP - which provides coverage for 6.6 million children from families not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.
In the section highlighted above, I want it noted how mater-of-factly the reporter notes the intrusion of right-wing bloggers in to the lives of a family doing what they saw as their civic duty. These people are undergoing a very public, very high-tech mugging cum character assassination, and the reporter only seems to note it as if it were on side of a reasoned debate on the merits of S-CHIP expansion. Of course, we can't really pretend this is so for too long, thanks to the blooming psychosis of the American right. Brown quotes a "criticism" of a commenter at Redstate:
"Hang 'em. Publically [sic]," the contributor wrote. "Let 'em twist in the wind and be eaten by ravens. Then maybe the bunch of socialist patsies will think twice."
While I object to the reporter offering the treatment of the Frosts as if it were some kind of normal, to-be-expected political event, rather than the contemporary equivalent of a mob with pitchforks and torches dragging the witch to the stake, I am glad that at least one mainstream paper is noticing the shenanigans. I believe the reporter is trying to be "fair" in this case because the only other recourse is to shake one's head and type out, "These people are batshit crazy."
