I'm still trying to get my head around this Graeme Frost/SCHIP business.Coincidentally, I'd already started writing something about the sickness engulfing the right lately as they're swept up in what seems to be an escalating spiral of screeching hate. The ugliness just happened to reach a mindblowing crescendo a couple of days ago following the SCHIP veto, a mean-spirited manoeuvre even for the Bushies. But that was nothing compared to the bizarre histrionics Bush apologists have been going through as they tried to justify kids being cut off from health insurance while fat rich pricks still get their tax cuts.
When the Democrats used 12-year-old Graeme Frost as a spokeskid for SCHIP in their weekly radio address, right wingnuts blew their collective gaskets. An assortment of psychotic ragebots immediately launched attacks on the kid, culminating with wingnut blogger Michelle Malkin sitting outside the Frost family's house doing some kind of perverse James Bond routine:
"Update 2:50pm Eastern: I just returned from a visit to Frost’s commercial property near Patterson Park in Baltimore. It’s a modest place" [...]
"...I also passed by the Frosts’ rowhouse. There was an “01 - 20 -09? bumper sticker plastered on the door and a newer model GMC Suburban parked directly in front of the house..."
If that doesn't make you shudder... maybe you're a Republican? All to prove that the kid's family wasn't poor enough to deserve state-assisted healthcare, a claim ultimately proven as wrong as everything else the right does these days. But wow -- things don't get much more bizarre and creepy than attacking a kid and doing surveillance on his family's house -- when the right-wing scream machine shifts into that low a gear, it's clearly spun a bearing or two.
The right has used kids (and soldiers, and 9/11 victims, and... I could go on) to further their agenda. Both sides do it: the difference is that the left doesn't respond by attacking the kids (or the soldiers, or the families of dead people). Karl Rove ramped up the sick politics of personal destruction, but really the "vast right-wing conspiracy" who sought to annhialate Bill Clinton's presidency were the harbingers of this twisted and shameless brand of politics. And now that every hate-filled imbecile has jumped on the train, it's quickly becoming derailed.
As John Cole pointed out last week, this is why the GOP is imploding: no sane conservative wants to be associated with these hateful cretins anymore. And they know it -- there's a stench of desperation in their escalating attacks, the desperation of those who know they're about to become historical trivia.
Update: Ezra Klein challenges Malkin to debate health care. Hahahahaha! Oooh, that would end well... if she took up the challenge, which she won't. (via TBogg)
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