American Conservatives: Now Virtually Hinge-Free!
At Time.com on the swiftboating of Graeme Frost (the little kid who spoke up for SCHIP).
American conservatism is in crisis. And if they don't get their shit together soon, it's not just the Republican party, but all of us who will pay the price.
The more unhinged they get, the more they drive away people (like me) who tend to agree with them on many issues (gun control, the death penalty, immigration). I mean, the issues are tough, and I realize I could be wrong about any of them...but I know crazy people when I see them, and I have not the slightest inclination to associate with such folk.
At Time.com on the swiftboating of Graeme Frost (the little kid who spoke up for SCHIP).
American conservatism is in crisis. And if they don't get their shit together soon, it's not just the Republican party, but all of us who will pay the price.
The more unhinged they get, the more they drive away people (like me) who tend to agree with them on many issues (gun control, the death penalty, immigration). I mean, the issues are tough, and I realize I could be wrong about any of them...but I know crazy people when I see them, and I have not the slightest inclination to associate with such folk.
posted by Winston Smith at
12:46 PM
24 Comments:
Shameless and cynical political exploitation of a seventh-grader, who would not be affected by the pending legislation/veto. Hiding behind the moral invulnerability of youth and victimhood.
But if politics is to be reduced to 12-year-olds, then there are no free passes. It was Frost's father who chose not to buy his family health insurance or get a job that provides it. It is not unfair to point out that it was he who put the load on the general public, not fate or unkindness.
And Karen Tumulty masquerades as a news "correspondent" for Time, but hers is a partisan polemic, and few will be able to tell the difference. Typical.
At the heart of the veto of expanding the program is the very real possibility that those who already have health insurance will drop it for free government care, a nuance not easily acknowledged when the discussion is at a 12-year-old level.
Yeah like how people ditch their well-paying jobs for welfare, right? Right? 'Cause that happens all the time, and then they drive around in their porches that our taxes pay for and laugh all the way to the welfare bank.
In fact, statistics show that 90% of all people on welfare used to be doctors who just decided to work the system rather than be good, honest, hard workin' Americans! Now they're just what we like to call "welfare terrorists". And these same people want you to pay for their insurance? Would you pay to insure terrorists? I think not.
If this bill passed, why, they'd be laughing all the way to the welfare bank and they'd be SPEEDING 'cause they have free insurance too!
Therefore, if this bill passed, it would make our roads more dangerous.
Bush is brilliantly keeping our highways safe and none of you can see it. I'm with Tom.
Let's examine the inaccuracies and/or dishonesties in Tom's comment. First, he would do well to learn more about the S-Chip program and its funding. If he did, he would know that what Bush was proposing for funding wouldn't even be sufficient to keep those already on the program on it going forward. So some would lose their coverage, and yes, the Frosts might be those who lose it. Perhaps they could just impoverish themselves enough to qualify for Medicaid. That would be a grand solution.
As for the idea that Frost's father put the family at risk by pursuing his own business and not seeking a job with health insurance, I'm sure Tom is intimately familiar with the Mr. Frost's attempts to gain such a job, the nature of the job market where he works, the degree to which available jobs provide benefits etc. Because everything is just peachy-keen in the middle class job market these days. Working in the insurance field, I can tell you that fewer and fewer employers are actually offering coverage, let alone good coverage, and that even that coverage often has many exclusions.
And this wouldn't also be the same Tom who in a previous thread was extolling the virtues of our *entrepreneurial* culture here in the good old USA, would it? Funny that.
As for using the kid to make a political point, well let's just say that the Dems learned well from the Republican playbook. It worked for them the past thirty years, so why the hell not? And this family's story has the additional virtue of actually being true, which is why McConnell's office tried to slither away as soon as they did a modicum of research. And also why Michelle Malkin shied away from debating the issue with someone like Ezra Klein, who actually knows his ass from his elbow when it comes to health care.
Sadly, the sentiment of today's Republican party is summed up by a comment I found about this story at another blog:
"Well, I missed "big john's" contribution to this discussion but I've seen plenty like it elsewhere in the bloggosphere. There's nothing much new to say that people haven't said: the Frost's are actually typical of the kind of idealized (white) american the republican party says it want's to help (John Cole and about a hundred other writers), Graeme is just 13 and the attacks on his family are actually really hurtful and problematic (especially the vists to his mother's place of work and the hounding of neighbors and business associates), etc..etc..etc...
But what really gets *my* goat is the confusion many right wing bloggers seem to have between "moral hazard" arguments, libertarianism, and owning up to what they really are arguing for which is either "f*ck you and die already* or *f*ck you and commit infanticide and murder* already depending on whether they are talking to the children or their parents.
In Bush's america where contraception *and* abortion would ideally be illegal there will be *lots* of people who have more children than they can fully support even with two working parents. Government money spent on "teaching abstinence" and "encouraging the adoption of snowflake babies" comes out of a healthcare budget that could be supplying--healthcare! to American citizens. Instead we get nothing but the most childish, ill informed, hostility to people who need help. Given the circumstances of the Frosts--and of a lot of struggling people in this country--the only alternative to the help offered by S-Chip is, first, destitution and then death. That's it. There isn't some miracle "responsibility fairy" that makes everythign come out right in the end. People arguing that the Frost's didn't deserve help, or shouldn't have been given help, are straight up arguing that they should either have aborted their children out of fear that someday they might not have been able to afford catastrophic care for them, or that they might as well stand by and watch them die because they are too expensive to live. Those are the choices for compassionate conservativism.
I am continually astounded that the selfsame people who are willing to pledge any amount of borrowed credit to a war to kill people they don't even know can't conceive of raising taxes to pay to keep their own neighbors and relatives. I am no longer astounded at the dishonesty of the arguments used to obscure what is really going on, however, that is just business as usual.
The longer I live the more Forster's "Only Connect" resonates for me as the central issue for humans. Only connect one part of your life to the next, only connect to your neighbor, only connect to what you are really saying and doing. Only by connecting can we get beyond arguments like those advanced by Malkin et al which boil down to some bizarre kind of backwards ressentiment. People who themselves are one job from losing health care coverage, one paycheck and one medical disaster from ruin, are being encouraged by the right wing to see themselves as *personally injured* and *offended* by any attempts to help people *just like them.* I can't tell if the underlying fear is that people will be forced to realize just how fragile their own circumstances are, or if the fear is that there's no amount of money and political will in the world to solve the problem so why bother trying.
Most of the right wing blog commentary just boils down to one long hysterical scream of rage that someone might get something "undeserved." I find that when you ask people to unpack that, to the extent they can, you find yourself sorting through some insane conservative dirty laundry bag of muddled concepts like this:
bad things only happen to bad people
good people can plan to avoid injury and accident
my current good fortune is permanent
my current bad fortune is contingent on something someone else did
If everyone needed help we wouldn't have enough help to go around
Money paid to industry is efficient, taxes are inefficient
making people suffer is necessary to preventing them from taking advantage of me.
and so on and so forth
Really, no amount of logical discussion of policy prescriptions can begin to intervene in this mess. And that, of course, is why Malkin refused to debate Ezra, because the entire discussion for the anti-SCHIP people is about eternal verities and eternal freudian issues and not about using tax money wisely to help people in need."
The true face of the current GOP is finally being shown to the public, and it doesn't like what it sees.
Look, Tom. Pointing out that using a 12-year-old in an ad is manipulative is just fine. Stalking and smearing the family, as your friends in Wingnuttia are doing: not fine.
Again: one of the many problems with American conservatism: even when there are perfectly good arguments available to them, they go for the jugular. It's a real bunch of loons ya got over there, man. Mean as snakes and twice as smart.
Incidentally, did you speak out against the Republican's use of family farmers to defend the estate tax? (cynical use of the moral invulnerability of farmers...?). 'Cause, you know, that was all outright lies...not even merely manipulative, but patently false...
Just wonderin'...
No, I missed the family farmer thing. If they were bogus, it's fair game.
Frost's father didn't get his family health insurance, and made other choices instead. It's not unfair to point that out.
And we could trade charges of wingnuttery all day without arriving at your desired conclusion that there's a moral inferiority to opposing a massive expansion of what is a socialistic middle-class entitlement and not merely a safety net for the needy.
Revealing the truth about the Frost family's financial state has put the lie to Anonymous' claim that without S-Chip, death awaits Graeme Frost and others like him. The Demos got their hand caught in the demagoguery jar, but with the help of allies like Tumulty, they still might get away with it.
Silliness, Tom. Go look into the facts--this family was working-class, but insurance was prohibitively expensive. It wasn't a "choice" in any but the most highly-attenuated sense of 'choice': they chose not to purchase health insurance in the same way that I have chosen not to purchase a BMW--they might have been able to do it if they devoted a ridiculous percentage of their resources to it.
The Dems didn't get caught at anything. Rather, what they did was Washington SOP--to some extent BS, but not notably so by the standards of that august metropolis.
The wingnutosphere, however--and, e.g., the always-entertaining Michelle Malkin in particular--has, once again, publicly humiliated itself.
And again:
Too bad that there's no sane alternative to the Dems in this country. I really wish I had a choice, because I am just not convinced of the wisdom of things like nationalized health care--which is, of course, where all this is ultimately headed.
So I have to choose between, basically, (a) a bunch of well-meaning silly people who may be leading us to socialist perdition, and (b) a bunch of outright lunatics who demonize all who disagree with them, habitually produce incompetent, idiotic and dishonest presidents, and build their foreign policy around cold national self-interest and indefensible wars.
So I choose to support the silly socialists, and hope that any gods there be have mercy on the well-meaning...
Shorter Tom Van Dyke: Reality has a liberal bias.
Also notice his projection of egocentrism onto the Frosts re: the proposition that they're not people who stand to lose coverage because of Bushism. Which, as I pointed out earlier is not necessarily true. Be that as it may, they couldn't possibly be motivated by their concern about the viability of the program for others, right?
(Sample of text from Graeme Frost: “I don’t know why President Bush wants to stop kids who really need help from getting CHIP. All I know is I have some really good doctors. They took great care of me when I was sick, and I’m glad I could see them because of the Children’s Health Program.
“I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me. This is Graeme Frost, and this has been the Weekly Democratic Radio address. Thanks for listening.”)
Winston, I believe I have the answer to the question of how to implement single-payer health care. Just call the marginal tax that each taxpayer pays to fund it a *premium* (thank you Frank Luntz), and when people see that it's far less than what they're now paying to the bloodsuckers, its popularity will sykrocket. Just take a look at the user satisfaction statistics of Medicare versus private health plans.
Reality is ignoring a congressman calling our troops murderers but 40 senators going after a talk show host [over a misrepresentation of his remarks].
Reality is reducing a policy debate, whether to increase spending on a program by $15 billion instead of 4 or 5 billion, to the level of 12-year-olds.
Malkin's blog isn't something in my rotation (a bit to my right), but this made me laugh. Reality is whatever the partisan dog-and-pony show says it is.
In 1996, Hillary Clinton propped up young Jennifer Bush, a seven-year-old with mystery ailments whose mother coached her to lobby for universal health care Jennifer was trotted out to present the Clintons a lucky silver dollar “to bring you good luck so everyone can have good insurance.” Jennifer’s mother was later convicted of aggravated child abuse and welfare fraud for misrepresenting $60,000 in assets on Medicaid forms.
In 2000, Al Gore propped up elderly widow Winifred Skinner to lambaste high drug prices. Gore repeated her claim that she had to pick up cans on the side of the road to pay for medicine. Dan Rather bemoaned: “She’s no child, but she belongs on a poster about high drug costs.” One problem: Winifred’s own well-to-do son, businessman Earl King, debunked those claims.
In 2004, John Kerry propped up Mary Ann Knowles, a breast cancer patient who he claimed “had to keep working day after day right through her chemotherapy, no matter how sick she felt, because she was terrified of losing her family’s health insurance?” The conservative Manchester Union Leader editorial page reported: “Knowles chose to work through most, but not all, of her chemotherapy because her husband was out of a job…She and husband John did not want to take the pay cut that would have come with disability leave, so Mary Ann kept working.”
“I don’t know why President Bush wants to stop kids who really need help from getting CHIP."
This is the lie and the slime. "Stop kids" my foot. The debate was not over kids getting cut out, it was about expanding the program to 25-year-olds and families making over $80K a year. Party operatives putting words like these into the mouth of a 12-year-old is what I object to.
More bullshit from Tom. And all the strawmen in the world are not enough to obscure it.
Fact: A $5 billion increase (the real amount proposed by Bush,) is not enough to even cover the increase in cost of covering those already eligible for S-chip. There's this phenomenon called health care inflation. Perhaps Tom should read up on it.
As an example:
"At currrent funding levels, states are projected to
face a combined federal shortfall of $12.3 billion
- $13.4 billion over the next 5 years."
Cite: http://ccf.georgetown.edu/schipdocs/states/PASCHIP_FactSheet-1.pdf
Fact: The covering of those with higher incomes was to compensate for the fact that both overall costs of living and health care expenses are extremely high in some S-Chip paticipating states. Here in the NY metro area, the typical family plan costs around $1500 per month, and still doesn't cover a lot of stuff. Maybe Tom can try living on $80,000 per year in NYC and also paying $18,000 per year for shitty health insurance.
Fact: In actuality, the $80,000 income level was an appealed-for one by New York state as a waiver for the JUST-EXPIRED PROGRAM. It was not part of the proposed bill. Coverage for those above 200% of the poverty level would still have to be granted only by federal waiver.
http://www.chausa.org/NR/rdonlyres/9073111D-988C-4BCB-9C4E-7FB605C88E60/0/070808MythFact.pdf
Fact: The bipartisan bill did not extend coverage under S-chip to adults. Although insuring adults is also a worthy goal, likely to increase the health and well being of children.
Cite: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/09/schip_factcheck.html
Facts, as even a famous moron once realized, are stubborn things. When Tom understands the truth about the program, the proposed bill, and medical economics, then we can talk. Until then, perhaps he should stay out of the deep end of the pool.
Well that was really good, Anonymous.
Any rebuttal, Tom, or is he right? If Anonymous speaks the truth, as he appears to, I'm not sure why Bush is right to not support the bill unless you are privy to some information of which we are not aware..
$13.4 billion over the next 5 years."
A $2.5B shortfall per year, then? The vetoed bill wanted $10B. But I'm glad to see this taken past the 12-year-old level and demagogery, which as you will recall, was my objection.
Calling me dishonest and arguing against "straw men" is awful brave behind anonymity, man. In fact, isn't that the sort of thing Frost's father objected to? Man up.
The current projected shortfall of ~$13 bn is based on the increases in cost JUST FOR THOSE ALREADY ON THE PROGRAM. The cost of enrolling those already eligible but not participating, as well as those children projected to become eligible under the (unchanged) eligibility standards is much higher. Which is why the conference bill:
"Adds $35 billion to the program over the next five years to cover approximately 10 million children: 6.6 million children who are currently enrolled and 4 million children who will be uninsured without this bill. The majority of the new children the bill will cover are eligible for coverage today; the bill does not dramatically expand coverage."
Cite:
http://www.familiesusa.org/resource-centers/medicaid-action-center/
Sorry, no more time for ankle-biters.
Sorry, no more time for anonymouses who can't make a point without being rude. You have me at a disadvantage hurling insults from behind the duck blind; I won't return fire. I don't need to label your arguments bullshit or accuse you of dishonesty to disagree with them. I'm sure the facts you cull from advocacy websites are accurate, altho they by nature leave out the other side of the story.
And my central point was an objection to reducing the debate to 12-year-olds and demagogery, a point to which you apparently have no objection.
As a matter of policy, I would have preferred the Frosts spending their own money on health insurance and lending them the money to buy their 2 properties. The latter are one-time outlays, not perpetual entitlements.
TVD, the Frosts are still paying the mortgages on both of their properties. The money was loaned to them.
They make $45,000, and BEFORE the accident was $1200 for the family. That is $14,400 a year, or 32% of their income.
I think that expecting people in the US to expend a third of their income on health insurance (which of course would not provide 100% coverage) is simply nuts, bad the economy, bad for security, and bad for entrepeneurs, as everyone is afraid to leave their crap job and try something new because the health care risks are so monumental.
Sorry, I meant to say that private insurance before the accident was $1200 for the family, or $14,400 a year.
Now with the pre-existing conditions of the children, it would be impossible for them to obtain insurance.
I hate to quote Malkin, but when "correspondents" like Karen Tumulty of Time only give one side of the story, I have no choice but to use "unapproved" sources. I cannot vouch for them, but neither have approved sources like Time done a professional job of conveying the facts.
According to Malkin (link at her site), in Baltimore, where the Frosts live, the cost before, not after, Mr. Frost left his family uninsured was under $500/mo. [It also appears the Frosts own 3 cars, among them a Volvo SUV and a Chevy Suburban.]
Look, health insurance is too expensive and Hillary may very well win the presidency on the issue, as the GOP has precious few ideas on the subject. But I think structurally, this is the wrong way to go about it.
The irony is that in questioning the Frosts' bona fides (and that was the original issue, not the particulars of policy), an ugly truth has been illustrated---the Frosts are now addicted to S-CHIP: they've been disincentivized to work harder or earn more money. Being chronically underemployed is now the Frosts' full-time job, one they cannot leave lest they lose the medical benefits.
And by expanding the program, millions more families will be encouraged to similarly become wards of the state. This is not good, hardly what I'd define as "progress."
Swiftboating, Ms. Tumulty? [A pejorative, and a begging of the question, but I don't feel like getting into yet another shibboleth of the left just now.] No, the cold light of fact, and one that your kneejerk partisanship prevented you from shining on the issue---which after all, is your job, no doubt complete with generous health benefits.
[Thx for your reply, Mr. Koll---I was contemplating perhaps low or zero-interest gov't loans, for the working poor and a home, or in the case of Mr. Frost's warehouse, a small business sort of thing. Anything but box the family into dependence on perpetual government entitlements.]
Quoting Michelle Malkin...sheesh. Who next? Squeaky Fromme? Anne Coulter?
It's not that Malkin isn't ""approved""--it's that she's crazy and she lies. See, that counts as a problem around these parts, though I know it doesn't over in their part of the rightosphere.
It's like your people over there have lost all sense of proportion. Everyone who disagrees with them is a traitor, even kids are fair game for swiftboating (just doing it to war heroes wasn't sufficiently satisfying, I guess), one terrorist attack is enough to make us throw down our civil rights, gather up our petticoats and go shrieking into the night...
Sheesh. What madness.
Did Malkin lie in this case? Is health insurance under $500 in Baltimore?
She provided a link, nobody has to take her word for it. Sheesh, indeed.
Am I being a hardass? You bet. I plead guilty. But you engage in the right wing's favorite pastime -throw enough bullshit myths against the wall to ultimately obscure the real point, so reasonable people without the time to really research it throw up their hands and say the truth must be somewhere in the middle.
Well, everybody has their Howard Beale moment, and mine came along time ago with the Right. So while I'm in agreement with Sidney Hook's admonition to attack your opponent's argument before attacking him, it gets tiresome, as Winston has noted, to have to do the same drudgery again and again.
In fact, it takes me back to another thread where I pwn3d you about Social Security. An exchange in which I posted a link to what you called a "left-wing" site, one which actually linked to the Trustees' reports as its source for facts. Since you dismissed it based on the source, what point was there in arguing with you?
You do the same thing again here, not realizing that the site contained a link to the three putative plans for S-chip - the Senate one, the House one and the Conference Agreement. But rather than actually look at it, you lunge in the dark for some "other side of the story". Yeah, there's another side to the story; the fantasy one Bushists concocted about the Conference bill he vetoed, who it covers, its expansion or lack thereof of eligibilty etc.
Like Krugman said: "Shape of earth: opinions differ".
I thought you left. Instead you came back to call bullshit again. That's what's tiresome. And rude.
My point is that using a 12-year-old to give a major policy speech is not serious, and that his family spent money on other things than health insurance and are now addicted to a government program is not a very good endorsement for expanding it.
Refute away, but enough with declaring yourself the winner about arguments you never even engaged.
Yeah, that was a *major* speech. Similar to a State of the Union. And the rest of your post is twaddle.
Thanks for proving my point. Again.
Yeah, that was some point. You can pick up your jockstrap on the way out.
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