The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost
Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007
By KAREN TUMULTY/WASHINGTON


Graeme Frost talks to reporters after a press conference.
(Dennis Brack /Bloomberg News/Landov)

If you listen closely to the two-minute radio address that 12-year-old Graeme Frost delivered last week for the Democrats, you can hear the lingering effects of the 2004 car crash that put him into a coma for a week and left one of his vocal chords paralyzed. "Most kids my age probably haven't heard of CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program," he says in a voice that sounds weak and stressed. "But I know all about it, because if it weren't for CHIP, I might not be here today."...

Since then, Frost and his family have been introduced first-hand to something else that most kids his age haven't: the reality of how brutal partisan politics can be in the Internet age. It started over the weekend, when a blogger calling himself Icwhatudo put up a post on the conservative website Freerepublic.com noting what he had found by scavenging around the internet: that Graeme attends a private school, lives in a remodeled house near one that had sold for $485,000 in March and is the child of parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times. The post also noted that his father purchased a $160,000 commercial space in 1999....

That was just the beginning of what turned into a Category 5 hurricane on the blogosphere. Typical of the tone was what Mark Steyn wrote on National Review Online: "Bad things happen to good people, and they cause financial problems and tough choices. But, if this is the face of the 'needy' in America, then no one is not needy." Nameless commenters to conservative blogs were even harsher. "Let 'em twist in the wind and be eaten by ravens," wrote one one on Redstate.com, who was quoted in the Baltimore Sun. "Then maybe the bunch of socialist patsies will think twice."

It turns out, however, that not everything about the Frosts' life pops up on a Google search. While Graeme does attend a private school, he does so on scholarship. Halsey Frost is a self-employed woodworker; he and his wife say they earn between $45,000 and $50,000 a year to provide for their family of six. Their 1936 rowhouse was purchased in 1990 for $55,000. It was vacant and in a run-down neighborhood that has improved since then, in part because of people like themselves who took a chance. It is now assessed at $263,140, though under state law the value of that asset is not taken into account in determining their eligibility for SCHIP. And while they are still uninsured, they claim it is most certainly not by choice. Bonnie Frost says the last time she priced health coverage, she learned it would cost them $1,200 a month.

In short, just as the radio spot claimed, the Frosts are precisely the kind of people that the SCHIP program was intended to help....

***

Politics has never been a gentle game. As far back as 1895, satirist Finley Peter Dunne's fictional saloonkeeper Martin Dooley observed that women, children and prohibitionists would do well to stay out of it, because "politics ain't beanbag." But surely, even Mr. Dooley could never have imagined a day would come when a mere seventh grader could be swift-boated.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1670210,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner

[Bitwit1234]

1. This smear campaign is a product of Malkin

She is the one (who lives in Maryland) who said she visited the home checked the facts etc. Well of course she can join right up there with the media, who are the worst darn fact checkers going. She got everything wrong, but that didn't stop her and then picked up by Fox and rush from trashing this kid.

Here's her email for those who want to tell her she is a sorry excuse for a human being. [e-mail]

And wonder what she would do if the democrats were as nasty as the republicans. If they followed her children around while they were at school and accused them of having a witch, (could change that to a b) for a mother. But the democrats are as nasty as the republicans they would never do this to a child. That's the difference in a party...republicans....you all know what they are I don't have to tell you.

[rinsd]

2. Sweet! Time has picked up this story of disgusting GOP behavior!

[WillyT]

3. Big K & R !!!

:kick: