Crush Liberalism

Dems pick “poor” child to deliver health care message

To paraphrase the master butcher of the English language of our time: it depends on the meaning of the word “poor”.

Quick background info: the Dems ran a kid named Graeme Frost in a commercial to point out how those mean ol’ nasty Republicans hate poor children like him. Turns out, he’s far from poor. D’oh! Not the first time these morons have picked a fraudulent (or, if you prefer, “less than ideal”) messenger.

I know these people have no shame, but you’d think they’d at least have a little bit of sense when running a commercial, right?  Think again.  From NRO:

Over the weekend, I posted a couple of things re Graeme Frost, the Democratic Party’s 12-year old healthcare spokesman. Michelle Malkin reports that the blogospheric lefties are all steamed about the wingnuts’ Swiftboating of sick kids, etc.

Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it’s incredibly tedious. And anytime I send my seven-year-old out to argue policy you’re welcome to clobber him, too. The alternative is a world in which genuine debate is ended and, as happened with Master Frost, politics dwindles down to professional staffers writing scripts to be mouthed by Equity moppets.

But one thing is clear by now: Whatever the truth about this boy’s private school, his family home, his father’s commercial property, etc, the Frosts are a very particular situation and do not illustrate any social generality – and certainly not one that makes the case for an expensive expansive all-but universal entitlement.

A more basic point is made very robustly by Kathy Shaidle: Advanced western democracies have delivered the most prosperous societies in human history. There simply are no longer genuinely “poor” people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you’re poor today, it’s almost always for behavioral reasons – behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the “needy” out there that only the government can rescue. An editorial in Canada’s biggest-selling newspaper today states:

A total of 905,000 people visited food banks across the Greater Toronto Area in the past year. 

The population of Toronto is about two-and-a-half million. Is the Star suggesting one in three citizens of one of the wealthiest municipalities on earth depends on “food banks”? Or is it the same one thousand people getting three square meals a day there? Or ten thousand people swinging by a couple of times a week? And, in that case, how many of them actually “depend” on food banks? Only the Star knows. But the idea that 905,000 Torontonians need food aid is innumerate bunk.

So, in the absence of real need, we’ve persuaded ourselves that we need to create more and more programs for the middle-class and wealthy. Several correspondents have written to scoff at the idea that the Frosts are wealthy, citing family friends who suggest the grandparents chip in for the private-school fees.

But hang on. That’s as it should be. That’s the kind of healthy transgenerational solidarity without which no society can survive (see Europe). Graeme Frost’s maternal grandfather died last December, and The Baltimore Sun reported:

At Bendix, he helped develop the first microwave landing systems for commercial aircraft and worked on NASA’s manned space program from 1960 to 1977. For the next decade, he worked in management at Bendix facilities in Iowa, Florida, New Jersey and Baltimore. From 1989 to 1991, he was vice president of engineering at Nurad Technologies, which manufactures antennas.

Mr. Sebring never officially retired, serving as an engineering consultant for the Navy for 15 years, assisting with communication systems between helicopters and surface ships.

So executive vice-presidents’ families are now the new new poor? I support lower taxes for the Frosts, increased child credits for the Frosts, an end to the “death tax” and other encroachments on transgenerational wealth transfer, and even severe catastrophic medical-emergency aid of one form or other. But there is no reason to put more and more middle-class families on the government teat, and doing so is deeply corrosive of liberty.

And, if the Democrats don’t like me saying that, next time put up someone in long pants to make your case.

Possessor of “absolute moral authority”, this kid.  Thus the left’s whining like a b#tch over the “smear campaign”, better known as an exposé. As Michelle Malkin notes:

…Asking questions and subjecting political anecdotes to scrutiny are what journalists should be doing.

When a family and Democrat political leaders drag a child down to Washington at 6 in the morning to read a script written by Senate Democrat staffers on a crusade to overturn a presidential veto, someone might have questions about the family’s claims. The newspapers don’t want to do their jobs. The vacuum is being filled.

If you don’t want questions, don’t foist these children onto the public stage.

Fight your battles like adults and stop hiding behind youngsters dragging around red wagons filled with your talking points. (Seriously, what kind of parents would use their kids as political props? – Ed.)

Why would the MSM need to investigate? If they did, they’d see the Frosts’ claims of just how expensive health insurance is there in Baltimore to be exaggerated threefold.

Exit question #1: if lack of affordable health insurance is such a widespread problem in America, why are the leftards having such a hard time finding someone (i.e. not a fictional person or life story) who is really, truly a living example? Why would they need to manufacture examples if the problem were really that severe?

Exit question #2: Notice how the left hides behind a child as a human shield from scrutiny of their horrendous ideas? That’s a tactic that’s not too terribly different than we see with…well, you get the idea.

October 9, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | media bias, moonbats, shameful, socialism