Various posts on the wingnut anti-SCHIP mob

If you haven't been following the story of Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old who spoke in favor of expanding the SCHIP program (or even if you have), Paul Krugman in the New York Times provides a concise summary of the wingnuts' attacks on him:

Soon after [Graeme's] radio address, right-wing bloggers began insisting that the Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister attend private schools (they're on scholarship), because they have a house in a neighborhood where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood was rundown and considered dangerous) and because Mr. Frost owns a business (it was dissolved in 1999). [...]

All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate. If service members oppose a Republican war, they're "phony soldiers"; if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he's faking his Parkinson's symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case for a government health insurance program, he's a fraud.

Conservative John Cole says:

If you look through this family's dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing — hell, their story is almost what you would consider a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.

But 12-year-old Graeme advocated for a policy position that Democrats support and Bush opposes. So that makes him The Enemy.

Ezra Klein says:

It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he "really" needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to smear his children.

The shrieking, atavistic ritual of personal destruction the right roars into every few weeks is something different than politics. It is beyond politics. It was done to Scott Beauchamp, a soldier serving in Iraq. It was done to college students from the University of California, at Santa Cruz. Currently, it is being done to a child and his family. And think of those targets: College students, soldiers, children. It can be done to absolutely anyone.

As ugly as the right's behavior has been, it's gratifying to know that they think they have to attack and smear war veterans, handicapped people, and children in order to win. If you can either present facts to support your side of an argument, or you can attack a 12-year-old or someone with Parkinson's, and you choose to do the latter, then you really don't have a very strong case.