Just The Facts, Please
Oct 10th, 2007 at 6:22 am by Susie
The NYTimes does a followup on the Frost family. And of course, even in the face of facts, Michelle Malkin refuses to back down:
In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.
“We work hard, we’re honest, we pay our taxes,” Mr. Frost said, adding, “There are hard-working families that really need affordable health insurance.”
Democrats, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, have risen to the Frosts’ defense, saying they earn about $45,000 a year and are precisely the type of working-poor Americans that the program was intended to help.
Ms. Pelosi on Tuesday said, “I think it’s really a sad statement about how bankrupt some of these people are in their arguments against S-chip that they would attack a 12-year-old boy.”
The House and Senate approved legislation to expand the child health program by $35 billion over five years. President Bush, who proposed a lower increase, vetoed the bill last week. Mr. Bush said the Democrats’ plan was fiscally unsound and would raise taxes; the Democrats say he is willing to spend billions on the Iraq war but not on health care for American children.
Mr. Bush’s plan could force states to tighten eligibility limits, but it seemed likely that the Frost children would still be covered.
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance, have backed off.
An aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed relief that his office had not issued a press release criticizing the Frosts.
But Michelle Malkin, one of the bloggers who have strongly criticized the Frosts, insisted Republicans should hold their ground and not pull punches.
“The bottom line here is that this family has considerable assets,” Ms. Malkin wrote in an e-mail message. “Maryland’s S-chip program does not means-test. The refusal to do assets tests on federal health insurance programs is why federal entitlements are exploding and government keeps expanding. If Republicans don’t have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats.”
As for accusations that bloggers were unfairly attacking a 12-year-old, Ms. Malkin wrote on her blog, “If you don’t want questions, don’t foist these children onto the public stage.”
Michelle Malkin, a no-talent hack who failed at an attempted career in “real” journalism, instead makes a substantial living manufacturing hate for popular consumption. Well, good for her! As long as there are Republican-loving authoritarians, she’ll never go hungry, and she’ll never have to worry about health insurance for her kids.
UPDATE: Bill Scher has more.
The story here is that the NYT has their content driven by what the Right Wing Noise Machine does. It would have been just peachy if they had felt the need to do any follow ups in light of any one of a thousand legitimate stories that the left side of blogtopia has unearthed only to see ignored (to the country’s detriment) by the corporate media.
It’s Daous’s Broken Triangle.
I really would like to see the malkins lose their insurance and then get denied coverage due to “pre-existing conditions”. I wonder if mental illness counts? There is something seriously wrong with that woman.
The cute part is how I was attacked… I said it on my blog and I’ll say it here. I wasn’t defending SCHIP, not at all, I was defending that families right to privacy. That’s why I put Malkin’s real address, phone number and aerial picture of her house on my blog. I removed it after a reporter for the Baltimore Sun asked me to kill it, because they were doing a story on Malkin.
If Malkin wants to try painting me as moonbat, fine. I’ll just paint her as the right wing fascist that she is.
I must comment that fascists are left wing. The Italian fascists were and are, socialists, as were the NAZI’s. If you must name call, please use hate mongers, rather than fascists. Otherwise, someday you’ll actually understand that many on the left in this country are fascists, not liberals. They attempt to smear and shut down discussion, rather than participate in dialog, which they alway surreptitiously call for and never participate in, except for name calling and smearing. Ah, the bliss of the ignorant.
Yes Jack, you are demonstratively knowledgeable as to the blissful nature of ignorance.
NB, Jack’s entire post, while complaining about “name calling” and disinclination to “participate in dialog,” engaged in zippola “dialog” itself, and mostly attempted to lecture the rest of us on the names he finds (or more precisely, derived from the most fatuous, poorly-supported talking points scattered through the ‘winger blogosphere) politically correct.
Jack, a few tips:
1. WWII–including the heyday of the Italian Fascists and the “NAZI’s” (as you put it)–has been over for more than 60 years. The Right doesn’t talk about stuff that old because it’s got such a red-hot sense of history; it does so because the last 7 years–when every scrap of Right wing ideology has been indulged to the hilt, at American expense–show them for the deluded incompetents that they are.
2. . . . someday you’ll actually understand . . . Yeah, the light will someday hit us and we’ll suddenly accept the insights you got from other apologists for the Right.
Dream on. One bittersweet quality of being a Liberal over the last few years is seeing your well-based observations go from being attacked as unpatriotic to becoming conventional wisdom–alas, too late to do much good. The Left worries about getting its facts straight. The Right doesn’t care about facts, it cares about having a consensus–reality-based or not. But fighting reality is very energy-intensive, and facts seep in. Which is why the someday you’ll actually understand dynamic moves from Left to Right, not the other way around.
3. The Fascisti and the Nazis were Right-wing dictatorships. Try to get your facts straight if you’re coming to argue a point.