The meaning of community

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in something of a crappy mood today. Probably because I’ve been reading too much about the right-wing smear-job on 12-year-old Graeme Frost and the rest of his family. Democrats had Graeme — whose family qualified for the SCHIP health insurance assistance Bush vetoed — about how important that particular government service was to him and his sister.

Now no less a personage than Michelle Malkin and her army of wingnuts have been stalking the Frosts, calling them to quiz them about their financials, and spreading falsehoods and half-truths about the family. Graeme, they say, is “fair game” because he made a political commercial, but I don’t think anyone is fair game for slander and harassment in their own private homes.

In any case, a lot of the arguments the wingnuts are making are odious in and of themselves. Why should the Frosts get government assistance, they wonder, when they’re not yet completely destitute? Mr. Frost has a small business and owns property, why couldn’t he provide decent health insurance for his family of six?

Actually, that’s the question I’m asking. The difference is, they see the Frost’s inability to provide health coverage as a moral failing of the Frost’s personally, whereas I am wondering why we allow health insurance companies so much profiteering that people who are as well off as the Frosts still qualify for and rely on government assistance. This is evidence of a massively broken system, people, not Welfare Queenism.

Digby says:

The Frosts can now expect that they will be bombarded with judgment from smug jackasses who will poke around in their private lives and tell them they are at fault, even though they both work, because their family couldn’t afford to pay the huge premiums for a family of six or the catastrophic costs associated with major injuries and the ongoing care necessary for a special needs child. And when these critics say this about these people they will also be saying it about millions of working poor and middle class families who are crumbling under the burden of the runaway health care costs that are breaking the American economy and the American family. They will all be told they are bad parents, bad citizens, bad people.

Yet it is Americans like the Frosts, who make 45,000 dollars a year trying to run a small business and raise a family who are the backbone of this country. They don’t deserve to be swift-boated or smeared or stalked just because they need some help when their kids are hurt and the costs for caring for them runs into the millions of dollars — or for speaking out about it. This sickening smear campaign against these people is unamerican, unchristian and inhuman, which actually isn’t all that surprising considering the people it’s coming from. [ Judgment Daze ]

Let’s be clear on what has all these people’s knickers in a twist: perceived abuse of a government program that cost far less than the Waste, Fraud and Abuse(tm) that has been allowed to run rampant in the Iraq Government Contracting Market. But I don’t see the freepers stalking out the Blackwater offices to see what their kitchen counters are made out of.

Be that as it may, the reason we have a country anyway is to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Part of what government is supposed to do is reduce risk for its citizens — and that includes the financial risk of starting a home business, having children, and participating in the economic and political project.

But these assholes don’t think their precious money — which they wouldn’t have without a middle class or the government services they depend on so much — should ever contribute to anyone’s general welfare. If you make a bad decision or things just don’t turn out right for some unforseen reason or you bet on the wrong horse or depend too much on that Enron pension plan, too freaking bad for you, you should have been smarter, you should have been more innovative, and you deserve to at least be made destitute. Preferably, I guess, you would just die and reduce the surplus population.

And the people who feel this way have the nerve to call themselves patriotic.

See also Ezra Klein:

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. 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 his smear his children.
[ What has happened to the Right? ]