"Swift-Boating": You Say That Like It's A Bad Thing
Posted by: tony on 10/17/2007 11:27 PM
Updated by: tony on 10/17/2007 11:27 PM
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Expires: 11/17/2007 12:00 AM
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Swift-boating. What a great term. It was first used by the Swift-boat Veterans for Truth in their campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election. This was a huge group of decorated veterans who combatted the misrepresentations that John Kerry had made after his return from Vietnam, and supplied the truth that only someone who had served with him could supply.
So "swift-boating" is the spending gobs of cash to tell people the truth about someone who is misrepresenting and lying. And this is a bad thing, because?
Now the New York Times is using this term to describe what happened to the family of Graeme Frost:
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 cords 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."
I feel bad for the boy. What a terrible thing to have happen. This 12 year old boy delivering his impassioned plea to the President to not veto his health care.
Well, the President wasn't actually vetoing his health care. The President actually wanted to increase the program, but not to the all encompassing, socialist degree that the Democrat leadership in Congress wanted to.
But let's not let facts get in the way of a child's impassioned plea for help to the President.
Graeme, whose sister suffered worse brain injuries when their family SUV hit a patch of black ice, was making an appeal for President Bush to reconsider his veto of legislation that would have expanded the program designed to provide health coverage to children of the working poor — those who are too rich to qualify for Medicaid but unable to afford private insurance.
Since then, Frost and his family have been introduced firsthand 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.
This is all criticism of his parents and the Democrat operatives who thought this whole thing up. When you, as an adult, jump into the political ring, you need to expect to get bloodied. And it's cowardly to hide behind a 12 year old boy.
It turns out that the Frosts actually were "poster children" for S-CHIP, just not in the way the Democrats had imagined. Most Americans are generous to a fault. But I would also say that a vast majority of people would have a problem getting fleeced to pay for the insurance of a family who has a 3/4 of a million dollar net worth, and are sending all of their children to private school, even though he declares an income of $45,000, below the threshold for S-CHIP.
Let's see, if those assets were liquidated, that would provide insurance for their whole family at $1,200 / month (the high ball figure I've seen) for... let's see... 625 months. That amounts to 52 years.
So the Frosts, if they lived less lavishy, had used cars, lived in an apartment, and sent their children to public school, they could afford insurance for their family until well after they retire.
This is what ticks off working taxpayers who make difficult choices to do what is best for their family instead of using the government to rob their neighbor so they can live in a 3000 square foot home and send their children to private school.
The "swift-boating" of the Frosts cast in stark relief the major flaw in providing "entitlements" to middle class people.
And "swift-boating" is bad, why?
(Via Right Wing Nut House)
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