First, thanks for answering after I asked the other day whether you thought the Republican Party would turn into a mob.
But I was really asking you about a child in Denver, and how that child could have ended up where he was on April 15th.
Today, I want to ask you a few more questions, about another child.
Specifically, this child:
In case you don't remember him, his name is Graeme Frost, and at age 12 he became the target of the your party's venom for having the temerity to recover from a horrific car crash, thanks to government-sponsored health insurance. The horde he faced was led by Rush Limbaugh (the most powerful Republican in the country), Mitch McConnell (the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill), and Michelle Malkin (the most powerful Republican in a cheerleader costume).
The backstory:
The parents have a combined income of about $45,000, and don’t receive health insurance from employers. When they looked into buying insurance on their own before the accident, they found that it would cost $1,200 a month — a prohibitive sum given their income. After the accident, when their children needed expensive care, they couldn’t get insurance at any price.
Fortunately, they received help from Maryland’s S-chip program. The state has relatively restrictive rules for eligibility: children must come from a family with an income under 200 percent of the poverty line. For families with four children that’s $55,220, so the Frosts clearly qualified.
Graeme Frost, then, is exactly the kind of child the program is intended to help. But that didn’t stop the right from mounting an all-out smear campaign against him and his family.
Frost gave the Democratic Weekly Radio Response to Bush's Saturday address back in mid-October of 2007.
The response: Malkin goes to the Frost family's home and appraises it, FreeRepublic posts their address, Limbaugh calls the kid a liar on national radio, and McConnell's staff emails reporters false information about the family's finances. McConnell was later caught lying directly to a reporter about his staff's role and what he knew of their actions:
Now, that was the treatment a 12 year-old kid who was unfortunate enough to survive a terrible crash got from the Republican Party leadership and activist core. Imagine the resentment the same people who attacked him will unleash against people they hold directly responsible for the push for health reform.
Actually, no need to imagine. You can watch it explode here:
(Do those remind anyone else of those videos of drunken teenagers smashing mailboxes with baseball bats?)
Now, I appreciate that this health reform effort is so massive in scope as to render its legislative language unreadable to all but the most patient and wonkish among us (neither of those being a descriptor for the average Republican Member of Congress). But I believe that the subject is so important, and the stakes so high, that the GOP should have taken the time over the past weeks to have read the bills themselves, as so many of the pseudo-rioters request through chant: indeed, if Republican Members of Congress had started reading H.R. 3200 and H.R. 676 back when they first started complaining that they needed more time to read the bills, and read them only while being driven to and from rallies, press conferences and speeches about opposing health care reform, they'd be done by now. A couple of dedicated legislative assistants (I think Members of Congress still get allotments to hire a few of them apiece) could have gotten through them both weeks ago, and handed them over to their Members complete with annotations and summations of the relevant information.
And I think those assistants could even have had time to go over those sections that call for establishing Obamacare Senior-Killing "Sleep Squads" with a bright neon highlighter so their bosses could easily point the language out to all of us that calls for the elderly to be slaughtered as an inexpensive food source for illegal immigrants:
Acknowledging the immense implications of the reform, let's consider what the consequences of a badly done really really are, Congresswoman Bachmann's Foxx's fevered dreams of octogenarian assassination aside.
The scenario that seems to be the most likely to my mind in the event of a complete and utter failure of a public health insurance program is (and stop me if this seems too crazy to be realistic) we'd have Congress vote to abolish or privatize it the next time the pendulum swings right.
I mean, we're talking about a Congressionally-created program, not some newly articulated Constitutional requirement that the government seize all aspects of the medical care and insurance industries. What statutory law giveth, statutory law taketh away. (And even Constitutional law can change: Prohibition was a pretty tyrannical intrusion into both state and individual rights by the federal government, giving them broad authority to exercise police powers against anyone guilty of no more than having a martini after work, and we decided that such an authoritarian intrusion into our lives was bad enough to warrant an amendment ending the experiment (and it didn't even take a Civil War!).)
So given the impermanent nature of a statutory reform, and given that we've been through worse instances of governmental intrusion into our lives than even the worst worst-case scenario in the reality-based health care reform debates, why is the anger on the Right so intense as to be causing melees?
Why is a voice from an angry mob shouting "open the fucking door" at a lone police officer?
Now, here's the sticky part: I know that a lot of the more centrist Republicans out there--you guys who insist on calling yourselves moderate or even "socially libertarian"--will think about this and say "your side has your fringe element, our side has teabaggers--it's just the same," remember that our side also takes pains, as a party, to denounce the over-the-top comparisons. Remember when MoveOn made a stupid pun and the Congress spent days debating how best to condemn them? And remember the "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest they sponsored, where someone engaged in what Ed Gillespie called the "worst and most vile form of political hate speech"?
Okay, well, whom among the Republican establishment has taken it upon themselves to try and quell these riotous mobs through condemnation of their tactics and appeals to their reason?
Consider, please:
Thursday's forum/near riot was sponsored by state Rep. Betty Reed, D-Tampa, and the Service Employees International Union, who apparently had hoped to hold something of a pep rally for President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal.
Instead, hundreds of vocal critics turned out, many of them saying they had been spurred on through the Tampa 912 activist group promoted by conservative radio and television personality Glenn Beck. Others had received e-mails from the Hillsborough Republican Party that urged people to speak out against the plan and offered talking points.
Members of that mob received these talking points from the Hillsborough County Republican Party, and many were members of Glenn Beck's version of MeetUp (that being the same Glenn Beck who, just today, joked about poisoning Nancy Pelosi--though, as a credit to his originality, he used wine instead of creme brulee). We're not talking about some fringe conservative party like the Constitution Party or the Alaska Independence Party here, but rather the Republican Party and its own in-house communications team, Fox News. That's who's sending these mobs out armed with talking points and strategies for turning discussions into Donnybrooks.
And if this were the first time it happened on this issue, with this level of animosity being deployed by Republican Party groups and leaders, I might be inclined to think it a fluke--an accident resulting from meddling with the primal forces of human nature. But, the thing is, this happened before, albeit on a smaller scale, to the kid in the hospital bed.
Our side's anger stems from the fact that there are thousands of people like the Frosts who die every day from a lack of health care, and that millions more are being held hostage by unscrupulous insurance companies who literally profit from denying treatment.
Where does your side's anger stem from on health care? Why is your side this afraid of a repealable statute? And when did mob intimidation become the preferred method for having your voices heard?
When did the GOP declare honest debate on health care unacceptable?
Is this really the same party you joined?
Get the facts: HeathReform.gov