Wurlitzer Prize for the Week Ending 10/13/07

Try as we might, The Mighty Wurlitzer was unable to come up with a single winner for our coveted prize this week, for there were simply too many viable and deserving contenders. So, in a break with our recently established tradition, we award the Wurlitzer Prize for Wingnuttery to...the entire right wing of the Republican Party!

There's more...on the flip...!

What is the occasion for this break in tradition, you ask? Well, specifically, it is the concerted effort to "destroy" one Graeme Frost; a fine young gentleman who had the audacity to suffer traumatic injury, whose loving & supportive parents then utilized the power of the state to salvage a satisfactory standard of living for his family, and who entered into the fray of partisan politics in order that other families would be able to avail themselves of these same services. Such transgressions could not go unpunished. There were tax revenues to save, dammit!

All this mishagas started a little over two weeks ago, when Graeme was tapped to deliver the Democratic Party's radio address to provide a real, human voice to the hubub on Capitol Hill surrounding the proposed expansion of the S-CHIP.

If it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today. … We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program. But there are millions of kids out there who don’t have CHIP, and they wouldn’t get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. … I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me.

Who could have envisioned that this innocent assertion would be equivalent to putting out a fire with gasoline? Well, anyone underestimating the evil of the wingnut-o-sphere.

As the New York Times' Paul Krugman so succinctly revealed the men and women behind the curtain:

Soon after the 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).

The charge was led by Michelle Malkin, who according to Technorati has the most-trafficked right-wing blog on the Internet, and in addition to blogging has a nationally syndicated column, writes for National Review and is a frequent guest on Fox News.

And G.O.P. politicians were eager to join in the smear. The New York Times reported that Republicans in Congress “were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance” but had “backed off” as the case fell apart.

In fact, however, Republicans had already made their first move: an e-mail message from the office of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, sent to reporters and obtained by the Web site Think Progress, repeated the smears against the Frosts and asked: “Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?”

This little mellowdrama does well to illustrate the not-too-well-kept nasty little secret of how the entire right wing of the Republican Party is not so much a party which holds a different philosophy of governance, but is in fact a well-choreographed font of disinformation and ill-intentioned propaganda.

No matter the source (even a 12 year old boy!), the symbol of dissension must be discredited, even destroyed as one poster on RedState commented:

If federal funds were required [they] could die for all I care. Let the parents get second jobs, let their state foot the bill or let them seek help from private charities. […]

I would hire a team of PIs and find out exactly how much their parents made and where they spent every nickel. Then I’d do everything possible to destroy their lives with that info.

This, despite the fact, as sensible conservative John Cole notes, the Frost family should be the very epitome of what the Republicans espouse.

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.

In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter.

However, as Cole goes onto note, the family is not without fault. Namely, they are not rich & they had the audacity to question the wisdom of a rare Il Douche'™ veto. Therefore, Graeme and his family must die.

Guess what, mbecker908, you're off the Wurlitzer's Christmakwanzukkah™ card list. That goes for all your compadres, too!