The Intellectual Vacancy of A-List Conservative Bloggers

Jonathan Cohn has a must-read post of the conservative blogosphere's bogus reporting on the Graeme Frost noncontroversy. He is a 12-year-old whom was hospitalized because of brain trauma from a car accident. He did the radio response to President Bush's veto of SCHIP. The conservative blogosphere decided to shoot the messanger. Creating Swiftboat-level doubt is a specialty of theirs.

Power Line

A Freeper took the trouble to investigate the 12-year-old who gave the Democrats' weekly radio address last week, and whose family ostensibly is too poor to pay for medical insurance, and therefore wants to use your money instead. The results are hilarious. Mark Steyn has more here.

Instapundit

Question: If business owners with half-million-dollar-plus homes and kids in expensive private schools now count as "working families," does this mean they'll get tax cuts?

Mark Steyn at The Corner

"icwhatudo" at Free Republic, however, showed rather more curiosity than the professional reporter paid to investigate the story and did a bit of Googling. Mr Frost, the "woodworker", owns his own design company and the commercial property it operates from, part of which space he also rents out; they have a 3,000-sq-ft home on a street where a 2,000-sq-ft home recently sold for half a million dollars; he was able to afford to send two children simultaneously to a $20,000-a-year private school; his father and grandfather were successful New York designers and architects; etc. This is apparently the new definition of "working families":

All this started because of an anonymous Free Republic commenter. John Hinderaker and Glenn Reynolds can at least pass off there factually-challenged posts by saying they're bloggers. Steyn is suppose to pretend he's a journalist.

The Frost are below middle income. They aren't living by Sudan standards, but aren't rolling in money. Neither parent can get private health coverage. The father is a woodworker and welder and mother works part-time. Graeme and his sister have been hospitalized. That scares off healthcare companies. Even the healthy looking Michelle Malkin is having trouble getting health coverage. That hasn't stopped her from crucifying the Frost family on her blog.

I often read attacks like this and wonder what is the motivation of these right-wig bloggers. They end up looking like fools. They attack a child and a popular government healthcare program. If these people were running for office they would be more marginized than Alan Keyes. One week it's attacks on Amanda Marcotte (like these people haven't written inflammatory punditry) and the next it's blaming the Washington Post for the Terri Schiavo memo Mel Martinez was passing around.

This isn't citizen media. It's Ann Coulter clones so angry at the Democratic Party all sense of reason leaves them. They could have argued against SCHIP on merits. They chose to go after a car accident victim and his family. These people never thought of how bad the Frost attack would hurt their side because they never gave serious consideration to the millions that would be cut from SCHIP by Bush's veto. It's bumper sticker slogans of "socialized medicine." Never is consideration given to the compassionate thing to do is provide healthcare. I dare any conservative blogger, with network news camera present, to turn people away from emergency rooms because they don't have health coverage. This would be seen beyond the wingnutsphere and low-rated cable news shows. Malkin backed away from accuing John Kerry of giving himself a self-inflicted wound. Conservative bloggers are scared when they are outside of their self-made bubble.



Bloggers such as Reynolds, Hinderaker and Malkin are the new stars of conservatism. The movement is in serious trouble. Intellectually-honest bloggers such as Dan Drezner and Ross Douthat should be conservative stars. The latter has is own ideological differences with SCHIP. Douthat does admit, "I will say that demonizing them is a lot worse than dumb..." The question is why are the dumbist voices the biggest stars in the conservative blogosphere?