Dems use kid to shut off debate
Democrats usually feel their arguments are too weak to stand up to debate so they like to put out props that are "unassailable." Thus they use 9-11 widows to attack the President on the war effort or some other kings X figure. In the SCHIP battle they use a kid whose parents have had remarkable success at taking advantage of government assistance and are asking for more because they made the choice not to buy health insurance.Over the weekend, I posted a couple of things re Graeme Frost, the Democratic Party's 12-year old healthcare spokesman. Michelle Malkin reports that the blogospheric lefties are all steamed about the wingnuts' Swiftboating of sick kids, etc.
Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man's job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it's incredibly tedious. And anytime I send my seven-year-old out to argue policy you're welcome to clobber him, too. The alternative is a world in which genuine debate is ended and, as happened with Master Frost, politics dwindles down to professional staffers writing scripts to be mouthed by Equity moppets.
But one thing is clear by now: Whatever the truth about this boy's private school, his family home, his father's commercial property, etc, the Frosts are a very particular situation and do not illustrate any social generality - and certainly not one that makes the case for an expensive expansive all-but universal entitlement.
A more basic point is made very robustly by Kathy Shaidle: Advanced western democracies have delivered the most prosperous societies in human history. There simply are no longer genuinely "poor" people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you're poor today, it's almost always for behavioral reasons - behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the "needy" out there that only the government can rescue....
...
When there is push back against this tactics we get the expected "how dare you" reaction from the left. The tactic is getting old and it is not as effective anymore. It may work with politicians, but it will not work with bloggers are talk show hosts so it is losing its armor. That would be a good thing for honest debate about the issues, but honest debate is obviously a bad thing for Democrats.
President Bush encouraged 9 states to cover not only kids but poor adults too, mostly poor parents under SCHIP when Republicans controlled congress. Now he’s cynically playing politics trying to look fiscally “responsible” by scuttling the whole program. That won’t happen but it will cost Illinois alone an extra $75 million to push these adults into Medicaid according to the Chicago Tribune, by far a more expensive program to both Illinois and federal taxpayers than SCHIP.
ReplyDeleteThat makes no financial sense at all. But then our whole hodge podge healthcare system which is twice as expensive as most other countries in the world doesn't either. Hopefully it will make no political sense either when the American people kick the Republican party to the curb next year.