It has come to this: Democrats give a twelve year old boy airtime on their weekly address to relate his story about what happened to him and his family when she was in an automobile accident, and they couldn’t afford to pay the bills without the kind of federal help that President Nice Job Brownie just vetoed, and the Bush republican grassroots immediately begin Swift-Boating his family. 

Whiskey Fire has some good notes on the obscenity Here.  The gutter is bitching about the fact that they own a 3000 square foot rowhouse in Baltimore, that their father owns his own cabinet making business, that the kids are going to a private school with a 20,000 a year tuition.  No part of that family’s life is now escaping the smear machine’s attention…right down to the kitchen counter tops…

The current market value of their improved 3,040 SF home at 104 S Collington Ave is unknown but 113 S COLLINGTON AVE, also an end unit, sold for $485,000 this past March and it was only 2,060 SF. A photo taken in the family’s kitchen shows what appears to be a recent remodeling job with granite counter tops and glass front cabinets.

Yeah, and the current market value of my little 1500 sq foot Baltimore rowhouse is about $240,000 but just six years ago I was able to buy it for $89,900, because that was what it’s market value was then.  One reason the housing market is still so hot here in Baltimore is that prices in the surrounding suburbs, and Washington D.C., are simply insane.  So people of modest means are buying up Baltimore rowhouses in the neighborhoods are that are still fairly safe.  One Whiskey Fire commenter puts it thusly:

Let me get this straight.  This guy’s a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?

Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I’d be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.

In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don’t really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.

But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn’t a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything’s said and done with he just can’t make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).

Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can’t pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.

And these jokers are pissed off about it.

Amazing.

I have a next door neighbor who is doing just that on his rowhouse.  He’s a building contractor of some sort, and he redid his own kitchen and it is just fabulous.  But you’d expect it to be, or you wouldn’t be wanting him to do your kitchen too.  And I have another neighbor who is by no means wealthy, and trying hard to keep his own kids in the Friends school here in Baltimore, rather then public school.  The public schools here in the city, thanks in large measure to republican scorched earth attacks on racial equality, cities, and public education, are teetering on the verge of collapse.

So this self employed father does his best to provide for his family, and give his kids a decent education, on $45,000 a year, and his kids are nearly killed in an automobile accident and that family suddenly finds themselves looking into an almost bottomless pit of medical expenses…and the gutter puppies at Powerline and The Free Republic, and professor InstaJackass, think there’s something suspicious about this?  No.  No.  Absolutely not.  They know goddamn well there’s nothing wrong with this family’s story.  Nothing factually wrong that is.  But it was very politically incorrect, and for that the family must not only suffer, it must be publicly run through the wringer as an example to others who might be considering speaking out.

For the Bush base, the Party is the only truth, the only religion, the only morality.  When the right wing talks about virtue and morality, what they’re talking about is fealty to the party.  Nothing else.  That’s how you can run a propaganda steamroller over a twelve year old boy’s family, because she dared to ask the nation to look, really look, at what happened to them. 

[Update…]  Graeme Frost is a boy, not a girl, as I’d originally written.  Obviously I didn’t listen to the radio address that started all this.  Sorry guy…

Daily KOS has some facts the Freepers don’t want you to know…

1. Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.
2. His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.
3. They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.
4. Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.
5. The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.

So Graeme’s sister is actually in a private school because she’s still struggling with injuries from the automobile accident.  And their Baltimore rowhouse was bought for considerably less then what it’s worth now…a fact which would only be surprising to someone who didn’t know that housing prices have risen dramatically in the past few years.  But see what the Freepers did.  They took the current value of the house and related it as though that represented the income level of the owners.  They took the cost of tuition at the schools the kids are going to, and related it as though they’d just proven that was what the family was actually paying.  They even put photos of the family kitchen under the microscope.

Michelle Malkin, who once posted the names and home phone numbers of University of California students who had organized a protest against military recruiters on campus, is now stalking the family of Graeme Frost.  And surely she’s not the only wingnut that wants to get this family somehow, some way, for speaking out, for putting human faces on the American health care crisis.  They say that this family is not deserving of support, because it is not destitute.  But that something like an automobile accident can drive an essentially middle-class, small business family into destitution is emblematic of Exactly what’s wrong with our health care system.  The political movement that waves "family values" as a banner has now officially made American families another enemy in the kulturkampf.  The political movement that enshrined free market capitalism as a moral standard more righteous then the Sermon On The Mount has now officially declared small businessmen are the enemy.  We are all on the front line now.  We are all targets.  But of course, we always were.

[Update II…]  You gotta love the comments the gutter is leaving on progressive blogs on this.  The suggestion being floated now is that the Frost family should have sold their house to pay for their children’s medical expenses.  They bought the house for 55 grand and now its worth almost half a million and so the kook pews are saying that means the family is rich and they’re just milking the system like a bunch of liberal welfare junkies.  I’ve seen one of them suggest the family sell the house and rent a 1 thousand square foot apartment to make ends meet.

Let’s deconstruct this.  The family of six, whose father is a self employed cabinet maker, is making somewhat less then 50 grand a year.  The house is 3 thousand square feet, which is good for a family of six.  I once rented a 750k sq foot apartment and that rent was costing me by the time I moved out in 2001 800 dollars a month.   And that was a One Bedroom apartment.  The two bedrooms, which were 1200 sq feet, rented for over a thousand a month.  Rents in Baltimore have skyrocketed as the value of homes have skyrocketed, and I doubt you could find a decent 1k sq foot apartment in Baltimore for less then the mortgage this family is currently paying on their house.  And it would be at most two bedrooms, which isn’t enough for a family of six.

So in other words, to pay the medical bills incurred because their children were in an automobile accident, and still stay right with the kook pews, this middle class working family should sell the house that’s big enough to raise four kids in, and which they can afford the mortgage on, and move everyone into a one bedroom apartment that will cost them more to rent, and which they’ll never own, and which is too small to raise a family of four children in. 

Actually, this is Exactly what would have happened to this family were it not for the Maryland CHIP program.  They would have lost their home, and been forced into a downward spiral that so many working poor are.  Their living expenses would have gone up, even as their standard of living went down.  I never realized how much my own family had been nickeled and dimed to death until I bought my house, and saw all the tax and economic breaks I was suddenly getting. 

And the Bush republicans think this is the Right policy.  They really think that pushing middle class families into poverty by medical bills is better then having a national health care system that would keep them, and their children out of poverty.

The next time a Bush republican utters the words "Family Values" in your presence, laugh in their face.  Oh, and do the same whenever you hear them start yapping about the virtues of small business.