Check The Back Story Of Every Dem Sob Story - Road to the Middle Class

THE RIGHT-WING blogosphere has been having a grand old time with the Democrats’ latest poster child. A 12-year-old boy gave the Democrats’ weekly radio address a couple of weeks ago and used the opportunity to advocate for the S-CHIP program, a government health program for not-so-poor children.

Democrats have recently passed an expansion of S-CHIP and President Bush has vetoed it. So Democrats have been hauling out the sob stories to develop the political momentum to override the president’s veto.

The centerpiece of their campaign, reported by Samantha Sault on the Weekly Standard blog, is

Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old boy from Baltimore, MD, whose parents relied on Maryland’s S-chip program to pay for his health care following a severe car accident.

The MSM dutifully copied the Democrats’ talking points without using its army of editors and fact-checkers, but the blogger icwhatudo did check up on the Frost family. Among other things he found out that

Graeme and his sister Gemma attend the Park School, a private school that costs $20,000 per child.

Their parents live in a recently remodeled 3,000 sq ft home and father Halsey Frost owns his own business.

We’ll see a lot more of this sort of shell game from the Democrats and I have a theory about it.

Liberals really don’t know any poor people, so a lot of the juicy government programs don’t really go to benefit poor people: they go to benefit well-connected Democrats like the Frosts. And why not? If you can save on health insurance for the kids and get the taxpayers to foot the bill why then you can spend money on private education and home-remodeling.

(But I suspect that the Frosts also have some private money. Check with grandma, fellas.)

The thing about government programs is that there’s only about enough media bandwidth for the average person to know about, say, five programs. After Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and the public schools the whole thing starts to become a blur. Who has the time to do the research to find out what program you are eligible for?

I’ll tell you who: well-connected Democrats. Imagining, advocating, managing, and just knowing about government programs is what they do in life. So you are always likely to find a well-connected Democrat at the head of the line for the next government handout.

Bottom line: checking on the back story of Democrat sob stories is going to be a rich vein for conservative bloggers to mine. Because the chance is always going to be high that any poster boy or girl that the Dems present for a media opportunity is going to be only a couple of degrees of connection from a powerful Democratic politician.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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