Schipp'd

Now to piss off everyone I haven't already: I think the battle against Graeme Frost is incredibly ill-chosen, and also, as I've said, I can't really get particularly energized about the idea that some kid, somewhere, is sucking my tax dollars illegitimately. Assuming the worst case scenario is true, and his parents are irresponsible clods who could and should have gotten him health insurance: well, they didn't. That's not his fault. The decent thing to do is to take care of him anyway.

However, I am also not prepared to get all huffy and indignant because conservatives dared to question whether Graeme Frost needed S-Chip. Obviously, nut jobs harassing the Frosts, or calling employers, or performing all of the other nutty invasions of privacy that I have read about, are vile creatures who have gone far, far beyond the bounds of human decency, with less reason than is generally offered by the perpatrator of the latest road rage indignity. But a number of people seem to believe that the very act of questioning whether Graeme Frost really needed the state to pay for his health care is somehow tantamount to accusing him of mopery while simultaneously suggesting that he be chopped up into small pieces and served flambeed to a party of laughing Republicans along with their Bébé Irakien en Croute.

The reason that Democrats put him up on the radio in the first place is that they thought Graeme Frost's need was a better argument for S-Chip than any boring old policy discussion. Well, if you make Graeme Frost's needs the measure of the program's success, then you can expect the program's opponents to question Graeme Frost's needs.

Democrats put him on the radio, of course, precisely because they expected him to be some sort of trump card whose need could not successfully be challenged. And in fact, I think they succeeded. But children should not be played like trump cards.