Giving Them A Name

By now I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with the current story of the right-wing smear merchants and 12-year-old Graeme Frost. (If not, you can find a good synopsis of the story here at Think Progress, and more in posts by Ezra Klein, here, Digby, here, and Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake, here. There are plenty of other posts about this incident at most of your usual stops as well.) Basically, young Frost had the temerity to appear on a Democratic radio address talking about his personal experiences after he and his sister suffered significant brain injuries following a car crash, and arguing in favor of continuing the SCHIP program that helps the families of kids with medical problems like theirs afford decent care -- you know, the one that the Compassionate Conservative Criminal In Chief just vetoed.

Well, obviously poor little Graeme had no idea what he was going up against by daring to disagree with the Decider, and now the wingnut noise machine has let him have it with both barrels. Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, all the good little brownshirts at Free Republic and Little Green Footballs and the rest of their ilk have been working overtime to try to paint Graeme and the Frost family as some kind of over-privileged elitists stealing undeserved taxpayer money from the government for having utilized a program to which they were fairly and legally entitled -- one that was set up for just exactly the type of situation in which the Frosts found themselves. Rather than debate the issue on its merits, these angry pundits and bloggers have instead set out to kill the messenger -- in this case, a 12-year-old boy. Disgusting is just the first word that comes to mind in regard to their behavior, but it's really no different than what they've been doing all along. They are bereft of ideas, morally bankrupt and cannot sway the majority of Americans to their cause on merit, so they use vicious attacks and outright lies instead.

Without going into all the details of the Frost case (they are laid out quite well in all of the above links), I just have to say that this is a new low even for that crowd of hate merchants and prevaricators. It's just this sort of thing that points to what the conservative movement in general -- and the Republican party in particular -- has become: Purveyors of disinformation, hatred, paranoia, character assassination and bold, blatant lies. As John Cole pointed out in his post about leaving the party behind (which I wrote about yesterday), the crazies have taken over the organization, and there's no more room now for even semi-rational people who won't follow in lockstep every bizarre move that the Malkins and the Limbaughs and the Hannitys and the Coulters and the Savages dictate. They hate people like Graeme Frost and his family, and, indeed, anyone who disagrees with them, with a white-hot intensity. Worse, they are willing to use all the considerable resources at their disposal to try to slime and degrade them, to discredit them, to make their lives miserable because they are, in the eyes of the wingnuts, The Enemy. The Other. These people have no compassion, no conscience, no moral character whatsoever, and yet they are taken seriously by millions of American citizens and the corporate media in this country -- indeed, many of them are in the employ of that very same media.

David Neiwert at Orcinus has just yesterday coined a term for this collective group of rabid dogs, a term that I believe should be spread far and wide and used frequently -- I know I will be referring to this group of liars and smear artists this way from now on -- he calls them The Assholosphere. From this day forward, that is what they will be known as whenever I refer to them: The Assholosphere. Any Republicans/conservatives who might be reading this, know that the group you are aligned with, the movement that you have supported, the people whom you have up to this point not left behind or otherwise disavowed because of their extreme, bizarre beliefs and hateful actions, will be henceforth known here simply as The Assholosphere, and unless you jump ship now, you're included. Because I've had it up to here with these assholes and their dirty tricks.
Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut for the illustration of just what it is that we're talking about here...