Fair Game by Jon Swift

Jon Swift is a satirist in the tradition of the original Jonathan Swift, but some things go beyond even his ability to satirize.

Being a conservative means never saying you’re sorry for what other conservatives do. It means justifying the means if you support the ends, whether that involves ruining people’s lives and reputations, invading people’s privacy, violating people’s constitutional rights or torturing them. It means seeing anyone who is not with you 100% as an enemy and seeing every issue as black and white. It means doing whatever is necessary to defeat the enemy even if you sometimes have to violate your own principles to do it and seem like a hypocrite. Being a conservative means scoring political points by going after easy enemies and racking up victories instead of wasting a lot of time with the much harder job of persuading people with the rightness of your cause. It means doing it to them before they do it to us. It means seeing everyone opposed to us, even a 12-year-old boy, as “fair game.” Yes, I am very proud to be a conservative. - "Fair Game"

The context is the battle over S-CHIP, a government program to provide health insurance to children. The President vetoed an expansion of this program. The Democrats chose a 12-year old boy, Graeme Frost, who is a beneficiary of the program to give the Democrats' reply to the President's weekly radio address.

The Frosts' story is that though they are in a way comfortably off - both parents work, they own a house bought way back when housing prices were rational, the children go to good schools - there was no affordable health insurance available to them when both their children were seriously injured in a automobile accident. (The Frosts, we are told, earn a combined $45K a year, and the health insurance that was quoted to them was $1.2K a month). Under Maryland law, which is where the Frosts live, the children were eligible for S-CHIP (the rule was for a family of 4 having income within 200% of the official poverty level or some such).

The Frosts committed at least two cardinal sins, in the eyes of the conservatives. One of them dared criticize the President. Secondly, as a diarist on dkos pointed (sorry, I couldn't find the diary), the Frosts explode the myth that a white American family with all the right values and hard work can make it in America on their own. The reality is that every middle-class family is one serious health emergency away from bankruptcy.

So the conservative attack dogs in the media did a number on the Frosts, and it was so bad that even Jon Swift's unfailing wit did the unthinkable and failed.