RUSH: Yesterday on CNN’s American Morning, here’s a montage of the anchor, John Roberts, and his report on the 12-year-old kid that the Democrats used to advance a falsehood about the president and the S-CHIP reauthorization.
ROBERTS: A 12-year-old activist has become the center of the story.
RUSH: Activist?
ROBERTS: Graeme Frost was left with severe brain injuries from a near-fatal car crash. But it hasn’t stopped him from lobbying, working with Democrats to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program known as S-CHIP. Democrats even picked Graeme to give their weekly radio address. Conservative bloggers like Michelle Malkin pounced, claiming the Frost family is a fraud, too wealthy for government assistance. One accusation? That Graeme attends a $20,000-a-year private school. The family insists scholarships cover most of that bill. Some of the accusations may be exaggerated, or false. But did the Democrats make a tactical error in holding up Graeme as their poster child? On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh continued the attacks.
EDITED RUSH CLIP: Now, the dirty little secret is this: The Democrats put lies into the Frost kids’ heads [776 words edited out] … a 12-year-old kid being used, to advance a distortion and a lie!
ROBERTS: The Frost family refused to show their tax returns to a local reporter. Graeme’s parents, Halsey and Bonnie Frost, still do not have health insurance for themselves.
RUSH: Here’s the dirty little secret dirt. The kid’s a 12-year-old ‘activist’? Somebody give me a break. He’s 12 years old, he had to have what he said written for him, or explained to him, or what have you. But here’s what everybody seems to be forgetting. Forget for a moment the family’s economic or financial circumstances. They are what they are, and there’s probably a lot more about this that we don’t know, but that’s, to me, still not the point yet. What the Democrats had little Graeme Frost go out and do is explain his circumstance, car crash and all that, and then say he ‘doesn’t want the same thing to happen to other kids his age because President Bush doesn’t want to increase the S-CHIP program.’ So you got a little 12-year-old going out there, telling a falsehood because the Frost family accessed the S-CHIP program as it is currently constituted! We don’t need to expand it in order for people like Graeme Frost to be able to access it. So to send him out there as a 12-year-old, and say that Bush wants to deny, and the Republicans want to deny, coverage to people like him is just incorrect. It is a falsehood and it is a lie — and they continue to use children as foils like this. This program is exactly what, as it’s currently constituted? The S-CHIP program is exactly what got Graeme Frost and his sister their coverage! Yet they send him out there to say that Bush wants to deny people like him coverage? No! Bush is for increasing the coverage to poor children by $4 billion a year. The Democrats want to increase coverage to ‘children’ up to age 25, with family of four income levels at $83,000. This prompted Mrs. Clinton to get in on the action on MSNBC, whatever the stupid network is. The question that she was asked by somebody, ‘When the Democrats went to someone in that group, a 12-year-old kid, to answer the president on the S-CHIP health care program, the radio speech, this poor kid was eviscerated by the far right.’
HILLARY: I was appalled by the way this young man and his family were treated, and I said last night in Boston, you know, as someone who has been, uh, pretty used to taking the incoming fire from the right, I’m willing to take it. I’m big enough. I can, uh, keep going and, you know, not worry too much about it, as I’ve proven over the years. But to turn on this young man —
RUSH: Wow.
HILLARY: — and to impugn him and his family for telling their true story, you know, I never cease to be amazed at the mean-spiritedness that you can find on the right. But think carefully about this, because what’s happening here is that there are commercial, partisan, political and ideological points that are being scored at the expense of this young man.
RUSH: You blew it, Mrs. Clinton. Your party blew it by using this young man. It would have been one thing to go ahead and use him as an example of the greatness of the program and how it needs to continue, but you put words in his mouth and you made him lie! You made this little kid lie, you and your party. You made him tell people in a radio address, that the president wanted to deny people like him and his sister health care coverage if they had some tragic accident — and it was that very program that Republicans created in 1997 that led to the Frost family being able to get covered after this accident. So if there’s any deceit, and if there’s any lying going on, and if there’s any misrepresentation going on, Mrs. Clinton, as usual, it is coming straight from your party. By the way, our microphones are everywhere, and we have tape of a recent appearance with Mrs. Clinton exhibiting the decisiveness and the confidence that she is so well known for.
(Playing of Hillary Clinton courageous spoof.)