Fair Game

In a recent poll of major conservative bloggers (which unaccountably left this conservative blogger out perhaps because I am entirely too reasonable), Rush Limbaugh was voted the Number 1 favorite conservative and Michelle Malkin, at Number 4, was the most popular blogger on the list. The results were no surprise because Limbaugh and Malkin (along with Ann Coulter, who was Number 2) represent the heart and soul of the conservative movement. There is perhaps no better example of the style and methods of these brave conservative warriors than the way they set out to destroy and humiliate a 12-year-old boy named Graeme Frost and his family. We are at war and these patriots will stop at nothing to defeat our enemies even if those enemies are children.

When 12-year-old Graeme Frost dared to criticize the President’s veto of the SCHIP program in the Democrats’ weekly radio address, he became “fair game,” as Mark Steyn (Number 3 on the list) put it. Conservative bloggers (spurred on, apparently, by an aide in Mitch McConnell’s office) began digging for dirt, poring over the Frost family’s financial information and splashing it over the Internet. They made harassing phone calls to the Frosts and sent them nasty emails all in an effort to send a message to others who might dare to speak out and participate in the political process on the wrong side. Never have I been so proud to be a conservative.

"The nastiness caught me by surprise," said Graeme Frosts's father and many liberal bloggers seemed taken aback by the intensity of the attacks on the Frost family. Unfortunately, these naïve liberals don’t understand that we are at war and that war calls for different rules, which is something that conservatives have known for long time. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh put it best when he compared this dangerous little boy to a suicide bomber, reusing a metaphor he also used to describe phony soldiers who don’t support the War in Iraq (like all conservatives Limbaugh hates rhetorical waste as much as he hates government waste so he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking up new metaphors when he can still squeeze something out of the old ones.) When confronted with a child suicide bomber with explosives strapped to his tiny body, a soldier doesn’t have time for sentimental thoughts about the terrorist’s youth. He just shoots on sight.

For conservatives the world is divided into us (patriotic Americans) and them (terrorists). There is no in-between. Liberal blogger Ezra Klein demonstrated how little he understood about conservatives when he comically challenged Michelle Malkin to a debate on the “issues.” Conservatives unlike liberals do not want to debate terrorists. Malkin not only refused his offer, she launched a vicious personal attack against Klein.

She accused him of being a poor reader for not understanding the nuances of her 2004 piece complaining about the bad choices she encountered for her own family’s health insurance. Macsmind, who also denounced the Frosts, pointed out similarly his difficulties with the health care system. "I have a wife who has survived cancer (twice) and has ongoing medical conditions," he wrote. "I make 40,000 a year and struggle to pay insurance but pay I do. I won’t even get into the outstanding medical bills. I don’t drive a fancy car or have a hope in prayer of buying a house such as theirs. Nevertheless, the Frosts have made crappy financial decisions and are wrong to expect the government to bail them out." What makes conservatives like Malkin and Macsmind different from liberals like Klein is that conservatives would rather struggle and be faced with terrible health care choices than to have no choice at all, which is what would happen under socialized medicine. Living in a free society means having the freedom to go into debt trying to pay for the cost of health care and having the choice to quit your job and take a job you hate because it offers health insurance or to sell your house and move into a homeless shelter to pay for medical costs. People who live in societies that have socialized medicine don’t have these kinds of choices; they have to take the health care the government gives them.

Malkin also accused Klein of libel, though I am sure that she is an opponent of the tort system, which is why she has declined to sue him. Klein had written about how Malkin published the contact information of traitorous students at UC Santa Cruz protesting the war in Iraq and of Chancellor Denise Denton, to pressure her to denounce them. The students received a host of nasty threats and the chancellor committed suicide a short time later. Not many bloggers are able to make such a real impact on the world and Malkin is very proud of what she accomplished, although she is too modest to take all of the credit for Denton's suicide. I’m not familiar with the intricacies of libel law but I think that while Klein published information that was true, it was written in bad faith and therefore is libel, whereas when Malkin or other conservative bloggers publish information that turns out not to be true (whoops!) it is with the best of intentions and therefore is not libel.

Although Malkin is not able to drive all of her enemies to suicide, she has had a number of other successes. She helped end the career and destroy the reputation of once-respected journalist Dan Rather. She got Jamil Hussein arrested and gagged. She helped silence Scott Beachamp. She rhetorically beheaded Jill Carroll when the terrorists who kidnapped her didn’t have the guts to do it. Of course, Malkin does not ruin the lives and sully the reputations of her enemies alone. Sometimes she acts as a megaphone for other conservatives who do the spade work and then others follow her cues. Even conservatives who sometimes recoil from her methods lend her support or aid and abet her if not by defending her then by remaining silent.

I would never attack Malkin because I know she is brave enough to say out loud what I am thinking and that if I ever denounced her, my reputation as a respected conservative blogger would be destroyed. And even if we are sometimes uncomfortable being on Malkin’s side, we certainly don’t want to be on the side of the terrorists. I’m sure many of my conservative friends in the blogosphere feel the same way. Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters, my favorite conservative blogger and someone I am proud to call a friend even though he usually believes in debating liberals on the issues and eschews personal attacks, defended splaying the Frost’s private financial information all over the Internet at first, but now seems to be having second thoughts on what he helped unleash with his tacit approval. “The response on the Right sometimes outstripped reason,” he wrote. “Rather than just argue the facts, some in the comments section here and elsewhere went too far in speculating about finances and motives of the Frost family.” But he still agrees that the Frosts were “fair game.” Rick Moran of Rightwing Nuthouse also seems to be backing away from the attacks on the Frosts, but he also excuses the behavior of the right-wing blogosphere by calling the Frosts “fair game.”

Oddly enough, the one conservative blogger who has denounced Malkin most vociferously is perhaps her greatest disciple, Chuck Adkins. Adkins is such an extreme conservative that he is sometimes mistaken for an extreme liberal. He is a Christian who calls himself “right-leaning.” He is against abortion and thinks homosexuality is “sick and repulsive” (“If you’re queer, you don’t belong here,” he says.) He is against neoconservatives (preferring the “paleoconservatism” of Pat Buchanan) and believes the Iraq War was a mistake but is opposed to pulling out now. In short, he is no liberal although he sometimes attacks conservatives for not being conservative enough. His rhetoric (such as his claim that students killed by a police deputy in Wisconsin "had it coming" because of their lack of respect for police and then reacting to criticism of his post by claiming he is a victim of people's intolerance of free speech) is almost indistinguishable from Malkin’s and when he published information about where Malkin lives (which he later retracted), he was taking a page right out of Malkin’s playbook. Of course, it’s one thing to post the personal information of traitors, as Malkin did, and quite another to post the personal information of a fellow conservative you disagree with. I have deleted attempts to post Malkin’s personal information in my comments and will continue to do so but I will also resist attempts to post liberals' personal information because like other conservative bloggers I want to preserve my own deniability for any responsibility of the consequences of such an action even if I give tacit support to Malkin and other respectable conservative bloggers who do so. In the same way, I would never call Glenn Greenwald a “faggot” the way Dan Collins of Protein Wisdom did, but instead prefer to sit back in silence while he does use such language the way other conservative bloggers did.

Even if some conservative bloggers do tepidly criticize Malkin and her ilk and although politicians like Mitch McConnell were prepared to join in the chorus of attacks on the Frost family but then decided to just let bloggers do it, no one should believe that we conservatives are not all Malkinites and Dittoheads at heart. The fact that few conservatives are willing to strongly denounce Malkin and Limbaugh and that her blog is the most popular conservative blog in the blogosphere and his radio show is the Number 1 conservative radio show should tell you all you need to know about our true feelings about them and their methods. And we will go to great lengths to defend them no matter how tortured our reasoning may seem.

If Democrats do manage to pass an expansion of the SCHIP program, I hope that conservative bloggers will investigate the eligibility of each and every family that applies and scare the rest into not applying. Of course, I won’t do it myself because it seems like an awful lot of work and I would hate it if some crazy blogger like Chuck Adkins did the same thing to me. But I will sit back and let others do the dirty work and defend them from liberal attacks even as I wash my hands from responsibility of any consequences of their actions. And I’m sure most conservative bloggers will do the same.

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.

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Jon Swift, Graeme Frost, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, SCHIP, Politics, Health Wonk Review