Malkin the Hypocrite, or Malkin the Spurned?

Give credit to Christopher Hayes for pointing out that, as recently as 2004, right-wing liar Michelle Malkin was all whiny about health care.

After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland’s individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that “choice” wasn’t much of a choice at all. We had to go on our own.

We discovered that the most generous plans in Maryland’s individual market cost $700 per month yet provide no more than $1,500 per year of prescription drug coverage–a drop in the bucket if someone in our family were to be diagnosed with a serious illness.

With health insurance choices like that, no wonder so many people opt to go uninsured.

Is the reason Malkin went all apeshit over Graeme Frost's family's speaking out in favor of the SCHIP extension (that went down in a hell of veto-inflicted flames courtesy of the shrub) that they dared speak out in favor of a health care bill for children, or because they spoke out in support -- by osmosis -- of a bill backed by most Democrats? It's kind of difficult to figure out.

On the one hand, there's the hypocrisy; Malkin was whining just three years ago about how tough it is to get affordable health insurance in this country (can you believe her when she wrote, "[w]e couldn’t qualify for the preferred rate because Golden Rule says I am underweight"? I guess all that stalking gives her a terrific workout). And now, here she is viciously attacking a lower-middle class family on a combined gross annual income of $45,000 because they ended up in a situation that -- fate being fickle -- could just as easily have befallen her own kids. Far right-wingers like Malkin are nothing if not the epitome of hypocrisy, holding themselves to a different standard than everyone else.

On the other hand, there could be an element of the spurned ideologue effect going on here. After all, if Malkin could get lucky and strike it rich penning insane diatribes against anything left of the farthest reaches of the right wing, why couldn't the Frosts? Why, reasons Malkin, they ought to be thankful their brats are even alive! How dare the parents do anything other than suck it up and work three or four jobs each?

I'm more inclined to believe the former than the latter, because liars such as Malkin do nothing that isn't 100% calculated to get what they want by instilling fear in the hearts and minds of their opponents. Want to eradicate that pesky Constitution? Drag out Osama every now and then. So what if in the process the right-wingers compromise vital intelligence operations that took years to achieve results? As long as they can scare Democrats and the American public into shutting up and accepting whatever Nazi-esque policy the shrub and his gargoyle want us to accept, it's all good, right? Want to galvanize the ever-shrinking base? Whip up fantastical bogeyman tales of that "evil" socialized health care! And if you want to intimidate families from speaking out in favor of health care reform so average Americans can have fewer worries, stalk them -- with all the threat of harm that comes with that depraved action.

It's possible there's an element of both in this; hypocrisy combined with insane incredulity that any middle class family could possibly, openly support something that Democrats have as part of their platform. But wouldn't this imply that the far right-wingers have a glimmer of human feeling? They don't care about the suffering of those they hold beneath them. Why should they care if an average lower-middle class family gets behind a program supported by the opposition?

It's because SCHIP and other publicly-funded programs supported by the public still have power to determine the outcomes of elections in this country, and that sparks one of the three emotions extreme conservatives do feel (the other two being hatred and contempt): unreasoning fear -- fear that enough voters will go to the polls and turn out in such numbers that Republican vote fraud will not stop Democrats from winning even more power from the GOP. The loss of power is the only thing the far right truly fears, and it has the ideology's preferred political party in such a state of mortal terror that they must stamp out anyone -- ANYONE -- whose plight may tug at the already stretched heartstrings of the American public. It's the loss of even more advantage going into next year's elections that is behind the viciousness and unreasoning hatred so gleefully indulged by the Malkins of the world.

As Yoda said, "fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate...leads to suffering."