Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Bethany's story

I'm finding this YouTube video on both Americablog, Carpetbagger Report, and ThinkProgress. According to ThinkProgress, "TrueMajorityAction released an ad of 2-year-old Bethany Wilkerson, who was born with a serious heart problem and received health insurance through the SCHIP program." Here is Bethany's story:



Well, it turns out that the Wilkersons' are now the targets of a right-wing smear campaign, just as the Frost family was. Going back to ThinkProgress:

Michelle Malkin — whose baseless smear campaign against 12-year old Graeme Frost was deemed too bogus for even Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — is now trying to rally the right against Bethany.

Heralding the arrival of a “new toddler-aged human shield,” Malkin writes that “the Wilkersons made a choice” — a seeming reference to the fact that Malkin now believes she has the license to attack the Wilkersons for their public support of SCHIP. “We need more ‘partisan bickering,’ not less,” added Malkin.

Malkin’s not alone in her rage. In a piece entitled “Meet the New Frosts, Same As the Old Frosts,” the National Review’s Mark Hemingway attacks the Wilkersons as irresponsible parents:

While the debate around the Frost family at least initially centered around their relative wealth, the issue really at hand is one of bad behavior. […]

For Dara and Brian Wilkerson, the fact that they don’t have health insurance is less about falling through the cracks than the decisions they’ve made.


Hemingway claims that Bethany’s mother, Dara, “voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was ‘unmanageable,’” to “take a job at a restaurant with no health insurance.” He mourns the fact that the Wilkersons “went on to have a baby anyway.”

I'm not sure as to where to begin on this mess? The right-wing nuttiness is screaming that the Wilkerson's should not have had Bethany because Dara Wilkerson's left her previously job, with health insurance, to accept a restaurant job which had not health insurance. If Dara Wilkerson was going to leave her "unmanageable" job, then she should not have given birth to Bethany. Of course, if Dara Wilkerson had to leave her "unmanageable" job with health insurance, and was pregnant with Bethany, then what should Dara Wilkerson have done with her pregnancy--have an abortion? Because the right-wingnuts want to outlaw abortion, so Dara Wilkerson couldn't abort Bethany as a result of her inability to pay for Bethany's health insurance. Just have Bethany die as a result of her heart problem? If Dara Wilkerson can't pay, or have health insurance to pay, for the operation to cure Bethany, then just let Bethany die as a result of the Wilkerson's inability to pay for Bethany's medical care? Is that the wingnuts' answer?

Complete insanity.

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