"The swift-boating of Graeme Frost"

I haven't been paying that much attention to the SCHIP debate, seeing that it's suffused with demagoguery, but I had heard repeatedly of Graeme Frost and wondered what all the fuss was about. This Time Magazine story sums it up nicely (below is just an excerpt):

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1670210,00.html

If you listen closely to the two-minute radio address that 12-year-old Graeme Frost delivered last week for the Democrats, you can hear the lingering effects of the 2004 car crash that put him into a coma for a week and left one of his vocal cords paralyzed. "Most kids my age probably haven't heard of CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program," he says in a voice that sounds weak and stressed. "But I know all about it, because if it weren't for CHIP, I might not be here today."
[. . .]
Since then, Frost and his family have been introduced firsthand to something else that most kids his age haven't: the reality of how brutal partisan politics can be in the Internet age. It started over the weekend, when a blogger calling himself Icwhatudo put up a post on the conservative website Freerepublic.com noting what he had found by scavenging around the Internet: that Graeme attends a private school, lives in a remodeled house near one that had sold for $485,000 in March and is the child of parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times. The post also noted that his father purchased a $160,000 commercial space in 1999.

All of this is completely misrepresented - Graeme goes to the school on a scholarship, the home was not remodeled, it's just appreciated since they bought it in 1990, and the family of six lives on $50K a year - below the 200% SCHIP requirement for the state where they live.

What is just as significant about the way this has played out is that many high-profile bloggers picked up the spin, and it was subsequently reported on CNN. Mitch McConnell's office admits to spreading the story until they discovered how false it was. A lot of really vicious and untrue things were said about this family, just because they publicly supported a government program that they had benefitted from.