NYT opinion writer and faux economist Paul Krugman has a piece up today in which he piles on the liberal bandwagon by attacking the “mean-spirited right” who Kruggie accused of launching a “smear campaign” against 12 year old Graeme Frost and his family.

The factual inaccuracies from Kruggie’s little diatribe are addressed here, and Dan Collins calls Kruggie on his nonsense here.

I just got back from a brief lunch and on my drive back I was listening to a few minutes of Rush where he was talking about this issue - in particular, how candidate Hillary Clinton has demagogued it. He played a clip of her on one of the talking head shows and in the clip she was trying to sound like a mother standing up for a child who is being attacked by “right wing bullies.” “Go after me” she essentially said, “and leave that poor little boy alone.” She talked about the right wing “attack machine” and said she never ceases to be “amazed” at the level the right will supposedly “stoop to” in an effort to tear down someone’s character (er, even if that were true - and it’s not - I guess Hillary’s forgotten about all the vicious smears she and her husband launched against the good character of prosecutor Kenneth Starr, among others, during Bubba’s time as president?). She then said that the “attacks” against the Frost family were calculated, political and partisan.

Um, excuse me, but wasn’t using Graeme Frost, an innocent 12 year old boy, a calculated, political, and partisan ploy by Democrats to sell the expansion of SCHIP - an expansion that would make SCHIP available to 25 year old “children”? Oh, hell yes it was. Yet this witch has the audacity to assert that it’s conservatives who are being calculated and political by “using” a 12 year old boy for political gain?

Unfortunately, this is a battle that conservatives will continue to have an uphill battle on, thanks in large part to the helping hand being given to them by the mainstream media, by clueless, partisan gunslingers like Paul Krugman and the NYT editorial staff, as well as willfully ignorant far left bloggers. We saw this during the debate over embroynic stem cell research last year, when Democrats trotted out actor and Parkinson’s disease sufferer Michael J. Fox in an effort to make Republicans look like they didn’t want to help suffering people. The facts in the debate got lost in the emotional and emblematic arguments liberals love to make, and in fact, Democrats like Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill (and other demagogue Democrats in MO) flat out lied to Missourians about an embryonic stem cell research amendment that was on the ballot in Missouri and used the opportunity to accuse Senator Jim Talent of “not supporting cures” for Parkinson’s, which was a flat out lie.

It’s very telling that Democrats routinely hide behind society’s “victims” as a substitute for real discussion. Democrats would rather argue based on feelings rather than facts, because I think they know that nine times out of ten, their arguments can’t and won’t stand up to the scrutiny test. That’s why they are so dishonest about their real intentions. So they parade the poor, sick, disabled, elderly, wounded veterans, minorities, and others in order to hide behind in an effort to “win” policy arguments by making Republicans out to be cold-hearted Scrooges who don’t give a damn about the welfare of the less-fortunate (and in the case of the Frosts, it wasn’t even about “more or less fortunate” but instead bad choices they made which it impossible financially to get healthcare independently). They know that once conservatives respond to these arguments, that their Democrat proxies in the media are going to go after them, Democrats themselves will then join the pile on in “defense” of the “helpless victims,” and from then on the argument remains defined not by its merits, but by deliberately deceptive Democrats.

These are the types of arguments I used to see as a teenager on the nightly news, and unfortunately at the time they helped formulate my opinions about Republicans, and they were all negative. It wasn’t until I began to take a second look at what I hed “learned” over the years from the mainstream media that I began to see that you shouldn’t always believe what you see/hear from journalists who are supposed to be free from bias but in reality aren’t.

After a while, some Republicans, weary from having to fight these uphill battles, either stop participating in the battles or they give up and join the opposition, because they don’t want to deal with the potential political fallout from being labelled as a “child hater.” Shame, shame, shame on any conservative who would take either of those paths. Conservative ideas never win out when conservatives choose political expediency over principle. And even though we don’t often win on emotionally charged issues like this one, it’s better to go down fighting, rather than to not put forth the effort at all.

Liberals count on conservatives to give up when the going gets tough. It’s up to us to prove them wrong.

More: E.J. Dionne wrote a similar piece to Krugman’s - Mark Steyn addresses the attacks Dionne made on him here. Paul Mirengoff tackles Dionne’s argument as well here.