Richmond Democrat mis-assigns credit for exposing the Frost story

At Richmond Democrat and other lefty blogs, they are trying to steal the thunder from the bloggers who really did the work digging up the facts about the family the democrats shamelessly exploited for political purposes in the SCHIP fight, giving it instead to some senate staffers.

In RD's post, Smoking gun found!, he tries to take the credit away from good bloggers like the Freeper icwhatudo and give it to some senate staffer, when the only credit the staffer gets is that he pointed out the story to a liberal-blind media:

On Monday morning, Don Stewart reportedly sent an email with the following text to reporters:
Seen the latest blogswarm? Apparently, there’s more to the story on the kid (Graeme Frost) that did the Dems' radio response on SCHIP. Bloggers have done a little digging and turned up that the Dad owns his own business (and the building it's in), seems to have some commercial rental income and Graeme and a sister go to a private school that, according to its website, costs about $20k a year ‹for each kid‹ despite the news profiles reporting a family income of only $45k for the Frosts. Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting

NONE of those facts were generated by this staffer, they all appeared days ago on the Free Republic web site, in a post about the subject. After a week of arrows by the democrats and frantic digging by the media, every fact in that original post has been proven true except for one, and the Baltimore Sun has actually discovered MORE things about the family.

BTW, the one thing that was wrong in the original post was a conjecture that the family actually paid for their private school. Turns out that just like their health insurance, someone else is footing the bill for their kid's eduation.

Meanwhile, RD continues the lie that people are attacking the kid. It you read the above e-mail, you can see that the only people attacked are the Democratic leadership for not vetting the family.

Of course, I can see why Democrats would think that telling the facts about the family is an "attack". After all, the family sends their kids to private school, a definite democrat no-no, and the father has his own business which isn't unionized, he actually owns property, and his business didn't provide health insurance for his employees.

In other words, this is exactly the kind of family democrats attack all the time. So when the Republicans point out these qualities in the family, the Democrats naturally think it's an "attack".

Now, there HAVE been attacks on the family (I imagine some evil commenter has even attacked the kid, but I haven't seen it). And the family has attacked people who oppose expanding SCHIP. But the real story is that this family is a perfect example of why the SCHIP program works as is and doesn't need to be expanded.