Jumping the Shark

I'm sure I'll say this again sooner than I expect to, and I might have already said this, but this week will be memorialized as the moment the Republican party jumped the shark.

So when Democrats enlisted 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who along with a younger sister relied on the program for treatment of severe brain injuries suffered in a car crash, to give the response to Mr. Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29, Republican opponents quickly accused them of exploiting the boy to score political points.

Then, they wasted little time in going after him to score their own.

In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.

I don't have anything original to say about this (I'll link to Digby! as an example), but Republicans and their cohorts have hit a new all-time low and they're continuing to dig. They're now a parody of themselves.