At the heart of Joe Wilson's back-bench "You lie!" blast during Barack Obama's speech to Congress the other night was not anger over his efforts to reform a broken health-care system, but something far more fundamental: The South Carolina Republican and his birther brethren refuse to accept this duly elected president as their leader.
Yes, the Supreme Court stole the 2000 election, but once the Democratic anger over that malfeasance passed (and let's recall that it was Al Gore who led the "it's time to move on" chorus) nobody refused to accept that George Bush was their president even if they didn't like the guy or his policies.
What has been at work since the young African-American from Illinois made political history last year is far more malevolent than not liking him or his policies, and try as I might to factor out Obama's skin color when it comes to his most strident critics, I just can't see someone like Wilson -- who after all crusaded to keep the Confederate flag flying atop the South Carolina statehouse -- behaving badly if the president was a white guy.
Same goes for the knuckle draggers who showed up at McCain-Palin rallies and later at tea parties shouting "Kill him!" and "Traitor!" And it occurs to me that the kind of deference and support shown Bush by lefties like myself in the wake of the 9/11 attacks would not be accorded Obama by right wingers should, heaven forbid, there be a crisis of that scale.
Some people are saying that Wilson's outburst was a peek inside the conservative mind. I beg to differ because I believe that most conservatives -- even if they didn't vote for Obama and often don't agree with him -- are for the most part respectful of the man and the office. I also believe as someone who would bleed red, white and blue for his country that conservatives and I have a lot more in common than the differences between left and right amplified by the punditocracy.
Wilson and his ilk are, of course, lapel-pin patriots and at heart cowards. And in Wilson's case an arch hypocrite since as a retired Army National Guard colonel he receives free medical coverage for life through the very kind of government-run health-care program proposed by his not president whom he derides as being a socialist.
It is easy -- in fact, way too easy -- to dismiss Wilson's blast as just more wingnuttery from a part of the country where everyone marries their cousin, or something. The reality is very different. And very scary.
Saner conservative voices have not spoken out forcefully against the big megaphones like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and now Wilson, while I fear that it may be only a matter of time before their all-encompassing rage, as manufactured as it is, prompts a fringer with the kind of lethal weapons whose easy access to they consider God given, crawls out of a cave and goes on a right-wing jihad.
IMAGE: "Autumn Cannibalism" (1937) by Salvador Dali
Thank you for expressing this. You have expressed my own fears quite clearly. I think we can see a fundamental conservative tactic at play here, exemplified by the comments of one Glenn Beck (pause for a shiver of disgust to crawl down my spine). His accusations that the president does not like white people and is a racist are the tactic. Accuse the opposition of being guilty of the very thing that you are practicing. If Beck is not a closet Aryan, I'll eat my hat. Let's not even start about the proselytizing about family values by the Republicans and my having lost count of the number of them who have been exposed or admitted to extramarital hanky panky. If the Republicans want to rename the Democrats as the Socialist party, a new tag might also be applied to them - The Hypocritical Party.
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