REP. JOE Wilson was right: His “You lie” outburst during President Obama’s address to the Congress Wednesday night was “inappropriate and regrettable.” He did display an appalling “lack of civility.”
Breaking decades (centuries?) of protocol by shouting down the president in the House chamber would be behavior beyond the pale even if Mr. Wilson had been right. The egregious nature of this incident is merely compounded by the fact that the president was much, much closer to the truth than his critics when he flatly denied that his health care legislation would provide benefits to illegal aliens. (It would have been far more appropriate for Mr. Obama to give a nuanced denial, but Mr. Wilson was kind enough to obliterate that distinction by handing the president a perfectly timed example of how opponents have abandoned civility for barroom behavior.)
Certainly, some politicians would have bragged about this rather than apologize. Still, the apology that Mr. Wilson fired off after a couple of hours of intense attacks from across the political spectrum was the least he could do; an apology to the Congress, and to his constituents, should be next. His behavior reflects very badly on someone who always has been seen as a gentleman. He certainly wasn’t on my top three list of suspects when the president’s heckler was identified as a S.C. Republican; although he has been a dogmatic parrot of the Republican Party line for the entire two decades I’ve known him, I expected far better of him.
His actions also reflect badly on our state. As if our state needed yet another embarrassment — and another excuse for businesses to steer clear of us and snub whatever job recruitment efforts state officials are undertaking.
Most troubling, though, is the degradation of civil discourse that it represents.
To some, Mr. Wilson’s outburst was heroic; that’s appalling. Even if you honestly believe that the president’s proposals would do harm to our society, or that he is lying, this is no way to express that idea, and good Southerners, of all people, do not applaud it.
To many, it was disturbing but not terribly surprising; a natural — if regrettable — progression after the public behavior we witnessed last month: In many parts of the country, people packed into town hall meetings not to ask questions or voice their concerns but to shout down their representatives when those representatives dared to tell them the truth — that there were no death panels, that they didn’t personally support a given provision, that nothing would force individuals to give up their private insurance coverage, that Medicare was a government program; a few even showed up with guns strapped to their thighs, a not-so-subtle threat.
But Mr. Wilson’s behavior should have been surprising. It’s one thing for a (relatively) few ignorant or deceptive individuals to demonstrate that they were born in a barn. It’s quite another for a member of the U.S. Congress to shout “Lie; you lie” to someone who is addressing the Congress. Such behavior is worse still when the person addressing the Congress is the president of the United States. As Sen. Lindsey Graham put it at the end of a statement that otherwise criticized the president’s speech: “Our nation’s president deserves to be treated with respect.”
It’s difficult enough to debate the most contentions and emotionally charged issues, day in and day out, with people whose world view is the opposite of yours; indeed, it’s something that few of us have ever even attempted, much less done successfully. It’s impossible to have an honest exchange of ideas — and certainly one in which people are open to accepting ideas that don’t meet their pre-conceived notions — with people who are hurling insults.
Yet self-government in a society as sociologically, philosophically and politically diverse as ours demands an honest exchange of ideas, a willingness to accept good ideas even when they come from your political opponents. It demands compromise. It is the job of our elected officials to provide that. There is no place in that process for outbursts such as Mr. Wilson’s. We can only hope this will turn out to be a mere blip, rather than the escalation of an already dangerous trend.
Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.
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