No one could have predicted that a white southern Congressman would heckle a black president.
DougJ has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
The greatest American hero
Erick Erickson says it’s South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson.
AllahPundit takes a Wilsonian view of things too.
After 8 years of telling everyone they were traitors if they didn’t wear flag pins and address George W. Bush as “dear leader”, these lunatics support having Congressmen heckle the president.
Idiots.
Hardly surprising
I thought Obama’s speech was effective.
Certainly, though, the most noteworthy thing about the evening was the childishness of the Republicans. Personally, I thought the low point was when they yelled at Obama about the death panels, but the Joe Wilson outburst seems to be getting the most play:
I’ve never seen anything like this — or like the death panel outburst — before at a presidential address. Though I’m sure Joe Klein or Michael Gerson will remind us that a Black Panther snuck in and heckled Nixon in 1972.
There is no question, at this point, that the defining feature of today’s politics is the complete craziness of the Republican party. I think it’s time to start finding ways around the filibuster. Forty nuts from a party of lunatics should not be allowed to obstruct what is, whether one agrees with it or not, a serious Democratic agenda.
Obesity
I’ll admit it, I’ve been reading the Atlantic blogs the past few days. What’s the deal with this never-ending discussion of obesity among McArdle, Ambinder, David Frum, and some of Sully’s readers? I don’t have the energy to sort through it, so could somebody describe it in 30 words or less?
Country first
Marc Ambinder has a pretty sharp piece about the problem with media outlets giving Lady Starburst too much play:
Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, has every right to submit an opinion piece on health care to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, and they’ve got every right to print it.
But Palin’s existence in this debate does not (a) lend her voice any credibility and, beyond that, even if you believe that her experience as a state governor does give her at least a modicum of credibility, it does not follow that, because her voice is credible, it ought to be influential.
I believe that Sarah Palin is ballot box poison for the Republican party and that making her the face of the party will hasten the party’s well-deserved demise. On the other hand, while I’m all for making fun of all the stupid things she does, taking her seriously as a policy person makes us weak as a nation and as a people. Since I put country first, I think newspapers should stop publishing her ridiculous opinion pieces.
I recommend checking out the comments on Ambinder’s piece. It gives a pretty thorough tour of the various idiotic defenses of Palin, e.g.
All you numbnuts are missing the point: Sarah may not have a PHD, and she may not use Harvard-smarty Lowell House words like “trenchent,” and drink white wine, but she’s lived the life the rest of have lived, and she speaks for us.
The birth whisperer
Congresswoman Jean Schmidt admits she’s a birther, sotto voce:
(via Glenn Thrush)
A shameful episode indeed
I generally consider E. J. Dionne to be a gutless, Vichy liberal, but this is right on the money:
We have just gone through one of the most shameful episodes of the young Obama presidency — shameful because of the behavior of the right wing, shameful because the media played into an extremist agenda, shameful because we proved that our political system has become so dysfunctional that a president gets punished for doing the right thing.
[…..]In a normal world, the media would have asked Greer for proof of such a wild charge and, since he didn’t have any, his press release would have gone into the circular file.
But, no, the media is so petrified of being criticized for being “liberal” that it chose to take a lunatic charge seriously and helped gin up this phony controversy.
And unlike some pundits who occasionally call out Republicans for tolerating lunacy, Dionne didn’t have to close with “and the Democrats do this too.”