In an interview on 60 Minutes last night, President Obama lamented the coarsening of political debate and expressed forlorn hope that he can “bring civility back to Washington.”
With all due respect Mr President, no you can’t.
And nothing demonstrates this quite like the way a heretofore obscure Republican Congressman, Joe Wilson, is now being heralded as a latter-day Tom Paine because he had the partisan gall to yell “You lie” at Obama during his speech before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.
Of course, both Democrats and Republicans have expressed righteous indignation at Wilson’s rude and unprecedented outburst. In fact, the Democrats, who control Congress, are threatening to pass a resolution to officially sanction him.
Meanwhile, Wilson is being hailed as a champion of the common man’s wholly misinformed and misguided frustrations with “big” government. Even worse, he has been given over one million dollars for his reelection campaign by those who support the boorish way he yelled his way onto the world stage.
Unfortunately, the nature of politics is such that I fear the reward he’s getting for his uncivil disobedience will only encourage other politicians to do the same.
Indeed, they must have envied the support Wilson got from the 60-70 thousand people who protested in Washington on Saturday, carrying placards that read “You lie, you lie”… and shouting some of the most vile epithets at Obama and Democrats imaginable.
[I]f this belligerent and factional trend continues, the US president will become nothing more than a boogeyman for political opportunists. Not to mention that it could lead to there being little difference between Republicans and Democrats in America and Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq.
[Obama speech: a ploy to brainwash schoolchildren, TIJ, September 8, 2009]
Therefore, even though I share Obama’s hope for more civility, I see no indication that he (as transformational as he might be) will be able to do anything to reverse this trend.
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