Joe Wilson’s war: Why are conservatives so angry?

“I thought that the gun-toting goobers who waved their misspelled signs outside the president’s speeches represented a new low,” said Elmer Smith in the Philadelphia Daily News. That was before “a fool named Joe Wilson” disgraced himself last week during President Obama’s health-care address before Congress. When Obama declared that his proposals wouldn’t apply to illegal aliens, the South Carolina Republican caused a shocked hush by pointing at the president and shouting, “You lie!” For his outrageous breach of decorum, Wilson this week won a formal House reprimand—even as he was lionized as a hero by right-wing TV and radio hosts. And Wilson wasn’t alone in his boorishness. As the president spoke, other Republicans “booed, hissed, and laughed derisively.’’ Such blatant displays of contempt violate centuries of congressional protocol, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “Congress didn’t heckle Lyndon Johnson like that during Vietnam, or Richard Nixon during Watergate.” What is it about this president that is driving conservative Republicans to act like frothing lunatics?

Take a wild guess, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. The Right’s incessant attacks on Obama as “a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, commie, Nazi,” and grandma-killer are too fantastic to be explained away as the usual political gamesmanship. Some whites simply “can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.” Wilson himself is a former aide to that old segregationist Strom Thurmond, and led a “campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol.” Hey, give the guy a break, said Robert J. Ellsberg in Huffingtonpost.com. Wilson has spent so much time inside the loony right-wing echo chamber that “he just forgot where he was. He forgot that he was sitting in the House of Representatives. He forgot that the person he was talking to was the president. He just freaking forgot.” Let’s just be grateful that Wilson “didn’t have a gun.”

Come now—it’s not so awful as all that, said Alex Massie in TheDailybeast.com. In my native Britain, members of Parliament routinely insult, berate, and grill the prime minister in the august chambers of Parliament. Americans have glorified the office of president and deified Obama, and bully for Joe Wilson “for doing what he could to remind us that the president is just a man.” Besides, Obama did lie about health care for illegal immigrants, said Kevin Williamson in National Review Online. Democrats have repeatedly voted down GOP enforcement mechanisms that would “keep illegals out of the system,” arguing that Medicare and Medicaid already require legal proof of citizenship. But illegal immigrants often circumvent those requirements, especially by showing up at emergency rooms.

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So let’s get this straight, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. Even though the health-care reform bills under consideration specifically declare that illegal immigrants are not eligible for insurance coverage, Republicans won’t be happy unless we make it illegal for emergency room doctors to treat an immigrant woman run down by a car, or giving birth, or suffering from the swine flu? That’s correct, said Sally Kalson in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. So thanks to Joe Wilson, Americans now have a clear choice: a president determined to fix at least some of the inequities in the current health-care system, or the “ill-mannered” opposition, insisting that reform means killing Grandma to provide care to illegal immigrants. “Voters will decide who has the public interest at heart.”