It’s early and I don’t quite have the mental acuity yet to deal with Obama’s speech, so I’m going to deal with the right wing reaction right now. In sum, it appears to be, “I can’t fucking BELIEVE that these stupid Democrats think anyone but me is a human being with feelings.”
Obviously, the most famous example of this was Joe Wilson yelling, “You lie!” at President Obama last night, when Obama was absolutely not lying. Wilson freaked out when Obama told the sad truth, which is that illegal immigrants will be excluded from this plan. There’s a sort of right wing perfection in lying about whether or not someone else is lying, and Wilson achieved it. This really isn’t that shocking. By the end of the town hall season, groups of rabid wingnuts resorted to simply booing Democrats whenever said Democrats had the audacity to state plain truths. The wingnuts have reached a point where hearing the truth creates a Pavlovian reaction of anger and perhaps physical disgust. They should be given allergy shots before hearing the truth, for their own protection, and perhaps under universal health care, a plan can be created to address just that.
Wilson’s response after his outburst was interesting. As Pam reports, Wilson said, “While I disagree with the President’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable.” But what does he disagree with? This is the offensive non-opinion:
There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.
Wilson disagrees with a statement of fact. He might as well have booed the President for saying the sky is blue. I suppose you can disagree with a statement of fact, but I wouldn’t think it wise to run around telling people about it. It makes you sound unbelievably stupid. Perhaps Wilson might have been better off pleading that he has a medical condition that causes allergic reactions to plain statements of fact.
But what’s interesting to me is that Wilson got all bent out of shape at the very mention of illegal immigrants, even if the President was agreeing with the right wing belief that they should just be tossed out on the street to die the second that they get a sniffle that might interfere with the work they’re being paid a dollar an hour to do. It’s obviously very, very important to the right wing base that there’s not even a hint of understanding the illegal immigrants are human beings, and that when they get sick and suffer, it’s exactly like when white Americans who vote Republican get sick and suffer. Just look at that picture of him, and his eyes flashing with deranged anger. He just knows that the President is sending secret signals of understanding that illegal immigrants are human beings, and he disagrees.
If that’s how a wingnut reacts to imagined empathy, you can just imagine how they react to the genuine threat of being made to feel that there are human beings that are not themselves. Roy Edroso waded into the much at NRO, and of all the childish taunting and freaking out, I think I was most amused with Tevi Troy’s self-congratulatory outrage that the President would actually argue that other people are human. Maybe even poor people!