The White House yesterday dismissed Marueen Dowd’s claim that Joe Wilson’s “you lie!” interruption during Obama’s health care speech last week had racial motivation behind it. How unsurprising. Her editorial was absurd.
Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t. But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.
Genius, Ms. Dowd! How perceptive you are to catch on to that hidden meaning! What great ears you have to be able to hear in on non-existent words – tell us, what else did you hear? Are you sure you didn’t hear the ‘n-bomb’? I mean, if you’re going to make up racially-injected words, why not go for the gold? Tell me, did you also hear Joe Wilson predict Eli Manning’s victorious passing scheme this Sunday?
I’m just curious as to how Ms. Dowd came up with this story when she sat down to write Friday night. What exactly was the thought process there? Somehow she extrapolated an emotional outburst into a full page editorial about how Republicans are just so distraught over having a black president that it finally slipped out through Wilson? What are you smoking Maureen? Are you delusional? If there’s anything Obama would be racially offended by I may think it is one of her next paragraphs:
Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black.
At least her expertise on race extends to her knowledge of how blacks were treated in Pacific 1960s towns. Saying that Obama did not encounter any major racial struggles seems like quite a presumptuous statement for a D.C-born white female journalist. I personally would be a little offended if someone made such a sweeping statement about any aspect of my childhood.
Bottom line is Houdini Dowd pulled a very sensitive and very serious claim out of thin air and decided to roll with it. It’s disgraceful – you don’t just wake up one morning and decide you want to write in one of the world’s biggest papers that somebody or some group of people is racist without any sort of substantive evidence, or at very least, a logical thought process.