This is the oddest defense by a wife I've ever seen. Roxanne Wilson, wife Joe Wilson, the South Carolina congressman of "You Lie" fame, makes a video defending her husband after his outburst. After the speech he called her, she says, and she asked him:

Joe, who was that nut bag that hollered "You Lie," or "You Liar?" He goes, "That was me." I said, "No, really, who did it?" I couldn't believe Joe would say something like that.

The rest of her monologue includes gauzy testimonies about how he's a "wonderful father" and has an "incredible work ethic." Which is nice and all, but not really apt. Also the "nutbag" bit is the only part that seems genuine and unscripted. Go figure.

Hanna, I actually think the “Who’s the nut bag?” ad is a very effective deployment of a chagrined spouse, even better than Hillary’s long-ago, “I’m not some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” defense of Bill. Roxanne Wilson strikes an authentic note of being appalled by his remark and grateful that the president accepted her husband’s apology. It allows the viewer to agree his behavior was unacceptable (while reminding voters his violation was not so bad as some other South Carolina politicians), then Roxanne gets to remind people he sometimes gets carried away because he cares so much. Unlike so many stiff and phony politicians, she’s a natural in front of the camera. Maybe Mark Sanford, et al. should hire Roxanne to defend them!

Tags: joe wilson, Roxanne Wilson, stupid politicians

We wake up this morning to a newly school–marmish Maureen Dowd scolding Joe Wilson (again) and praising yesterday’s congressional reprimand of him as a “rare triumph of civility.” So now we have, as our new public faces of politeness and good manners, Rahm Emanuel, the prince of potty mouth, and Maureen Dowd, queen of the wicked insult. Maybe they can tour the elementary school circuit together.

Actually, what this whole affair reminds me of is freshman year of college, which for me happened during the height of the P.C. era. The way the left has decided to skewer Joe Wilson is by calling him a racist. Now, there’s no doubt that Wilson is playing this both ways, apologizing in public and then egging on his scary rabid fans on Twitter. And there’s no doubt that some of his fans are nutbag racists who spend the rest of their time fomenting the “birther” movement.

Yes, Joe Wilson supports flying the Confederate flag. You’d be hard pressed to find a Republican from South Carolina who doesn’t. The big revelations in the Dowd column today come from Rep. James Clyburn, the highest-ranking black Congressman. Clyburn mentions Wilson’s membership in a shady pro-Confederate organization. This is a group that in its early days had some links to the KKK. Again, pretty common in South Carolina. Then Clyburn mentions some “real nasty things” he said about the black woman claiming to be Strom Thurmond’s daughter. At the time Wilson took Thurmond’s side because he had worked for him. He said the charges were “unseemly.” That’s not all that nasty.

We could back and forth on these charges for a while. I don’t want to cheerlead Joe Wilson, he’s not my kind of guy. He’s your average blinkered Southern nostalgist. But is that racist? “Racist” is something we say to get someone to shut up. “Students are looking to us, and they ought not to be able to ever feel that such bad behavior would be condoned,” said Clyburn. Honestly, I’d rather they learn that in America, anyone can call the president a liar and not be hunted down.

Tags: congressional reprimand, joe wilson

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David Brooks alerts us to the fact that a congressman said something rude at a presidential speech, and a musician interrupted an awards show. “This isn’t the death of the West,” he reassures us. Good to know! But what is it? Why, it’s the death of all that is good and humble in this world, and the subsequent rise of “expressive individualism.” At some point between 1945 and today, we have crossed “a sort of narcissism line.”

I’d like to know more about this line. Did we all walk across it together? Were we too self-obsessed to notice? Poor Ta-Nehisi Coates is so far over the line that he can’t even see it. “It's virtually impossible to be a black person,” he contends, “and believe that Americans were somehow more humble in the past.”

This may be the product of blinkered, post-1945 reasoning, but it seems to me that West’s sideshow and Wilson’s outburst together signify… nothing. There is nothing telling, interesting, or indicative about two men acting out at a couple of awkwardly staged performances. The way millions of people react to them, on the other hand, matters very much. And if you’re like David Brooks, you’ll see the attacks on West and Wilson as a collective outcry against the vulgar monstrosity that is our culture. If you’re like me, you’ll see this reaction as a collective insistence on deference to authority, a pathetic inability to tolerate the meekest of incivilities. Either way, whatever it might mean when 270 representatives spend valuable time excoriating a single man for a two-word declarative statement, it probably doesn’t have much to do with the triumph of individualism over conformity.

Photograph of Kanye West and Taylor Swift by Christopher Polk/Getty Images.

Tags: David Brooks, joe wilson, kanye west

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Hanna, I see what you're saying about how Joe Wilson is in the mainstream of South Carolina white culture, but that doesn't strike me as a reason to shy away from drawing the conclusion that he's a racist. If anything, that just seems to be more evidence that he is a racist. We are talking about the people who gleefully elected Strom Thurmond to office repeatedly. Whether we like to admit this about our fellow Americans or not, there are large parts of the country where the mainstream white culture is overtly racist. As a white person living in a red state, I'm sick of pretending that this doesn't create plenty of occasions where conservatives will say the most hair-curling racist things when they think they're out of the earshot of anyone that will confront them on it.

And why would we doubt it? The white reaction to the civil rights movement didn't happen in some other place and time. The violently angry white reaction happened within Joe Wilson's memory, around the time of his adolescence in South Carolina. In fact, according to his biography, he immersed himself in the Republican party at just the point in time that pro-segregation Southern Democrats were switching parties. With Google searching, all the information I could find on when exactly Wilson worked for Strom Thurmond was unsurprisingly and conveniently hazy, but it seems that it had to have been in the mid-'60s, right after Thurmond switched party affliations as a protest against racial equality, and just a few years after Thurmond held the longest filibuster in history to halt civil rights legislation.

It's not impossible that political views reverse within a person's lifetime, but despite our highest hopes for ourselves, it's rare. It's believeable that Robert Byrd turned around on race, because he actually made an effort to fix the damage done by racism. But for most racists, what's happened is they've decided they're victimized by the "P.C." culture that shames them for overt bigotry, and so they get a lot of pleasure out of constructing a set of code words and signals to demonstrate allegiance under oppression, fancying themselves something closer to the anti-Nazi Resistance than to the hose-turning, screaming segregationists they were just a generation ago. It's an absurd fantasy, but one that Wilson is feeding by showing one face to a national audience and another to his base.

The only real reason to quit hammering Wilson is that it's a distraction from policy issues, and it feeds the white racist victim complex. But there's a real danger in setting the bar so high on what we call "racism" that associations, symbols, and behavior aren't enough proof to at least suggest that's the most likely explanation. That functionally erases racism as something that it's polite to acknowledge, and the people who bear the burden of that silencing are the actual victims of racism, the non-white people who have to suffer the abuses and obstacles that racist attitudes cause. It shouldn't be worse to call someone a racist—especially if the evidence has piled high and deep—than to be a racist.

Photograph of Joe Wilson by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Tags: health care reform, joe wilson, Obama, racism, south carolina

Hanna, maybe what we're witnessing is a bit of media overkill—no surprise there—which is certainly irksome considering the many more important issues that should be getting comprehensive news coverage. Still, you make “your average blinkered Southern nostalgist” sound so quaint and harmless. If you, like Rep. Jim Clyburn, were a son or daughter of the South and were black and of a certain age, you might be forgiven for thinking that those who pine for a return to the way things were are really wishing for the days of white supremacy, when black people stayed in their place and never had the temerity to run for high national office, let alone the presidency. You might understand that the nostalgia goes beyond the Confederate flag and to the very heart of the comfort that white men like Joe Wilson took from knowing that there was order and safety in their world because they had black people in check and under control.

What you’re casually overlooking is the very deep and very legitimate pain and anger that people of color feel when they recall, without a shred of rose colored nostalgia, the terror that was visited upon them daily by white southern segregationists who shared Strom Thurmond’s mentality and Joe Wilson's admiration of that mentality.

What makes you so willing to take what Wilson’s says at face value? You believed his “You lie!” outburst was spontaneous—and granted it may have been—and you also believe that the only thing Wilson said about Thurmond’s secret black love child was that she was “unseemly” to claim Thurmond was her father. Somehow I find this hard to believe. And what’s so unseemly, by the way, about saying someone is your father when that someone had an affair with your mother, the house servant, secretly acknowledged he was your father, and regularly gave you financial support? That some powerless black women would have the nerve to sully Thurmond’s good name by even implying that he would sleep with a black woman? Clearly that’s much more indecorous than lynching black men who so much as shot sideways glances at white women in the good ol’ days. And it’s much more ill-mannered than a member of Congress trying to shout the president down while he’s addressing the nation.

Joe Wilson is a big boy, who knows how to throw his punches and, by all appearances, seems wholly capable of taking a few good punches, too. He is not being “hunted down,” he is suffering the consequences of throwing the first punch. Just a few days ago you were sounding a bit nostalgic yourself for the sort of verbal fisticuffs that take place in the British parliament during Prime Minister’s Questions, during which “spirited and sometimes nasty debate might take place instead of the tedious "civility" that governs these phony American sessions.” Now you want Maureen Dowd and Rahm Emmanuel to show civility to Joe Wilson? Trying to draw some sort of moral equivalence between Joe Wilson's actions and the speaking style of a potty-mouthed chief of staff and the writing style of wicked-tongued columnist is a bit of stretch. Neither Emmanuel (who politely accepted Wilson’s appology to President Obama, no?) nor Dowd, are elected officials, nor have they ever shouted down a president down during a speech to a joint session of Congress. Even Joe Wilson’s biggest appologists and defenders recognize this.

Calling someone a racist, if in the past he has said racist things, behaved in a racist manner, supported racist legislation or legislators, and championed a flag that is viewed as an emblem of racism, is not some easy way to shut someone up, as you contend. It's an easy way to point out the truth. Last I checked, Joe Wilson was not going quietly into the good night because he's been called out or forced to shut up.

Tags: Joe Wilson Obama's health care reform speech