Category Archives: Republicans

Graham, DeMint and the Angry White Guy Divide

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Lindsey Graham, normally one of the most articulate members of the U.S. Senate, apparently misspoke when he said this, quoted today in The State:

“We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys.”

Obviously, he forgot the last two words, “… any more.”

Just joshing, Republican friends. While you may be the party of white guys, you haven’t all been angry, all of the time. Some are pretty ticked off nowadays, though, so much so that they’ll pay good money to hear one of their own shout insults at the other side.

The question the senator raises is, will the party continue to be that way in the future? And the debate over that has broken down on familiar lines. No, not racial lines. And not “statism vs. freedom,” as much as the Sanford wing would like to define the world that way.

The divide is one that I’ve struggled with myself a good bit over the years — whether to be right, or be effective.

Set aside for the moment the fact that Jim DeMint is wrong about many things. He believes he’s right — believes it with a great deal more certainty than you and I believe we’re right (you have to, to be such a committed ideologue) — and he believes in shaping his party so that it includes only those who are “right” as he sees the right. He said that about as clearly as it can be said here:

“I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs,” DeMint told The (Washington) Examiner in a comment that has been widely quoted.

Sen. Graham, by contrast, would rather get some things done. That means working with, and supporting, people who don’t bow down to the same gods with the same ritual intensity. Work with Democrats (such as John Kerry) when that helps. Support Republicans (such as Bob Inglis) who are willing to think for themselves (even though they are sometimes wrong, as Inglis was on the Surge). And finally, bring in enough voters to make a majority rather than a minority.

And no matter what ideologues may claim sometimes about the ubiquity of their beliefs, you will never, ever have a majority if you only let in people who think exactly the way you do.

As for the “right vs. effective” dichotomy. I have written several times about my own struggles with that choice (which I don’t like being a choice any more than anyone else does; in a fairer world you could be both). And you’ll see if you follow that link that I’ve had a tendency to choose “right” when forced to choose. Part of that, though, was that that was what my former job was all about — determining the right answer to the best of your ability, and advocating it as strongly as you can. And I should also point out that my sense of rightness has been very different from Sen. DeMint’s. With me, it was about identifying the best answer on a specific issue under specific circumstances. You would never catch me falling into the absurd error of insisting a certain side or faction was by definition always right, by virtue of its ideological purity.

Similarly, Lindsey Graham has been willing to go down in flames trying to do the right thing — whether it’s comprehensive immigration reform, or the Surge, or reversing man-made climate change.

But for the sake of this discussion, the one raised in the piece in The State this morning, the contrast between the two senators breaks down pretty neatly along right-vs.-effective lines, with Sen. Graham on the pragmatic side, the one where not everyone has to be an angry white guy.

Goys will be goys

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There is a saying that negroes like watermelon because…

No, that doesn’t quite capture it, does it? By comparison, it’s pretty innocuous. After all, you could end the sentence, “everyone does.” What’s the harm in liking watermelon? Rather insensitive, not the sort of thing you’d go around saying if you had half a brain and cared anything about other people’s feelings, but it’s not in the same league with Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer Jr. invoking the myth of the rich, avaricious Jew, a stereotype that helped feed the resentments that led to the Holocaust.

No, for an analogy, you’d have to reach to something that actually resulted in the murders of black people, something like, “There is a saying that black men lust after white women because…”

Where did the GOP find these guys? In case you missed it, these two geniuses Merwin and Ulmer — Republican Party chairmen in Bamberg and Orangeburg counties, respectively — wrote the following in an opinion piece published in The (Orangeburg) Times and Democrat:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

I find myself wondering, What saying? Who says it?

These guys actually could make a guy sympathetic toward earmarks, which one assumes was not their aim.

Karen Floyd says they’ve apologized, and that’s that. What do y’all think?

Of COURSE most of Wilson’s and Miller’s money is from outside SC. Those donors don’t know them.

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I see that most of the money that has unfortunately flowed into the coffers of Joe Wilson and Rob Miller came from out-of-state:

Over the next 21 days, through the Sept. 30 end of this year’s third quarter, Wilson and Miller combined to raise $4.34 million – more than Democratic Rep. John Spratt and GOP challenger Ralph Norman collected over two years for their 2000 election in what had been the state’s richest U.S. House race ever.

No less remarkably, the vast majority of the largest donors to Wilson or Miller live outside South Carolina – 77 percent of Wilson’s new backers, and 86 percent of Miller’s recent supporters…

Nothing remarkable about it. It stands to reason — out-of-state donors don’t know these guys.

A more discriminating, local giver would probably wait and give to a candidate who could provide better representation to the 2nd District (ahem!). These ideologues from elsewhere couldn’t care less about the 2nd District or any other part of South Carolina; they’re just doing their bit to keep the partisan spin cycle spinning.

A donor who’s giving money to Joe Wilson because he yelled “You lie!” probably wouldn’t give it if he knew that normally, Joe is not a natural vessel for delivering such hostility. He’s a fairly mild-mannered guy who lost control for a moment, and initially did what came naturally and apologized, before getting swept up in something ugly.

A donor who wishes to express outrage over what Wilson does probably wouldn’t give to Rob Miller if he knew what a weak candidate he was. (My prediction: If no other candidates get into this — and unfortunately, with them sitting on all this money now, probably no one will — Miller will probably lose to Wilson by almost the same margin by which he’s trailing him in fund-raising. $2.7 million to $1.69 million — well, maybe the Democrat would do a little better than just under 40 percent, but he still will lose substantially.)

Hey, guys: Just insult the president, and RAKE in the dough

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This morning I ran into Dwight Drake yet again at breakfast — I swear, all that guy does is eat — and he told me that he exceeded his goal of raising $250,000 in the past quarter, reaching $300k.

Then, at another Kaffeeklatsch in Five Points with Steve Benjamin and Jack Van Loan, Steve told me that he raised $100,000 in the same period — which he says Richard Gergel tells him is a record, although he doesn’t know for sure.

Here’s what I told both of them: Hey, guys; you’re missing the boat: Just shout an insult at the president of the United States, and you can be rolling in the dough…

Can you believe this guy? As I said this morning on Twitter:

How does Joe Wilson live with himself, KNOWING he’s cashing in on something he did that was inappropriate?

He knew he did wrong as soon as he yelled “You lie!” His first instinct, and it was the right one, was to apologize. The Joe Wilson I know, while he’s an excitable guy, is better than that.

But then he got a taste of the wages of demagoguery, and he was ruined. Now, he basks in the adoration of those who celebrate the degradation of political deliberation in our country.

It’s disgusting. And while a guy who’s unemployed like me could use $2.7 million (and think about what an UnParty candidate could do with that — he’d have the chance to really torpedo this crazy partisan system), I honestly don’t see how he looks himself in the mirror as it comes pouring in.

Trying to explain Joe Wilson to France

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This morning I had a very pleasant breakfast at the usual place with Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, the U.S. Bureau Chief for Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s largest weekly newsmagazine. I forgot to take a picture of him, but I found the video above from 2008 (I think), in which I think he’s telling the folks back home that Obama was going to win the election. That’s what “Obama va gagner” means, right? Alas, I have no French, although I’ve always felt that I understand Segolene Royal perfectly. Fortunately, Philippe’s English is superb.

It was my first encounter with a French journalist since I shot this video of Cyprien d’Haese shooting video of me back in 2008, in a supremely Marshall McLuhan moment. If you’ll recall, I was interviewed by a lot of national and foreign journalists in the weeks and months leading up to the presidential primaries here. (You may also recall that a lot of them came to me because of my blog, not because I was editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper. Philippe, of course, also contacted me because of the blog, although he was aware of my former association, and expressed his kind concern for my joblessness.)

He had come to Columbia from New York, which has been his home for 14 years, to ask about “this summer uprising among the conservatives, peaking with the Joe Wilson incident,” as he had put it in his e-mail.

Well, to begin with, I disputed his premise. I don’t think there has been a resurgence of conservatives or of the Republican Party, which is still groping for its identity in the wake of last year’s election. What we’ve seen in the case of Joe Wilson — the outpouring of support, monetary and otherwise, after the moment in which he embarrassed the 2nd District — was merely the concentration of political elements that are always there, and are neither stronger nor weaker because of what Joe has said and done. Just as outrage over Joe’s outburst has expressed itself (unfortunately) in an outpouring (I’m trying to see how many words with the prefix “out-” I can use in this sentence) of material support for the unimpressive Rob Miller, the incident was a magnet for the forces of political polarization, in South Carolina and across the country.

What I tried to do is provide historical and sociological context for the fact that Joe Wilson is the natural representative for the 2nd District, and will probably be re-elected (unless someone a lot stronger than Rob Miller emerges and miraculously overcomes his huge warchest). It’s not about Obama (although resistance to the “expansion of government” that he represents is a factor) and it’s not about race (although the fact that districts are gerrymandered to make the 2nd unnaturally white, and the 6th unnaturally black, helps define the districts and their representatives).

In other words, I said a lot of stuff that I said back in this post.

We spoke about a number of other topics as well, some related, some not:

He asked about the reaction in South Carolina to Obama’s election. I told him that obviously, the Democratic minority — which had been energized to an unprecedented degree in the primary, having higher turnout than the Republicans for the first time in many years — was jubilant. The reaction among the Republican minority was more like resignation. Republicans had known that McCain would win South Carolina, but Obama would win the election. I explained that McCain’s win here did not express a rejection of Obama (as some Democrats have chosen to misinterpret), but simply political business as usual — it would have been shocking had the Republican, any Republican, not won against any national Democrat. I spoke, as I explained to him, from the unusual perspective of someone who liked both Obama and McCain very much, but voted for McCain. I think I drew the distinction fairly well between what I think and what various subsets of Republicans and Democrats in South Carolina think…

That got us on the topic of McCain-Bush in 2000, because as I explained to Philippe, I was destined to support McCain even over someone I liked as much as Obama, because I had waited eight years for the opportunity to make up for what happened here in 2000. Philippe agreed that the world would have been a better place had McCain been elected then, but I gather that he subscribes to the conventional wisdom (held by many of you here on the blog) that the McCain of 2008 was much diminished.

Philippe understood 2000, but as a Frenchman, he had trouble understanding how the country re-elected Bush in 2004 (And let me quickly say, for those of you who may be quick to bridle at the French, that Philippe was very gentlemanly about this, the very soul of politeness). So I explained to him how I came to write an endorsement of Bush again in 2004 — a very negative endorsement which indicted him for being wrong about many things, but in the end an endorsement. There was a long explanation of that, and a short one. Here’s the short one: John Kerry. And Philippe understood why a newspaper that generally reflects its state (close to three-fourths of those we endorsed during my tenure won their general election contests) would find it hard to endorse Kerry, once I put it that way. (As those of you who pay attention know, under my leadership The State endorsed slightly more Democrats than Republicans overall, but never broke its string of endorsing Republicans for the presidency, although we came close in 2008.)

Anyway, when we finished our long breakfast (I hadn’t eaten much because I was talking too much, drinking coffee all the while) I gave him a brief “tour” of the Midlands as seen from the 25th floor of Columbia’s tallest building, then gave him numbers for several other sources who might be helpful. He particularly was interested in folks from Joe’s Lexington County base, as well as some political science types, so I referred him to:

  • Rep. Kenny Bingham, the S.C. House Majority Leader who recently held a “Welcome Home” event for Joe Wilson at his (Kenny’s) home.
  • Rep. Nikki Haley, who until recently was the designated Mark Sanford candidate for governor, before she had occasion to distance herself.
  • Sen. Nikki Setzler (I gave him all the Lexington County Nikkis I knew), who could describe the county’s politics from the perspective of the minority party.
  • Blease Graham, the USC political science professor who recently retired but remained plugged in and knowledgeable. (Philippe remarked upon Blease’s unusual name, which started me on a tangent about his ancestor Cole Blease, Ben Tillman, N.G. Gonzales, etc.)
  • Walter Edgar, the author of the definitive history of our state.
  • Neal Thigpen, the longtime political scientist at Francis Marion University who tends to comment from a Republican perspective.
  • Jack Bass, the ex-journalist and political commentator known for his biography of Strom Thurmond and for his liberal Democratic point of view.

I also suggested he stop in at the Gervais Street Starbucks for a downtown Columbia perspective, and the Sunset Restaurant in West Columbia.

I look forward to reading his article, although I might have to get some of y’all to help me with understanding it. With my background in Spanish and two years of Latin I can generally understand French better when written than spoken, but I still might need some help…

Henry McMaster’s video on the Water War with N.C.

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You know, it occurs to me: How am I going to get people, especially political types, to buy ads on my blog (once I start offering ads on my blog) when I go ahead and put there promotional material on the blog for free? The video above being a case in point.

Well, I don’t know. But I’ll keep sharing stuff like this whenever I have something to say about it.

And what I have to say about this is: It’s a huge improvement over his initial campaign video, but still leaves much to be desired.

It’s an improvement because it isn’t a naked play on partisan resentment. In the earlier video, he blamed unemployment in South Carolina, absurdly, on Barack Obama. In this one, by contrast, his villain is those greedy North Carolinians upstream, which is more credible.

And the tone is laudable because it’s calmly and dispassionately explanatory. That’s nice for a change.

But one thing it fails to do is explain to voters why this has a bearing upon their choice for governor. It doesn’t clearly say that I, Henry McMaster, have taken a particular stand on this issue and my opponents have not, or in any other way related the Water War to the subject at hand, which is nominating a gubernatorial candidate.

You may say I can’t have both calm explanation and overt appeal for votes, but I think I can. If you’re going to take a minute to ‘splain something, ‘splain what I can do about it. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard.

Your thoughts?

Does Sanford still think he has anything to lose politically?

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This really got my attention in an otherwise boring turn-of-the-screw story over the Sanford ethics case:

Sanford asked the court to intervene Wednesday, arguing that if the State Ethics Commission releases the report, it could be used against him politically or undermine the governor’s ability to defend himself. Sanford’s attorneys will have until noon Tuesday to respond to the Ethics Commission arguments.

The boldface emphasis is mine. I would love to see the original press release or court filing or whatever that led to that paraphrase, “used against him politically.”

Surely the governor doesn’t actually believe that he has anything to lose politically. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t he say, in writing, not long ago, that his political career was over? I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time because it seemed like a painful case of stating the obvious.

This guy was toast before he dug the hole deeper with his unsuccessful attempt to block the stimulus funds. Already, the leadership of his own party had stopped listening to him, and the stimulus battle just made it less likely that they’d ever start again. All the Argentina madness happened on top of that. Those of us who were all too familiar with this guy and his irrelevance knew far before that explosion that there was no way he would ever have had a chance at national office, once the national media paid any attention to his record whatsoever. And of course there wasn’t anything left for him in South Carolina.

So how on Earth could he be hurt politically by disclosure of the preliminary ethics report, or, for that matter, by anything else? How could you possibly hurt a political career that is SO over, and then some?

But maybe he didn’t say that. Maybe The State got it wrong. I’d love to see what he DID say, so if any of y’all know, please direct me to it. A brief search on my part yielded nothing…

State GOP links itself to Wilson more closely than it has to

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Just got a tweet from Karen Floyd — remember Karen? she’s the state GOP chairwoman now — calling my attention to this item about Joe Wilson “thanking the Upstate’s ‘talk radio community’ that he said sparked a critical shift in his approach to fighting Democratic health care reform efforts and ultimately led to his now-celebrity status among some conservatives across the state.”

As I’ve said before, I wasn’t bothered nearly as much by Joe’s Tourette’s Moment during the president’s speech as by his subsequent behavior. We all lose control now and then. No, the thing that is really, profoundly offensive is the way Joe has embraced the extremists who embrace him, and decided to make the foolishness of a moment his new guide for political life.

OK, but even that is understandable to a certain degree. It merely illustrates a weakness common to politicians. It’s related to the “dance with the one that brung you” phenomenon. Since the talk-radio screamers are the only ones asking Joe to dance these days, he’s decided to go home with them. It happens, all across the political spectrum. If these are the only folks who will support him, he’ll support them back, under the logic of political survival.

But you’d think that a state party would want to maintain at least a certain neutral aloofness from this process. Not that I expect them to cast him into the darkness or anything; you’d just sort of think they’d stare into space and try to act like they didn’t notice the faux pas. Think about it: Karen is the chair of a party that contains both Joe Wilson and Bob Inglis, who voted for the resolution to express “disapproval” of Joe’s big moment. In fact, Joe was visiting Inglis’ part of the state to deliver this collective hug to talk radio.

Seems like the state chair would just want to stay out of that, and call as little attention to it as possible. I mean, as silly as the action of the S.C. Democrats often are, do you see Carol Fowler putting out a release to call attention to a Democrat who is making a career out of the most embarrassing moment of his life? Maybe she would. There’s no accounting for parties, and I gave up long ago trying to make sense of their doings.

But this sort of stood out, to me.

We need new leadership, all right…

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Just had a bit of an out-of-body experience at Rotary today. Our main speaker was Carroll A. “Tumpy” Campbell III. He was allegedly there to talk to us about economic development in South Carolina, which was weird enough on its face. I mean, what was his qualification to do that, other than the fact that he was on the Ports Authority governing body before Mark Sanford pushed him off, and his daddy was our last really successful governor at ecodevo?

But that’s OK, because that didn’t seem to be why he was there. In fact, I was sufficiently confused about why he was there that I began to wonder why I was there, which was way existential. Anyway, he sounded like a guy who was running for office, although he didn’t overtly say so. Finally, I had to be reminded that he is planning to challenge Henry Brown down in the 1st congressional district. The consensus among folks I spoke to who heard this Rotary speech was that Henry doesn’t have much to worry about. (Which is saying something — I haven’t really paid much attention to Mr. Brown since he went off to Congress, but unless he got a whole lot sharper when he went to Washington, which would be a singular accomplishment if you think about it, he can’t be the world’s most impressive congressman. I remember him as a forgettable state legislator, who for a time chaired the Ways and Means Committee. Same guy, right?)

Sure, he mentioned ecodevo. He said a few painfully obvious things about it, such as the fact that the Port of Charleston is really, really important to economic development. You know the drill — BMW would never have taken a second look at South Carolina without that port, yadda-yadda… and did I mention to you that it’s not a coincidence that my name is Carroll Campbell? Seriously, it was just like that, only not as funny.

I didn’t take any notes on his speech, unfortunately. I usually start taking notes during a Rotary speech when the speaker says something interesting. I mean, I’m not there as a reporter, but if the speaker says one interesting thing, I pull out my notebook and write it down. And if he or she keeps on saying interesting things, I keep the notebook out and keep writing, and maybe mention it on the blog later. Suffice it to say that I was never in danger of even thinking about taking out my notebook during Tumpy’s speech.

Until it was over. Then I realized that I wished I had a record of it. (When the video is posted on the club site, I’ll try to remember to go back and link to it.) I wanted the record because, in retrospect, this speech was strikingly vapid. It was no ordinary bad speech, but a monument to the painful mediocrity that permeates the electoral process in our poor state.

In a nutshell, the gist of it was this: South Carolina needs new and different leadership. That was wedged in among a bunch of half-stated Republican cliches. In other words, the message was We need new leadership, but I sure ain’t it, because I’ve got nothing original to say.

Someone pointed out to me that even the cliches weren’t complete, but they were so unmemorable that I can’t attest to the accuracy of that observation. But thinking back, if you had simply grabbed random phrases from the Tweets of a garden-variety South Carolina Republican — incomplete Tweets, like those I cited from Joe Wilson earlier today — and strung them together, it would sound sort of like that Tumpy Campbell speech. Down with the stimulus, and bailouts, and big gummint, and so forth and so on, and golly but we sure need some real leaders who will say down with the stimulus, and bailouts, and big gummint, and so forth and so on. (Like we’re not already et up with such “leaders.”)

Anyway, that’s my report from the front lines of the 1st District congressional race…

Oh, wait — speaking of Joe Wilson, he was there at Rotary. But he didn’t shout out or anything, so I didn’t realize he was there until later…

No “tea parties” for me, thanks; I’ll take coffee

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Something that occurs to me when I see notices like this one:

Larry invited you to “Tea Party Event ” on Sunday, September 27 at 1:30pm.

Larry says, “Please join me.”.

Event: Tea Party Event
“Come hear Senator Larry Grooms”
What: Informational Meeting
Start Time: Sunday, September 27 at 1:30pm End Time: Sunday, September 27 at 4:30pm
Where: Wannamaker County Park

… is this: Who wants tea? Certainly not me. I’m a coffee guy. All these people having “tea parties” seem kinda, you know, effete to me. Not very American.

I mean, when the British slapped that tax on tea, a few unsteady types went spare and committed an act of vandalism in Boston harbor. But the rest of us moved on and drank coffee instead. Preferably Starbucks coffee (he said, still hoping against hope for a major endorsement deal).

When the UnParty wants to whip up its base, it’s going to have Kaffeklatsches instead. We’ll sit around, talk, drink coffee — no big whoop.

Dead-blogging the GOP debate

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Just some scattered thoughts as I listen to the GOP debate last night via the Web. Can’t call it “live-blogging,” but it’s kind of like that, so I’ll call it “dead-blogging,” which sort of reflects my level of enthusiasm about the candidates so far, a few minutes into it. Some random observations:

  • These people aren’t running for governor of South Carolina. They’re running for the GOP nomination for governor, which is entirely different. Every word they’ve uttered so far has dripped with Republican jargon and catch phrases, and none of them has communicated the slightest desire for MY vote. Anyone else feel that way? I mean, it’s like listening to old-line Marxists talk about “running-dog imperialists.” These phrases don’t communicate or inspire, they just help us pigeon-hole the speakers…
  • Did Larry Grooms just say that DHEC regulates too aggressively? In what state, in which universe?
  • Seems the panel should have some folks on it with more of a statewide perspective, such as, say, the editorial page editor of The State. Oh, wait; there isn’t one any more…
  • Nikki’s sweet (oh, the women are going to come down on me for that one, but she is), but she really shows she’s out of her depth whenever she starts comparing government to a business. Inevitably, she betrays a lack of understanding of one, or both. For instance, she just decried the fact that the state lottery spends $7 million on advertising. She says that should go to education. Well, fine, so far. I don’t like the lottery spending to sucker more people into playing; I don’t think the lottery should exist. I would not, of course, try to make people think that the lottery is in ANY way an answer to our school funding needs. But that’s not the problem with what she said. The problem is, she says a business would not spend the money on advertising to keep the customers coming. Ummm… yes it would, Nikki. It would have to. I mean, duh, come on. It’s hard to imagine a type of business that would be MORE dependent on ad spending to keep its product front-of-mind for prospective players, to constantly whip up interest in its “product.” It has no substance, so it’s ALL about generating buzz…
  • Interesting how it is an accepted truth among these GOP candidates that the current administration has totally dropped the ball on economic development. There’s nothing new about it — Republicans have been griping about it for years — but it’s interesting because it sounds for all the world like these folks are running for the nomination of a party that has NOT held the governor’s office since 2002.
  • Which is dumber or more off-point — a TV watcher asking when we’ll eliminate property taxes, or Larry Grooms saying we shouldn’t tax either property or income? Which of course only leaves taxing economic activity as the last major category. And given our current economic situation, how stupid is that? And is he unaware that we’ve already tilted our tax system far too far in that direction already? Where’s he been the last few years?
  • Gresham Barrett tries to deflect a question about the Confederate flag by saying we need to concentrate on sending the signal that we are serious about moving forward on economic development in this state. Well, getting the flag off our state’s front lawn is the easiest, simplest, most obvious step we can take in that direction.
  • Here’s another odd question from the public — Would you oppose more stimulus funding for SC if South Carolinians didn’t have to repay it? What relationship does that have to reality? None. There has never been, and never will be, such a major expenditure that we as taxpayers won’t be on the hook for. Of course, Nikki’s reply acts as though that’s the very situation we had with the stimulus that she agreed with Sanford on, which is the opposite of the truth.
  • Henry at least gets a plug in for comprehensive tax reform…
  • Grooms is right to say across-the-board is not the right way to cut the state budget, but then he retreats into quasi-religious ideological gobbledegook about how the problem is too much spending to start with. (More specifically, he says we shouldn’t institute programs — as if we’ve instituted new programs lately — that we don’t know how we’ll pay for. And yet he’s the guy who wants to make sure we don’t have the revenues we need, by taxing nothing but economic activity.)
  • Just watched Bill Connor’s Gov Lite campaign ad, which reminds me: If I ever do run for office, and I start blathering about how you should vote for me because I’m not a “professional politician,” will one of y’all slap me? Not hard, mind you, just to sort of reboot my brain so I can come up with something other than cliches…
  • Nikki says she supports “all education reforms.” So basically, if you call it a “reform,” she’s for it. Talk about failing to be discriminating…
  • Henry doesn’t seem to be aware that we are a national leader in demanding accountability of public educators. Lack of accountability isn’t the problem. We’re et up with it. In fact, we just had an insurrection over the PACT test, because so many parent agreed with the teachers that they’d had enough of it. I’m with him on merit pay, though.
  • Andre just came out for consolidating school districts. Good for him. Of course, Mark Sanford has always said he was for it, but hasn’t lifted a finger to make it happen. He also said he doesn’t want to spend money on football stadia, which I certainly applaud.

OK, I’ve got to stop watching now… lunch appointment. More later, if I get time…

How about a “Let Joe Go” party?

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wilson

Yesterday, my wife got the envelope above in the mail.

It contains the usual “paint-yourself-as-a-victim-of-the-inhuman-opposition” language that we are accustomed to seeing in fund-raising appeals:

I’ve been under attack by the liberal left for months because of my opposition to their policies, especially government-run healthcare. They’ve run commercials in the Second District and flooded my office with phone calls and protestors. They’ve done everything they can to quiet my very vocal opposition to more government interference in our lives. Now, it’s gotten even worse.

Hmmm. Could the fact that it’s “gotten even worse” have anything to do with the form that Joe’s “very vocal opposition” has taken?

Of course, Joe goes on to express regret — but not really — for his outburst, in a classic political non-apology apology:

I am also frustrated by this and, unfortunately, I let that emotion get the best of me. Last week, I reacted by speaking out during the President’s speech. I should not have disrespected the President by responding in that manner.

But I am not sorry for fighting back against the dangerous policies of liberal Democrats. America’s working families deserve to have their views represented in Washington. I will do so with civility, but I will not be muzzled.

Of course, he needs your money to buy himself a bigger megaphone…

Call the tone “defiant regret.”

You see, in the world of hyperpartisan politics, you NEVER really give ground to the other side, because it is ALWAYS wrong. Raking in the big bucks means never having to say you’re sorry and mean it.

You can’t mean it, and you can’t be seen as meaning it, because you’re counting on getting contributions from the very people who are GLAD you yelled “You lie!” at the president.

This is why I don’t mind Joe’s outburst nearly as much as I mind his continued, deliberate efforts to cash in on it. Anybody can lose control for a moment. Remind me to tell you about the time I yelled out in church when I was four years old, an incident that some old folks in Bennettsville still talk about. I didn’t mean any harm.

But this cold-blooded campaign to benefit from that outburst is what I find unforgivable. I find it contemptible on all sides: Democrats demonizing Joe, and Joe demonizing them back. But Joe is my congressman, and he’s the one I hold accountable. I’ve always liked Joe personally. We get along fine. But that’s because I always thought he was the sort of guy who’d REALLY be sorry about such an outburst.

Anyway, this mailing was an invitation to a “Welcome Home Reception” for Joe in West Columbia on Sept. 28 at Kenny Bingham’s house. One is asked to RSVP to fellow blogger Sunny Philips… and to contribute between $25 and $500, or more.

The “LET’S GO JOE!” seems an unfortunate choice of a battle cry. It sort of begs the opposition to come back with “Let Joe Go,” which has more of a ring to it. Maybe someone — someone other than Rob Miller — should have a party with that on the invitations, and welcome Joe home for good.

Well, the fix is in in the 2nd District

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Joe Wilson’s outburst last week should have created an opportunity to upgrade our congressional representation in the 2nd District (which is where I live and vote).

Unfortunately, the dynamics of the perpetual partisan shoutfest centered in Washington have utterly precluded that. The fix is in, all we have to look forward to in 2010 is more of the same.

Thanks to the way the partisan spin machines have manipulated this affair (mutually supporting each other in their common cause of constant political conflict), Joe Wilson and Rob Miller have both raised enough money to make each a fait accompli for his respective party’s nomination. This is it, the choices we will get.
The choice will be between Joe Wilson, as reflexive a party follower as you’re likely to find in the GOP, and Rob Miller, who is a nice young man who deserves our deep gratitude for his service as a United States Marine, but (from what I’ve seen so far) is no more capable of expressing independent thought that goes beyond his party’s cliches than Joe is.

Our chance to improve the quality of representation in the 2nd District has been blown away by this hurricane of money — a hurricane driven entirely by the mutually-supporting partisan spin cycles of the two parties, and NOT by the interests of the people of the 2nd District. (It works just like a hurricane, too — first you get furious winds tearing at you from one direction, then after the eye passes and you think it’s over, furious winds tear at you from the opposite direction. But it’s all the same storm.)

If it weren’t for the constant, furious spinning of those machines (which are really one machine ultimately, since neither can “justify” its existence without the other — do you think I’ve made that point in enough parenthetical asides yet?), this past week might have been a time for some thoughtful individuals to step forward and send up test balloons about a possible candidacy. But that won’t happen now, with the way the knee-jerkers on both sides have inflated the campaign warchests of these two.

You know, if I could figure out how to put groceries on the table while doing it (which is sort of my top priority these days), and if I thought there was some possibility of wresting attention away from these well-financed inevitabilities, I would run, win or lose, just so the voters of the 2nd District would have a real choice, one that offers a break from absurdity as usual … But those are two really big ifs.

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss… And make no mistake, we WILL get fooled again.

Bob Inglis and others who broke ranks deserve our attention

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There was  no question that Joe Wilson should have apologized to the House for violating its rules and just generally for conduct unbecoming a gentleman (and unbecoming Joe Wilson, if you know him — he’s generally a gentle man). Barack Obama was not the only person insulted by “You lie!” If you insult a guest at a social occasion, you apologize to your host as well as the insulted guest.

But as soon as it became something that the Nancy Pelosis of the world were trying to MAKE Joe do, all question of right action went out the window. It became a matter of which side is going to win? That’s what everything boils down to these days in our nation’s hyperpartisan capital. Thought doesn’t go any deeper than the playground equation of whether one can be compelled to say “uncle.” And once a crowd had assembled, and members of his own gang were assembled around him urging him not to give in (and sending him $1.6 million), Joe wasn’t about to give in.

Silly and contemptible, but that’s party politics for you.

So I don’t attach much importance to the vote yesterday to express weak “disapproval” of Joe’s outburst. The outcome was predictable. Republicans voted against, and Democrats voted for, and since there are more Democrats than Republicans, Joe got “punished” — punished in a manner so insubstantial that it put me in mind of what Huck Finn said about Aunt Sally’s attempts to discipline him: “I didn’t mind the lickings, because they didn’t amount to nothing…”

I guess we all tend to choose up sides, but for my part, I tend to lump all the partisans of both parties on one side, and myself on the other. To me,  they all act alike. Not only that, but their actions so perfectly complement and support each other that it’s almost as though they were colluding. Think about it: It would have been impossible for the House Democrats to make such a production over the matter, with a formal vote of official disapproval, if Joe hadn’t cooperated with them so beautifully by childishly refusing to apologize to them. Everyone played his assigned part to perfection. Or almost everyone.

In fact, I’d ignore the whole affair, except for the fact that the vote wasn’t entirely along party lines. For instance, South Carolina Republican Bob Inglis voted for the “disapproval” resolution. Because he did that, because he thought for himself and did something that might cost him the support of many in his tribe, what Bob Inglis has to say about the subject actually matters. Unfortunately, I didn’t see much about what he had to say on the subject in the paper — just the usual ritual pronouncements from the people who voted along party lines, and you knew what they would say.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a statement on his decision to vote as he did on his Web site. But I did find his statement from the other night about the president’s speech. (That’s the video version of it above. Note his fundamentally respectful way of disagreeing with the president — something that shouldn’t be noteworthy, but is.) And because he stood up for decorum and had the courage to vote against his own party, I paid more attention to what he had to say about health care than I otherwise would have. By the way, here’s what he had to say at the time — before it had been inflated into another meaningless contest between the parties — about Joe’s outburst:

OBAMA: “The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” One congressman, South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson, shouted “You lie!” from his seat in the House chamber when Obama made this assertion.

THE FACTS: The facts back up Obama. The House version of the health care bill explicitly prohibits spending any federal money to help illegal immigrants get health care coverage. Illegal immigrants could buy private health insurance, as many do now, but wouldn’t get tax subsidies to help them. Still, Republicans say there are not sufficient citizenship verification requirements to ensure illegal immigrants are excluded from benefits they are not due.

Bob Inglis has always been a thoughtful guy who stands up for what he thinks is right, regardless of the dictates of the tribe. I’ve always appreciated that about him, even when I think he’s wrong — such as when he opposed the troop “surge” in Iraq. His iconoclasm causes me to care about what he says, which puts him in a lonely category in the U.S. House. A man who’s willing to pay a political price for his views deserves to be heard.

I would also like to know more about the thinking of those Democrats (Arcuri, Delahunt, Giffords, Hinchey, Hodes, Kucinich, Maffei, Massa, McDermott, Moore, Taylor and Teague) who voted against the mild “disapproval” resolution. I haven’t seen anything from any of them, but if any of my readers would kindly provide a link, I’d like to read what they had to say. It interests me far more than the ritual pronouncements of party orthodoxy…

Let me tell you about Joe Wilson…

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Wilson,Joe06

A lot of folks are presuming to explain Joe Wilson, based on the impression he made last week in his Tourette’s Moment (or the far worse impression he’s made since then trying to leverage the moment to his political advantage). Some, such as bloggers from the left, are explaining it as just the sort of thing you expect from those idiot Republicans. Voices on the right, meanwhile, hail Joe as the guy who was saying What Real Americans Think (which you know has gotta be making Sarah Palin jealous, because what else has she got now that she’s not governor any more?). Maureen Dowd, after saying she was “loath” to resort to such oversimplification, chalked it up to racism, asserting that what Joe really meant was “You lie, boy!”

Well now, there’s something to that if you’re making a general statement about the Republican Party in the South. There was a time when to be a Republican in the South meant you were either a reformer who couldn’t bring himself to join the Old Boy network that was the Democratic Party, or black. But then Strom Thurmond, inspired by Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights, defected to the GOP in 1964. It took awhile for a lot of white voters to follow him. But then some of the folks who followed George Wallace in his independent run in 1968 just didn’t go back. Some considered themselves independents for awhile, but they eventually drifted into the GOP, and after awhile a certain dynamic was in place whereby more and more white folks got the impression that all the other white folks were going over there, and joined them.

The process wouldn’t be complete in South Carolina until Republican lawmakers persuaded some black Democrats to join forces with them in a reapportionment battle in the 90s. Here’s where things get more complicated than the Dowd explanation. You see, after a certain point (the point to which white Democrats were willing to go), the only way you can create another black-majority district (which will presumably, according to conventional wisdom, elect black candidates) is by creating several surrounding districts that have been bleached free of black voters. Such districts are FAR more likely to elect a white Republican than a Democrat of any color. Anyway, that reapportionment deal led to the election of a few more black members and a LOT more white Republicans, which is how the GOP took over the Legislature.

So yeah, the dynamics that produce a Joe Wilson — or a Jim Clyburn — are just shot through with racial considerations. So you can always say that race is part of the equation in any confrontation such as we saw last week. I haven’t examined the list of people who contributed to Joe Wilson’s campaign coffers last week because he made an ass of himself, but I’m thinking it’s pretty safe to say that it’s somewhat whiter than South Carolina as a whole — and most likely whiter even than the 2nd District.

Does that mean Joe Wilson is a racist? No. The idea would shock him. He would sputter and protest in that out-of-breath way he has when he’s excited, and he would be absolutely sincere. I know Joe Wilson; I’ve known him for more than two decades, and I know that he’d mean it when he said that he’d never judge the president or anyone else by the color of his skin. Joe Wilson is a guy who goes out of his way to be nice to everybody.

No, there’s another explanation for why a guy like Joe Wilson gets elected, and why huge numbers of white folks will flock to his side when the Nancy Pelosis of the world are looking daggers at him. It’s a phenomenon that runs in parallel to the narrative of race in our state’s history, one that is so interwoven with it that whenever it appears, people look right past it and see only the racial aspect, black and white being less subtle than what I’m talking about.

White South Carolinians, as a group, exhibit a trait that is not at all unusual in this nation, but which has shown some of its most extreme expressions in the Palmetto State. It’s the thing that makes a guy put his foot down and declare that no government is going to tell him what to do. This manifests itself in lots of ways. It was surging through the veins of those Citadel cadets firing on Fort Sumter. Yes, you can say that the Civil War (conceived and launched right here in South Carolina) was about race. You can say it was about a minority of wealthy whites wanting to keep black people as their property, and the majority of whites being dumb enough to go along with them on it, even though it was not it their economic interests (or any other kind of interest) to do so. But ask yourself, HOW did the ruling elites get all those other whites to go along with them? By selling them on the idea that the federal government was trying to run their lives. It worked like a charm, and we’ve been reaping the evil result of that madness ever since.

It’s no accident that we have twice elected a governor who has NO accomplishments to point to and who distinguished himself by being the last governor in the union to accept stimulus funds that S.C. taxpayers were (like taxpayers everywhere, if they live long enough) going to have to pay for. Standing against gummint involvement, especially federal gummint involvement, plays well among a significant swath of the electorate here.

But defiance is not a necessary ingredient. If it were, Joe Wilson would not have gotten as far as he has. He’s no stump-thumper (the shouting incident was truly anomalous); you wouldn’t mistake him for Ben Tillman, or even Strom Thurmond. But Joe Wilson is the natural heir of another political phenomenon that Thurmond embodied (and Sanford has raised to an art form): the do-nothing officeholder.

It’s a twist on the Jeffersonian notion that one is safest when the government governs least, a play on the old joke that we’re all safe now because the Legislature’s gone home, etc.

We all know about the highlights, or lowlights, of Strom Thurmond’s career — his Dixiecrat campaign, his infamous filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, his later mellowing on race, etc. Less noticed by the popular imagination is that for most of his multi-generational career, he didn’t do much of anything. In fact, the only legislation I can remember bearing his mark in the years that I was responsible for The State‘s coverage of him was those little health warnings on beer cans and wine bottles. That’s about it. I mean, that’s something, but it’s not much to show for half a century in the Senate.

What Strom Thurmond did was constituent service. He perfected the technique of staying in office by being the voters’ (black voters or white voters, he didn’t care) own personal Godfather in Washington. You got a problem with that big, bad government up there? Talk to your Godfather. Doing personal favors for people was far more important than lawmaking. And this made him politically invulnerable.

Over in the House, the member who best embodied the Thurmond Method — minimum lawmaking, maximum constituent service — was Floyd Spence. Joe Wilson became Spence’s acolyte, his squire, his sincere imitator. It was perfectly natural that he became his successor. Floyd was a nice guy who loved being a congressman but didn’t want to accomplish much in Washington beyond constituent service and a strong military, and Joe fits that description to a T.

The 2nd District has come to expect, even more than any other district in the state, elected representation that Does Nothing on the national scene (beyond fiercely supporting a muscular national defense, of course).

The representative of that district, who is very much the product of that non-governing philosophy, is bound to be at odds with a president who is the product of the Do Something philosophy of government. And you can see how he might get a little carried away with himself in trying to stop the Biggest Thing Barack Obama has tried to get the government to Do.

And yes, you can describe this dichotomy in racial terms. The folks who keep re-electing Jim Clyburn want government to Do As Much As Possible (at least, that’s how he interprets his mandate, and I don’t think he’s wrong), while Joe Wilson’s constituents tend to want the opposite. And those districts were drawn to put as many black voters in Clyburn’s 6th District as possible, thereby leaving the 2nd (and the 3rd and the 4th the 1st, and to some extent the 5th) far whiter than they would be if you drew the lines without regard to race.

I’m just saying there’s a lot more at work than that.

S.C. GOP tries to be cool (an effort which, of course, was doomed to failure)

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I’m a Republican from SCGOP on Vimeo.

Nowadays, I’m feeling sorry for the Republicans. There were times in the past when I felt sorry for Democrats, but not at the moment. I don’t like the parties at any time, but at least I can work up some sympathy when they are losing.

I remember back in the late 80s and early 90s, as the Republicans marched inexorably forward in lockstep toward their dominance of the state, I found the Democrats totally charming in their own feckless way. They remembered a time before party politics (when there’s only one party, there might as well be none), and they were sort of Ashley Wilkes-like in their gentlemanly wistfulness for a time when people weren’t so crass about party affiliation. (The Republicans, meanwhile, were more like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, doing whatever it took to succeed, with no looking back.)

Now the Republicans are the hapless losers, and they are taking on the tone and vocabulary of losers, and since I love seeing parties lose, it makes them lovable in my eyes.

This is the inescapable point to be mined from the latest party video, which borrows from another lovable loser, the Microsoft-based PC. After Apple had so devastatingly mocked the haplessness of the PC alongside the oh-so-hip Mac in ad after ad, Microsoft came back with the message, “I’m a PC,” in which it embraced the image of the four-eyed, unhip loser, and tried to make THAT cool.

Now S.C. Republicans have their derivative “I’m a Republican” ad, which endeavors to make the same point: No we are NOT cool, but we like ourselves the way we are and hope you will, too.

The ad has its good points — at a time when many in the rest of the country believe Joe Wilson meant “You lie, boy!,” the ad preaches a message of inclusiveness, showing black and brown faces in far greater preponderance than you will see at most GOP gatherings. While it may stretch  credulity, it’s a good message to send right now, to South Carolina and to the nation. The fact that they wanted to send that message deserves praise.

And the production values aren’t too bad.

Beyond that, the hackneyed phrases sort of grate at me. I find myself thinking, Is this the best we can do in South Carolina, or in the nation? Just repeat these same, often meaningless, lines?

Not that it doesn’t get creative, but when it does, it’s kind of weird. My good friend Eric Davis mentions “conservative solutions,” which strikes me as a bit off. If you’re a conservative, doesn’t that mean you think things are fine and we don’t need any solutions? Maybe not, I think further. Maybe it means that we DO need solutions, but the time-honored ones we employed in the past will work just fine.

But then he throws me another breaking ball that causes me to swing and miss completely — “conservative change.” I’m  sorry, but I thought being conservative means not wanting change, sort of by definition. You know, “conserve,” as in “keep,” “stay,” “maintain,” “preserve,” and so forth.

The message I come away with is this: “We know y’all want change, change you can believe in, which is why you’re not voting Republican. But hey, we can give you change; we can give you … conservative change! Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

Some will say, “The Democrats aren’t delivering change, either, just the same old partisan games,” and if you’re speaking of the Democrats running Congress, for instance, you’d be completely right. But it IS what they run on. It IS kinda their brand, you know. You’re supposed to judge them (and for my part, I judge them fairly harshly) on how well they deliver what they promise.

But Republicans aren’t about change. They’re about conserving. Stick to what you know, guys. Don’t try so hard to be cool.

So you like being what you are, and are proud to call yourselves Republicans. Fine. Whatever floats your boat. Me, I like using PCs, even though Macs are cooler (one of my daughters just bought  one last week), so I understand. To each his own.

But stick to what you know.

Lindsey Graham’s delicate position

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lindsey

I found Lindsey Graham’s townhall meeting very interesting. While I disagree with him substantively about the subject at hand — health care reform — it’s always interesting to listen to him because he’s a smart guy who has a lot to offer to any policy question. In other words, while he clings loyally to support of Joe Wilson as a fellow Republican, he’s not a guy who’ll ever reduce his objections to a shouted “You Lie!”

Let’s dispense with the disagreement first — Sen. Graham fails to persuade when he says his crowd-pleasing things (Republican voters got calls at home asking them to come) about how we don’t want the gummint taking over any more of our lives. The argument that we can’t have a public option because the private sector can’t compete only condemns the private sector in my mind. The senator’s replies to the student who objected that private companies compete quite successfully with the Postal Service were weak. He got the crowd to cheer by mentioning the huge public subsidy the Postal Service needs to keep going, which to ME argues that its private competitors do just fine. He then argued that competition doesn’t work the same way in health care, which is true, which is why we can’t expect the market to solve our problems. (Lindsey agrees at least with that. He’s for regulation, not a new government entitlement program.)

But the senator repeatedly stressed how we should find things on which we agree and work from there — he talked about areas of agreement between him and Russ Feingold (who agrees with me that the way to go is single-payer) — and I know he means it, so I listen all the harder to what he has to say.

And I was fascinated with his central argument. It was this: It would cost too much. And he doesn’t trust the American people, including all the anti-gummint types in that room, to prevent the program’s costs from going out of control. He kept doing an interesting thing… he kept getting the crowd to cheer with assertions about how inept the gummint is, and how we don’t want it intruding any more into our lives, and then he’d ask how many people there were on Medicare (quite a few) and how many would voluntarily give it up (no one).

So basically, he repeatedly demonstrated that this crowd that was so willing to moan at the awful gummint and laugh ironically when Lindsey referred to Obama’s promises to control costs LOVES its gummint-provided health care — at least, those who have it do. He even said it fairly direction once: “Everybody clapping (at one of his shots against government), half of them are in a government plan.”

And the costs of that government plan, Medicare, are so out of control that he doesn’t want to create another program that would be JUST as popular, even among people who THINK they don’t like government programs, and that therefore would be just as costly, if not more so.

That’s what I heard, and it was interesting.

As he alluded more than once, Lindsey Graham walks a fine line, trying to be a moderate as a Republican from a beet-red state. Another time he said many who were applauding had tried to rip him a new one over immigration reform. He referred to having voted to confirm Justice Sotomayor. So it was fascinating to see him use populist techniques to get a crowd to support him on something where his position is that essentially, he doesn’t trust them, the people, not to support a program that would bankrupt us.

This, by the way, is why I won’t jump to run for office. I’m not sure I could maintain that balance between stroking people and leveling with them that you’re taking a position they may not love. I think I’d get fed up with it pretty fast.

Lindsey Graham doesn’t. And while I can see the contradictions inherent in what he’s doing, I can also respect him for being willing to wrestle with those contradictions — even when I believe that, substantively, he’s wrong on the issue.

Sorry, but calling the president a ‘liar’ is out of bounds for BOTH parties

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Sigh. I really don’t want to have this argument with friends, especially not on the anniversary of 9/11, but I can’t let what Kathryn said over on Facebook stand without responding.

It was in reply to this post back here, in which I asserted that Democrats drag themselves down to Joe Wilson’s level when they respond to him by saying, “Bush lied.” I had thought it would be a teachable moment, in which I could say, See how bad y’all sounded over the past four years? See what it’s like when someone refuses to respect the president for partisan causes, declaring him and all he says illegitimate?

My good friend Kathryn responded:

Wait–Bush did lie, and got us into a war, and Obama didn’t lie last night at all–quite the contrary, and Wilson knew it according to the papers. Wilson was out of line and Democrats’ saying things today doesn’t put us on the level of a tantrum during the President’s speech either. Sorry.

To that, another friend, Randy Ewart, added:

I concur with Fenner – well said!

You know, I’d hoped we’d put this behind us when Bush went home to Texas. I certainly heaved a sigh of relief. I never liked the guy. I always resented the fact that he was president, when it should have been John McCain. (Remember how South Carolina ill-served the nation back in 2000?)

But the eight years of hatred that Democrats spewed at the guy, starting from the very beginning, with the Long Count in Florida, was an ugly thing to behold. And yes, it started that early. I remember a couple of conversations I had with Mike Fitts back in the summer of 2001, asking if he could explain the vitriol to me. It was obvious that Dems didn’t just disagree with the guy; they hated him. Which wasn’t good for the country. Yes, I had seen and decried the venom that Republicans had directed at Bill Clinton well before he’d had a chance to do anything to deserve it, too — I particularly recall the bumper stickers saying “Don’t Blame Me — I Voted for Bush” that cropped up on cars before his 1993 inauguration. But the reaction to Bush seemed to go even a step farther — and this was well before the “sins” that Democrats usually list when explaining their distaste for the man.

Oh, and I don’t recall Bush lying. Yes, I realize it’s an article of faith among y’all that he DID (what was it again — the WMD that he and everyone else firmly believed were there in Iraq, seeing as how he had actually USED some of them — or something else?), just as it is an article of faith among Republicans such as Joe Wilson that this president is lying when he tries to set the record straight. It is so important to them to conflate their twin bugaboos — “socialized medicine” and illegal immigration — that it is heresy for anyone (particularly the Chief Heretic) to suggest otherwise, heresy so foul that it wrings furious cries from their lips at inopportune moments.

(Just an aside: Isn’t it ironic that two men who have grabbed national attention by calling these two presidents liars are both named Joe Wilson? Oh, and that other Joe Wilson was wrong, too — the intel he brought back from Niger did NOT conclusively refute the yellowcake reports, according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report.)

And I’m not even going to get into that “got us into a war” stuff, except to say that we were already IN a war. Argue whether we should have reopened the front in Iraq when we did, fine. But we were already in a war.

I know y’all mean what you say, but I’m sorry — I see an obvious symmetry between Joe calling this president a liar and y’all calling the last one the same.Y’all have your perspective as Democrats, and Joe has his as a Republican. And I have mine as founder of the UnParty, so consider the source.

What got into Joe Wilson tonight?

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In the hour or so after the president’s speech, my Blackberry wouldn’t stop buzzing. The Tweets came fast and furious as everyone discussed Joe Wilson’s outrageous behavior tonight. He was the guy who shouted, “You lie!” to the president of the United States during a joint address to Congress.

Which was, let’s face it, a new low in the annals of partisanship in America.

My wife was startled to hear it, saying, “I thought he was more mild-mannered than that.”

He is. But he was under the influence of a particularly insidious drug. It’s the same one that Jim DeMint was on when he spoke hopefully of the health care debate being Obama’s “Waterloo.”

Politicians in Washington, and increasingly right here at home, are so high on the frisson of perpetual partisan warfare that they find themselves thinking things, saying things and doing things that they wouldn’t think, say, and do otherwise. The positive reinforcement they get for it is considerable. Even as Democrats were beside themselves with indignation over Joe’s outburst, some of the more extreme Red Staters were ready to canonize Joe for his moment of irrationality.

So Joe had to choose. As it happens, he chose to apologize (ironically, he did so BEFORE I got the press release from the S.C. Democratic Party demanding that he do so):

“This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill. While I disagree with the President’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the President for this lack of civility.”

Good. That’s something. But I’m afraid the standards for political disagreement just got ratcheted down another notch tonight, and I’m sorry that my congressman did the ratcheting. He’s sorry. Well, so am I.