Seeking A Homeland

Don't get mad, get even

News sources and blogs are afire with reaction to South Carolina representative Joe Wilson's disgraceful heckling during President Obama's speech tonight. Amazingly, to me anyway, there's already a paragraph about the incident on the Wikipedia page for Wilson. There have been nearly 200 revisions to the page in the last few hours and it "is currently disabled due to vandalism."

What makes this even stranger is that today Wilson's son Alan launched a campaign for South Carolina Attorney General, a position that may call for even more propriety than the office of U.S. representative does.

This has certainly been a busy day for SC pols. Earlier, in a move that Wilson must also have known about when he went to the Capitol to hear Obama's speech, the SC GOP caucus delivered a letter signed by 60 of its 73 members asking Mark Sanford to resign. Since that chamber only has 124 members and all 51 Democrats will most likely agree, that makes it nearly unanimous.

Between that Wikipedia page and this CNN story I think I can see why Wilson did this. He may claim, "This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President's remarks," but I suspect it was a calculated political tactic. Rob Miller, the Democrat who pared Wilson's share of the vote in 2008 down to 54%  (it was 84% in 2002) is running against Wilson again in 2010. Wilson is worried, and he needs to do something to energize his base, which must be demoralized after Sanford's debacle made a mockery of the religious right's so-called "family values."

I propose that we not just get mad, though. Let's get even. The way to let Joe Wilson know that his behavior is totally unacceptable is to help Rob Miller. We can donate to his campaign at http://robmillerforcongress.com/ or on his ActBlue page.

I got the ActBlue link from Suburban Guerilla, who had the exact same idea I had. I promise you, though, that I came up with it before I saw her post. She found a good video clip of this incident from TPM, too. Later I saw the same general idea on Daily Kos.

Rapid response

No, I'm not referring to the Secret Service's seemingly sluggish response to the  shoe throwing incident during Bush's trip to Iraq. I'm talking about how incredibly quickly some enterprising Flash designer put together a game called "Bush's Boot Camp" based on the incident  I don't know much about how these things are built, so maybe it's much easier than I think. There must be libraries of game elements that can be plugged into any storyboard, I suppose. Nevertheless, I'm impressed by someone's creativity and speed.

On a more serious note, this is just one more example of how far Bush has fallen and how far down with him he has taken the U.S. presidency. His years in office will always be bookended in my mind, and many others' too, I suspect, by two images. One is Bush with with his megaphone among the rescue workers at Ground Zero just after 9/11, surrounded by rubble and by the unseen remains of victims, terrorists and heroes. The other is the supposed leader of the free world ducking to avoid being hit by the shoes thrown by some nobody who now is a hero in the Arab world. How did he ever manage to get from point A to point B? And how long will it take Obama to restore what has been lost? The mere fact that Obama was elected is a good start, but I'm afraid a full restoration will be much longer in coming.