"...Boy?" Really?

I have been totally swamped at work, hence my dearth of posts recently. I did have time, however, to take note of the whole "You lie!" controversy that took place when Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina uttered his now-famous two word exclamation during President Obama's speech defending his so-called health care reforms - a speech in which he repeatedly... well... lied. Go Joe.

There had already been many past mutterings from the loony Left that any criticism of Obama was based on his race, but Wilson's utterance, and the huge anti-Obamacare rally that took place in Washington D.C. on 9/12/09 opened the flood gates of vitriol against anyone questioning our Dear Leader. Pretty soon you had everyone on the Left - including a Jew-hating ex-president - declaring that all the criticism of Obama was being committed by racists.

Of all the declarations of that preposterous and slanderous lie, the worst was from that hateful little shrew at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd. In a hilarious episode of pop-psychological projection, Dowd insisted that Wilson hadn't just yelled, "You lie!" No, what he was really yelling - we just couldn't hear it - was, "You lie, Boy!" Gosh, Maureen, Rep. Wilson said nothing of the kind... but you certainly did. Attributing the utterance to Rep. Wilson does nothing to change the fact that Dowd is the one who verbalized it. We don't know that Wilson was thinking "Boy", and I'm sure he wasn't. I can't say the same for Maureen Dowd, as apparently that is what she was thinking.

Try as I might to explain this whole situation, a writer far more talented than I has scribbled a much better roundup. I urge you to read National Review's Jonah Goldberg's thoughts on this subject. Here is a snippet or two to get you started:

And, yes, a tiny, tiny fraction of the signs at the Tea Party protests last weekend were racially insensitive. But if that’s how we’re going to score, then opposition to the Iraq War is anti-Semitic. After all, I saw a bunch of signs at antiwar protests that said bigoted things about Jews...

Left-wing writers spent the week droning on about how it’s now racist to say “I want my country back.” These amnesiacs are blissfully unaware that “taking back” America was the rallying cry of the Democratic party for eight years under George W. Bush. Anti-white racists all...?

Read the rest. I thought Goldberg - author of the stupendous book Liberal Fascism - was dead on.

Good Day to You, Sir