Green: Joe Wilson’s war

It turns out that what most people remember about President Barack Obama’s Wednesday night… It turns out that what most people remember about President Barack Obama’s Wednesday night address to a joint session of Congress wasn’t his speech itself, but the exclamation of “You lie!” by Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C.

Indeed, it’s the only thing that newspapers, political blogs, television networks and even Congress seems to want to talk about — so much so that there has been less discussion about the content of Obama’s health care address than that of Wilson’s comment, or his apology, or Rush Limbaugh’s disapproval of said apology, or Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s adamant assertions that he must apologize again.

In some ways, the media and public reaction to the comment is justified.

Certainly, Wilson’s comment was out of line. Even Obama’s old nemesis Sen. John McCain, who looks more like an aged Bilbo Baggins than ever, said he thought the comment was disrespectful and out of line. “There is no place for it in that setting, or any other, and he should apologize for it immediately,” McCain told CNN.

And in confluence with what I’m sure was an intense pressure from the Republican Party, Wilson did what any politician conscious of his public image would do: He apologized.

But that should have been the end of it. And yet, it wasn’t. Instead, we the American people, were treated to article after article about Wilson’s BlackBerry Tweets, first-person accounts from his South Carolinian constituents about personalized get-well and congratulations cards and an extensive screenshot analysis of Pelosi’s tiger-like death stare.

This isn’t beating a dead horse. This is resurrecting a dead horse and then beating it again and again.

More upsetting than this waste of television airtime, paper and brain cells, however, is the debate it has sparked among the American public.

The comment seemed to serve as a sort of Scar-admits-to-killing-Mufasa moment, in which all the pent-up hostility between conservatives and liberals broke out in lion vs. hyenas free-for-all to the death.

Conservatives have rallied around Wilson as the new Republican hero, even creating bumper stickers (the great American medium) that say, “You lie.”

Liberals, including some House Democrats, are using this as an opportunity to turn moderates against those irascible, indolent, “Party of No” Republicans once and for all, demanding punishment or at least a second apology out of Wilson, who I’m sure is tied up in Michael Steele’s basement somewhere being re-educated on the proper way to oppose a president — “One must only boo, grunt, look slack-faced or Tweet on one’s BlackBerry with apparent disinterest.”

All this hullabaloo leaves one wondering — what about health care?

Not that health care debate has ceased. But it does make one wonder why it takes a comment like, “You lie” rather than the policy itself to set off this torrential downpour of media and public excitement. This phenomenon, unfortunately, is nothing new.

The American public was much more attuned to the fact that “lipstick on a pig” might or might not have been a sexist comment when applied to Sarah Palin than many of the platforms being debated during the 2008 presidential election.

Likewise, I would argue that more Americans are aware that former French President Jacques Chirac was mauled by his bipolar poodle than have knowledge of current French-U.S. relations.

Granted, it is human nature to been drawn to the salacious, gossipy underworld of politics rather than the hard facts, numbers and policy. But this is when the media and politicians themselves are to blame.

It’s time the focus shifted back to things that matter — like, perhaps the most important piece of legislation in U.S. government since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program of the ’60s.

Address the real issues and let Wilson fall back into irrelevancy, where he belongs.

E-mail Molly at mog4@pitt.edu.