Joe Wilson was right.
The representative for South Carolina, Republican Joe Wilson, interrupted Obama’s address to Congress on health-care, yelling “You lie!”. Subsequently Wilson was excoriated for rudeness and for breaking protocol and for dissing the office of the President and for other such silliness, and had to apologize. Everyone was embarrassed and Obama emerged probably strengthened by the incident, by whatever imaginary calculations are used for such assessments.
But Wilson was right about Obama lying, and about the moment in the speech when Obama’s lies became evident purely from the internal evidence of what Obama was saying - even if the lie involved was the exact opposite of the one Wilson seems to have imagined he was denouncing.
Obama began his speech with remarks on the current situation of health-care in the US, basically a discussion of problems interspersed with assertions of principle and of worthy goals. Thus:
THE PRESIDENT: Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can't get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can't afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or too expensive to cover.
Standard stuff. And a bit later we get:
THE PRESIDENT: One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it. Another woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne. By the time she had her insurance reinstated, her breast cancer had more than doubled in size. That is heart-breaking, it is wrong, and no one should be treated that way in the United States of America. (Applause.)
So there you go: no one should be treated that way in the United States of America. This theme was strong, an assertion of the principle supposedly driving Obama’s health-care agenda, etcetera.
And then there is the moment which saw Wilson interject:
THE PRESIDENT: There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms -- the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You lie! (Boos.)
THE PRESIDENT: It's not true. And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up -- under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place. (Applause.)
Applause. Maybe they were all too busy being shocked that someone interrupted the President to wonder whether these statements contradicted the assertion that health-care is some kind of right or some measure of a decent society – the clichés of reform. Denying federal health-care to many million people absolutely, and to women in need of abortions, seems like it might make of his previous statements something very like a lie - no one should be treated that way in the United States. Except these people – foreigners and would-be baby-killers. Applause.
Beyond this bit of reassurance to racists and anti-abortionists, the speech is elegant and stupid in about equal measure, especially when Obama starts to go on about how people are better off with free-markets playing a big role in health-care, I guess to reassure anyone who might still be hallucinating that he is pushing for some comprehensive federal health system instead of a version of what is currently the worst health-care system in the Western world. One wonders what he is imagining would be evidence for this assertion. Obama identifies ultra-free-market ideology and advocacy of a public health-care system as two positions which have arguments in their favor, but which must be put aside for pragmatic reasons and, for the latter position, because of the wonderful benefits of maintaining the legitimate dominance of the private health insurance industry.
I know people think he is smart, but his intelligence doesn’t seem to preclude even a residual commitment to not saying ridiculous things all the time. May God bless the United States of America.
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