Here’s a headline and, no, it doesn’t come from The Onion:
“Wilson took caffeine pills in 2007.”
The “Wilson” in question is of course Rep. Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who infamously interrupted President Obama’s health care speech on Wednesday night.
The publication in question, however, is The Hill, the (relatively) lively alternative to Roll Call among newspapers vying for supremacy in the 20515 Zip code. And the rest of the article, by Jordan Fabian, is as oddly stark and context-free as the headline:
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who shouted “you lie!” at President Obama during his Wednesday night address to Congress, admitted to regularly consuming caffeine pills in 2007.
It is unclear if Wilson still takes NoDoz, a brand of pill that contains 200 milligrams of caffeine a pop. By comparison, a seven ounce cup of drip coffee contains 115 to 175 milligrams of caffeine.
A source told The Hill in 2007 that the congressman ingested the tablets “like candy,” but Wilson insisted he was not addicted despite the fact that he had been taking them since high school.
“I love coffee, but I don’t have time to drink it and I don’t have access to it,” Wilson said at the time.
The fifth-term Republican said he shared his NoDoz use with his doctor, who Wilson said assured him that the over-the-counter pills are not dangerous unless you get addicted.
Wilson interrupted the president yesterday night after he said that his health reform plan will not insure illegal immigrants. He quickly apologized for his outburst last night but maintained that Obama was lying in a radio interview today.
So what’s the point, exactly? For conservatives, it’s that another reflexively liberal publication is trying to tarnish a new straight-talker. Good Lt. at the Jawa Reports feels that taking NoDoz makes Wilson “as bad as any college
“You lie!” shouts a Republican member of Congress at the president. Was he rude, correct, clumsy, politically savvy — or all of the above?
student cramming for exams” and that the whole story is “just a pathetic leftwing non-smear-in-the-making (they’re obviously trying to make you think he’s some kind of whacked-out drug addict).” “The Hill is oh so innocently wondering whether Wilson’s shouting might be due to the fact that he’s … some sort of speed freak,” adds Allahpundit at Hot Air. “We’ve reached a very, very dark point.”
Well, as someone who spends a fair amount of time thinking about smears-in-the-making, I’ve gotta say this one leaves me scratching my head. Ditto for Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog, who attempts to shine a light into Allahpundit’s dark point:
The writer, Jordan Fabian?
Well, he’s a young man who, until recently, was an editor at the Cornell Review, a right-wing campus paper that was co-founded by Ann Coulter. He was an intern at The Weekly Standard and The American, a periodical published by the American Enterprise Institute.
So he’s, um, not exactly a liberal journalist.
So why did he write this story? Is it a false flag operation — a clumsy attempt by an ideological soul mate to change the subject from Wilson’s outburst and to make Wilson appear to be the victim of journalistic malpractice, which can then be blamed on liberals?
Just a theory….
Yes, just a theory, but one worth looking into, I suspect.
In any case, although Mr. Wilson’s outburst may have been seen by even the Republican leadership as an unacceptable breach of protocol, it has led to a pretty healthy discussion of the status of illegal immigrants under any new legislation. In fact, according to Fox News, it led to a change in at least one version of the initiative:
Among three House committees to pass bills for health reform, only one expressly bans federal funding for proving health coverage to illegal immigrants.
“The Congressional Research Service has indicated that indeed the bills that are before Congress would include illegal aliens,” Wilson said. “And I think this is wrong.”
Indeed, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service study found that the House health care bill does not restrict illegal immigrants from receiving health care coverage.
House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner amplified the complaint that without proof of citizenship, illegal immigrants could be insured.
“There were two opportunities for House Democrats to make clear that illegal immigrants wouldn’t be covered by putting in requirements to show citizenships,” he said. “Both of those amendments were, in fact, rejected.”
In the Senate, Democrats in the so called “Gang of Six,” a group of bipartisan senators on the Senate Finance Committee which is the last panel yet to release its bill, began moving quickly to close the loophole that Wilson helped bring greater attention to.
“We absolutely assure that those who are here illegally would not get the benefit of any of these initiatives,” Sen. Kent Conrad said.
As for Mr. Wilson himself, The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye reported Friday morning that “Mr. Wilson’s outburst last night has turned into a fundraising bonanza” for a 2010 Democratic challenger, Rob Miller, who “has received more than $200,000 in contributions from across the country.” And Mr. Wilson himself,
apology and all, is seeing his coffers rise.
(Nor has he been hurt by a line of criticism that makes the NoDoz claim seem like a model of responsible journalism: Adam Weinstein’s argument in Newsweek that he’s a hypocrite because he and his four sons, all veterans or serving members of the armed forces, accept military health benefits.)
O.K., but enough of politics and policy, and let’s get to the morals of the story. We all know that the Capitol was once a more rough and tumble place and that even recent history has its examples of boorish behavior toward the commander in chief. So did Wilson really cross a new line? And, if so, what does the whole business say about today’s Grand Old Party?
On the question of the act itself, The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, usually sympathetic to conservative causes, doesn’t give Wilson a break. “His offense sets a new low bar,” she writes. “But as a nation, we have entered a political era of uninhibited belligerence. The civility we insist that we prefer has been in short supply at town hall meetings, several of which Wilson conducted.”
However, Wilson has an unexpected supporter in Salon’s Glenn Greenwald.
Yes, it’s “rude” and indecorous, but … the President is not a King, even if George Bush was routinely treated as one as people politely wearing critical t-shirts were barred or even removed from various events where His Majesty appeared, including the State of the Union address.
Eugene Robinson today absurdly calls the GOP’s disrespectful behavior at Obama’s speech “un-American.” Right-wing contempt for Obama is often petty, deeply emotional and ugly — just like right-wing leaders themselves. But the demand that the President be venerated and treated as royalty is far more “un-American” than disruptive transgressions of etiquette. Wilson’s heckling was juvenile and dumb, but that’s all it was.
Then he puts in the knife in the G.O.P.:
If only a fraction of the media dismay devoted to his two-second breach of “decorum” had been directed to, say, rampant presidential lawbreaking, or the implementation of a torture regime, or the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in our various wars, we would be much better off. The American Right is indeed dominated by crazed extremists who often seem barely in touch with basic reality and who are at war with core American political values, but Joe Wilson’s irreverence is one of the least significant examples of that, if it’s one at all.
Indeed, no matter how Wilson’s actions play out for himself politically, there is little doubt that they will reinforce the growing image that the Republican tent has more than its share of carnival barkers. Politico’s Andie Coller has an overview:
Joe Wilson’s outburst Wednesday night earned more than a personal rebuke from the president and a dagger-eyed gasp from the speaker of the House; it drew winces from Republicans worried that their party is becoming known less for the power of its ideals and more for the pettiness of its vitriol.
“Neither party has an exclusive on wack jobs,” says Republican media consultant Mark McKinnon. “Unfortunately, right now the Democrats generally get defined by President Obama, and Republicans, who have no clear leadership, get defined by crackpots — and then they begin to define the Republican Party in the mind of the general public.”
Turn on the TV, and you see what he means.
Here’s Orly Taitz, insisting that the commander in chief was born in Kenya. There’s a flock of town hall protesters, waving photos of the president in a Hitler mustache. Former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin warns darkly that Obama is planning “death panels” for senior citizens. Georgia Rep. Paul Broun equates the president’s plans with “Nazi” policies. Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt — last heard calling John Murtha a “coward” — tells a birther: “I agree with you, but the courts don’t.”
The anonymous liberal who blogs at Just Above Sunset thinks Coller shows that conservatives understand the dynamic, they just don’t know what or if they should do anything about it:
The Republicans know this is no good – Coller cites a former Republican congressman [Vin Weber] – “The president was helped more by the optics of House Republicans than by his own speech. It’s not likely to do any long-term damage, but they need to be very careful how they oppose this president.” But he also cites a current high-level Republican who doesn’t want to be named – “The image of a bunch of white guys booing an African-American president is about as bad as it gets.”
Well, yeah – duh. But it plays well in the Republican South. And of course that’s the problem …
The senator from Texas, John Cornyn, the chairman of the Republicans’ campaign arm in the Senate, is cited as saying that it’s just not fair to tar all Republicans with the jerks on the fringe, and really, they won’t last … So cut them some slack. Every family has its problem children. Daddy will be home soon. Things will settle down. And Minority Whip Eric Cantor says of this boorish behavior – “I don’t see it as any definition of our party.”
Andrew Sullivan lets one of his readers agree for him:
Yes, the GOP of 2009 is the party of torture and fiscal recklessness. But as Joe Wilson’s outburst last night made clear, it is every bit as much the party of the College Republicans.
Wilson’s catcalling was only part of it. This is the party of Colson and Segretti, Atwater and Rove, Kristol and Norquist. It is the party of Joe Wilson and the odious Patrick McHenry, the latter a bad caricature of a South Park or Simpsons character. Just look at them, with the “What bill?” signs around their necks, waving the copies of their “bill” in the President’s face …
Juvenile, manipulative, impossibly smarmy, hateful – or at least more than willing to use the weapon of other people’s hate – and, above all, relentlessly cynical. To these (mostly) men, politics is not the “art of the possible”, not a means for peaceably grappling with the most difficult and complex issues of the day, or for attempting to improve the lives of people you will never meet. It is nothing but a game, one where the object is not just to win but to destroy your enemies with a weird mix of angry slander and junior high insults – and to have a good chuckle while admiring your handiwork.
It is an attitude that enables one to label a respected judge who worked with disadvantaged children a pedophile (as Rove’s minions did in an Alabama Supreme Court race in 1994), or to put Sarah Palin on a presidential ticket.
Just as for the neocons it is always 1938, for the professional College Republicans in the House GOP, it is always the annual convention, with the hotly-contested race for treasurer or secretary between one guy from Michigan State and another from Clemson.
On the other hand, Red State’s Erick Erickson doesn’t think much of the people Collier quoted as concerned conservatives:
Who does the Politico solicit from the GOP side for agreement with their premise? A bunch of liberals.
Mark McKinnon, who loves Obama and wouldn’t dare lay a hand on him during the general election, thinks the GOP is led by “crackpots.”
Same with John Weaver who took his marbles home (those he had not lost) because people wouldn’t listen to him. He became a Democrat anyway.
Vin Webber. Good grief.
Brian Jones, formerly of the RNC, who is a McCain loyalist.
About the only person who is not riddled with self-loathing and thus competent to weigh in on the matter is Senator Cornyn, who said, “Anybody can say what they want, they can identify themselves as a Democrat, independent, a Republican, a socialist or whatever they want to call themselves. That doesn’t mean they were representative of a political party or the mainstream of a political party.”
Precisely. The Politico spends its time trying to connect Birthers to the legitimate party apparatus despite everyone from Ann Coulter to me ridiculing them. The Politico never spent its time giving equivalent exposure to the “Impeach Bush” efforts in leftist bastions across the country, the crazy conspiracies that the left treated as mainstream, etc.
This just means we’re winning.
Well, we’ll see. But one thing’s for sure: in this news cycle, there’s no need for NoDoz.
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