Commentary by Peter J. Smith
September 10, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Outside of this summer's town-hall protests and tea-parties, the lonely voice of South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson bravely crying out “You lie!” in protest of President Barack Obama's deliberate distortions before a joint session of Congress was perhaps one of the defining moments of this health care debate. Those two words coming from a Congressman were both necessary and long overdue.
Rep. Wilson's vocal expression of dissent and discontent with the President's plan arguably did far more to protect American democracy than those mute and tame Republicans who silently protested against Obama by holding up sections of their own proposals – hoping that the cameras would notice them. The sound of “You lie!” erupting in the chamber contrasted sharply with the political orchestra of successive standing ovations and resounding applause – at every one or two lines – that gave the impression that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Biden, and most of the Congress were racing to leap to their feet and show who among them was most fervent in loyalty and zeal for the President's largely amorphous health-care plans.
But heckling and other forms of collective expression of dissatisfaction with the government – be it toward public officials of the American Republic or the President himself – are dangerously out of style and intolerable to the current power-brokers in Washington. President Obama would like to have the American people take his good intentions as guarantee for good law: but polling shows that a majority of Americans understand they will experience the practical effects of this “reform” regardless of the quality of the President's intentions – and they do not want it.
For his lone cry of outrage at the President's bald mendacity and deliberate misrepresentation of his plans for health-care reform, Rep. Wilson now faces the pillory of the Washington political establishment and most of the mainstream media. But leave it to Matt Drudge (and not the mainstream media) to point out that Rep. Wilson's heckling of a President by Congress in joint session has precedent: Democrats booed President George W. Bush during a State of the Union address in 2005 and Republicans did the same to President Clinton in 1993. Some even walked out. Wednesday's event was not even a State of the Union Address, only a joint-session of Congress, and Wilson had every right in that chamber to protest the President speaking falsely on health-care reform to the Congress and the American people.
However the Democrats who saw the spectacle of their perfect adulation of President Obama marred by Rep. Wilson's outburst of “You lie!” howled in outrage, and called him dangerous and a threat. Republicans joined the chorus and rebuked Wilson as “embarrassing.” But Wilson's action put the proceedings in stark relief: the President's supporters may applaud him ceaselessly to express their approval, but the opposition must remain quiet and dare not raise their voices in dissent.
History shows that passive acquiescence on the part of the opposition in a democratic republic only emboldens authoritarians and invites totalitarian control, especially during times of crisis: one of the many hard-learned lessons of the 20th Century.
Without these raw democratic expressions of collective dissatisfaction in the United States on the part of either the people or elected representatives like Joe Wilson in the public forum, there would never have been a United States, much less a Boston Tea Party, Boston Massacre, Paul Revere's Ride, battles at Lexington and Concord greens, the Continental Congress, or a Revolutionary War.
Had the American people meekly decried this aggressive nationalization of the American health-care system in tones of polite protest, and held their media-maligned “tea parties” in a spirit more akin to a ladies society gathering than the collective anger and resistance displayed by firebrand Sam Adams and the “Sons of Liberty” in Boston Harbor, then this health-care bill would have been signed and sealed before August, as originally ordered by the President. Instead the American people gained more time to discover that the “reform” called the “America's Affordable Heath Choices Act” deprives them of many liberties and legal rights, such as the right to demand damages in a court of law from insurance companies that deny patients life-saving treatments.
When Winston Churchill compared the Parliament of Great Britain to the government of National Socialist Germany in 1940 he said, “In our country public men are proud to be the servants of the people. They would be ashamed to be their masters.” Patrick Henry, who spoke “Give me liberty or give me death,” publicly reviled King George III in the Virginia House of Burgesses for abrogating long-standing rights guaranteed to English subjects since the Magna Charta and for turning the relationship of government and the governed into that of master and servant.
But President Barack Obama instead wants Congress to ends its “bickering;” however this “bickering” is called our “democratic process” and is the only thing that stands in the way of this country's free men and women becoming complete wards of the state. This “bickering” is an expression of that vocal and vigorous criticism which Obama and his allies actively avoid and cannot seem to endure. The President has only appeared at town halls that are nothing more than orchestrated political theater packed with pre-selected audiences. These represent American public opinion no more than a Potemkin village represented the truth about Soviet Russia and the “workers paradise.”
Democracy requires the people's representatives to publicly challenge as much as they publicly applaud. Only the rising clamor of outrage from the “Joe Wilsons” in the House of Commons finally brought down Neville Chamberlain's disastrous government in 1940 with calls for a vote of “no confidence.” Chamberlain was interrupted in the middle of an address to Parliament, and that vocal democratic dissent in that chamber almost 70 years ago brought in Churchill as Prime Minister and changed the course of history.
Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana, a pro-life surgeon and legislator, gave the GOP response to the President, but dull words do not inspire and no one remembers them. Imagine Boustany and not Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams at the Continental Congress and then imagine whether the American Revolution would have happened at all. Despite his subsequent apology, Rep. Wilson gave the only memorable response to a President who promised, “if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Wilson’s opponent says he raised $700,000 from that comment, but Wilson’s supporters have already raised $750,000 in 48 hours and as of Friday afternoon Rep. Wilson's Congressional site was still down “due to exceptionally high traffic.”
Call it “Joe Wilson's war” or call it patriot dissent, but when the South Carolina Congressman shouted “You lie!” to the President, he was fulfilling his oath to defend the Constitution. Defending democracy in America deserves more “Joe Wilsons,” not fewer.