What's missing in the fallout and falderal from Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst? Substance--and what it tells us about today's right wing mentality.
What so stirred Wilson's anger was the idea that undocumented aliens might somehow benefit from government spending on healthcare. (Granted, he's an angry guy--he once ripped into a guy on C-SPAN for `hating America' by simply stating the fact that America sold Iraq weapons in the '80s, and he criticized Strom Thurmond's illegitimate black daughter for besmirching Thurmond's rep by coming public after his death.)
The Gulf War, which saw countless Iraqis vaporized in a scorched earth campaign (torched oil wells got the press, but all the Iraqi soldiers firebombed before they could join their surrendering friends was the real story), popularized the term "collateral damage" as a slick way to talk of innocent people who just happened to get in a war's way. (Of course, when Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh described victims of the Oklahoma City bombing as 'collateral damage,' everybody acted like they'd never heard the term before.) For the right, "collateral damage" is just the cost of doing business.
But collateral benefit is another story. Some poor person in another country gets killed--too bad. The idea that some impoverished person from another country might get healed . . . or get preventative care or treatment for some communicable disease . . . or that someone might benefit from government spending who, in their view, didn't deserve it . . . For today's right wing, that's the real horror.
Meanwhile, in his blog, George Stephanopolous tells how Obama's moved to further appease the right wing on this issue.