On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of the U.S. House Representative from South Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District, Joe Wilson, who made himself notorious back in 2009 at President Obama’s first State of the Union speech when he took the unprecedented act to disregard all decorum by standing up and screaming, “YOU LIE!” at the leader of the free world during a nationally televised speech. At least when Waldorf and Statler heckle on the Muppets, they make it funny. The GOP closed ranks, and only one member of the GOP voted to admonish him for it. Perhaps that should come as little surprise, because he once expressed his disappointment that nobody in the Democratic Primary in 2008 addressed Obama’s birth certificate. That seems to also fall into a pattern, because Joe Wilson was also a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans while a state legislator, tried denying his former boss on Capitol Hill, Strom Thurmond, had ever had an affair with an African-American woman, calling it “unseemly” and a “smear” that anyone would do so (meanwhile, genetic tests proved it true). In a debate about the soon-to-be Iraq War in 2002, Rep. Wilson denied that the United States supplied WMDs to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s to justify a need for force… and since voting to send our brave young men and women to fight in that conflict, Wilson has voted over a dozen times now against healthcare funding for veterans. He’s still using military conflicts to make irrational political points, though, as he claimed President Obama had only started airstrikes against ISIL because he wanted to distract Americans from Benghazi (where investigators found no administration wrongdoing), the IRS Scandal (where no malicious wrongdoing was found), and Obamacare (which is actually a positive thing). Which is to say, Rep. Wilson spends a lot of time jumping at shadows, as he also was highly suspicious of Planned Parenthood after watching the hoax videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress.
So, while Joe Wilson has a district tailor fit to keep electing conservatives, things were hardly copacetic down in South Carolina’s 2nd District. Rep. Wilson hosted a town hall back in April that, quite frankly, devolved into his constituents chanting “YOU LIE!” back at him, because he was feeding them some less-than-honest statements regarding the GOP’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. His district’s lean, though, remains at a +12, so Joe Wilson was re-elected to a tenth term in 2018 with 56% of the vote.
But not all the news is awful. For we can also report that Joe Wilson was another of the GOP’s witless morons who was duped by Sasha Baron Cohen on “Who is America?” within the past year, and Wilson was recorded on video endorsing the idea of arming toddlers. He still insists he’s not a lunatic.