In the fictional version of American politics in the first decade of the 21st Century, this would be cut as "too symmetrical," just as surely as an editor would insist you couldn't call your make-believe Congressman, "Representative Heckler."
We get one president who lies, non-stop for eight years, and the first time he truly gets called out for it, it is in the stodgy and very appropriate venue of the New York Times, by a man named Joe Wilson.
Then we get another president who tells the truth, often when it is to his detriment, getting heckled, in the least appropriate venue imaginable, in the chamber of the House of Representatives, by a habitually hot-headed Congressman also named Joe Wilson.
The invective, the flatullence-quality of the Representative's salvo, makes the gaudier story. But as I hope to show in a Special Comment tonight, the salient fact was that Congressman Wilson, and not the President, was wrong last night.
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