Maureen Dowd is making sense

I have to admit, MoDo brought her A-game for her column on Rep. Joe Wilson. Dowd found the courage to state explicitly what so many of us have been thinking:

The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! [NYT]

Read the whole thing.

It's one thing when liberal bloggers say that Joe Wilson has issues with a black man being president, it's quite another to see it spelled out on the New York Times op/ed page.

Whenever some egregious incident makes headlines, we're told this is an opportunity for a national dialogue on race that never happens. Finally, Wilson managed to shock the established media into broaching the subject.

(Update) Just to clarify, I'm not crediting Dowd with any special insight. She is mainstreaming an idea that's pretty taboo inside the beltway. There's a deep, deep reticence for anyone in the political or media elite to call a fellow Villager racist. Pat Buchanan recently wrote a column defending Hitler and blaming the allies for pushing him to start up the death camps. Hitler. Yet Uncle Pat's plodding along the talk show circuit like nothing every happened.

Dowd's going to take some heat for this. It's no big sacrifice for someone in her position, but she did go out on a limb, relatively speaking.

via cfrost.

Comments

[etcetera]

Because fewer people participate.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Etc, there's no evidence that landslides are less likely in larger countries. If people decided who to vote for by flipping a coin, then ratio would get closer to 50-50 as the number of voters increased, but voting choices are anything but random.

[Matthew Burton-Kelly]

Okay, this is getting way out of hand. I voted for Obama, I agree with many (not all) of the things he ran on, and I was hoping we could get past this stuff.

Accusing people who disagree with the current administration of being racist is just stupid. It's a non-viable debate tactic. This is one more thing that's being blown out of proportion by the people who disagree with Obama: I firmly believe that it wasn't some "liberal" who first pointed out that the "other side" is racist--I think we've been played. Rumours and wild speculation lead to things like the situation we're in, and probably all because someone said "you know, I bet the liberals play the race card because it seems like something they would do," which turned into a general idea thta liberals were playing the race card, which turned into liberals actually playing the race card.

People: don't use stupid arguments. It accomplishes nothing to call the other side racist when it doesn't relate to the issues at hand, just like it means nothing when I say something about your mother during a debate. You're playing into their hands.