Fighting "Joe" Wilson

Here are some key bits from a news story about Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson, the Republican Congressional Representative from South Carolina. This is the guy who yelled "You lie!" to Obama during his speech to the joint session of Congress.

In fact, over his entire congressional career, health professionals represent Wilson’s top industry contributors, donating a total of $244,196 to his campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics OpenSecrets.org database. He received another $86,150 from pharmaceutical companies, $73,050 from insurance companies and $68,000 from hospitals and nursing homes.

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It was not the first time Wilson — attorney, U.S. Army vet and former aide to U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond — has raised eyebrows by shouting at political opponents.

Seven years ago this month, the then-freshman Wilson appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” with five-term Congressman Bob Filner (D-Calif.) to discuss whether to go to war in Iraq, action that Filner opposed but Wilson supported. In the course of the discussion, Filner noted that the U.S. supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein’s regime during the Iran-Iraq War — a fact revealed by the investigation into the Iran-Contra Affair, which discovered the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, then under an arms embargo, to win support for freeing U.S. hostages in Lebanon and to fund the Nicaraguan contras, a counterrevolutionary rebel force that was fighting the country’s government.

But Filner’s statement incensed Wilson, as the Washington Post reported at the time:

“That is wrong. That’s made up,” Wilson fired back. “I can’t believe you would say something like that.”

When Filner calmly held his ground, advising Wilson to read newspaper reports and other documentation, the Republican erupted: “This hatred of America by some people is just outrageous. And you need to get over that.”

As moderator Connie Brod sat by helplessly, Filner challenged: “Hatred of America? . . . Are you accusing me?”

“Yes!” Wilson shouted. For good measure, over the next minute Wilson accused Filner of harboring “hatred of America” four more times, of being “hateful” three times and of being “viscerally anti-American” once. Filner responded, “This is not worth replying to,” and Brod finally regained control of the discussion by taking viewer phone calls.

That people elect hotheads and fools like "Joe" Wilson is a shame. But, South Carolina is famous for such politicians. Strom Thurmond was the hypocrite racist who late in life finally admitted that he had a black child. This arch segregationist was having sex with black women while saying that white people needed to keep "pure" by segregating the blacks into poverty with a "separate but very unequal" education system that provided "new" books to the black kids by rounding up all the worn out textbooks from the white schools and shipping them to the black schools as their "new" textbooks. That is what "equal" meant under Jim Crow laws in the Deep South.