Liar! Liar!

I have no reason to suspect that Rep. Joe Wilson, the loudmouthed heckler from South Carolina, is on the payroll of the Democrats, but if he is he’d have done just what he did last night.

The Dems and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) are already milking Wilson for all he’s worth to confirm what I’ve described, here and here, as the new Conventional Wisdom that Obama critics are all so rabidly unreasonable that none of us need be listened to, justifying Obama in moving ahead with a health care reform based only on Democratic votes. As Michael Scherer has just written in Time,

At the moment Wilson exploded, the outburst seemed like an assault on the President. Soon afterwards, it was clear that it had been a gift. Wilson had, in an emotional expression, proven Obama’s point: the summer of town halls had been less a discussion than a circus, a forum where misinformation was vindicated by passion, where disrespect was elevated as a virtue. Now the circus had come inside Congress.

At this point I had planned to use the response to Wilson’s outburst to extend the point that I’ve just made here, that the emerging liberal/Democratic/mainstream media consensus placing all the blame for today’s vitriolic partisanship on rowdie righties is guilty of a blind-in-one-eyed double standard. Where, I would have asked, was the concern for “civility,” the outrage over nasty and vicious attacks on the president, when President Bush was routinely called liar 76 times before breakfast every day?

I would have noted that Googling “Bush lied” today yielded 214,000 hits earlier this morning, but it would probably be more now. True, many of these were objecting to the characterization, but even they prove my point. Take, for example, Fred Hiatt’s argument in the Washington Post in June 2008:

Search the Internet for “Bush Lied” products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic “Bush Lied, People Died” bumper sticker is only the beginning.

Of course it’s not necessary to go all the way back to Democrats denouncing Bush as a liar in order to demonstrate the double standard at work. In his Labor Day speech the current Supreme Leader in the White House denounced “all the lies” that were being purposefully spread by his critics.

I would have said all that, and more, if I had followed my original plan, but I don’t need to do that since others have already done it so well (brief roundup here).

The lack of civility is a two-way street, but, as usual, the purveyors of Conventional Wisdom look only one way before attempting to cross. That’s why they routinely get run over.