UNCIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

"You lie!" The ejaculation by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) during the President's speech to Congress was accompanied, on screen, by looks of alarm and distaste on the faces of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi that suggested someone had farted. And the whole affair (including Wilson's totally disingenuous apology) has provoked a national debate on civility, or the lack thereof, in the discourse of American politics.

Rudeness is nothing new in the halls of government. Threats of violence and actual incidients of fisticuffs and caning and even duels to the death used to be common occurrences on Capitol Hill, and more recently, insult and invective have become the common currency of campaign rhetoric, to the point where no one is really surprised to hear Obama identified oxymoronically both as a socialist and a Nazi.

My Knee-Jerk Liberal response is to deplore the vulgarizing and cheapening of language and behavior, and to blame it largely on the Republicans -- well, on the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party, for whom hate speech is ofen a prelude to hate crimes (killing abortion doctors, for example). Sarah Palin announces that if Obama has his way, elderly citizens will be executed by "death squads"; Conservative talk-show hosts rile up the faithful to the point where a 9-mm sidearm seems an appropriate accessory for Americans attending a town meeting to discuss something as seemingly innocuous as the way to improve the delivery of health care. Democrats never behaved this way, I tell myself.

But it occurs to me that if they had -- if, while George II was making his bogus case for invading Iraq, cherry-picking or fabricating intelligence to support the laughable claims of cached WMDs aimed at Israel and the U.S., someone like Senator Hillary Clinton had risen during debate and in ringing tones told the President, "You lie," perhaps the slippery slope to war might have provided some traction to those (like Obama) who didn't believe Bush's claims but were, or felt, powerless to dispute them.

Bush, more than any other American president, tried (aided and abetted by Dick Cheney) to turn the office into an absolute monarchy -- to destroy the checks and balances on his power by neutering Congress, co-opting the CIA, and turning the Supreme Court (which, after all, installed him in the White House by skewing the results of the 2000 election) into an arm of the administration. But as the power of the President grew -- as he proclaimed himself not bound by Congressional limits on executive privilege, for example -- respect for him and for the office eroded. In 2003, Bush's opponents felt themselves were paralyzed by their respect for the office, if not the man. In 2009, Rex Rammel, an Idaho gubernatorial candidate, says he'd buy a license to hunt Obama and then claims he was only joking because "Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue hunting tages in Washington, D.C."

So, though it sickens me to hear people saying out loud and for attribution what was unthinkable before the New Millenium, I can't help wishing the process had begun ten years ago -- say, during the election campaign of 1999-2000. Al Gore is probably the last person one can imagine indulging in sicko verbal mudslinging, but there might have been other Democrats out there with poor impulse control and inventive vocabularies (Michael Moore comes to mind) who could have taught America just how lame, how unfit for the presidency, how untrustworthy and fundamentally dishonest George W. Bush was. And just maybe, if people of influence hadn't yeilded to the inhibitions that all civilized people used to share, we wouldn't be asking ourselves every day how we got into the twin messes of a disastrous war and a failed economy.