In "Boy, Oh, Boy, [1]" columnist Maureen Dowd leaped upon a derogatory word (embedded in her column's title) for blacks she imagined Rep. Joe Wilson saying in order to call everyone opposed to President Obama a racist.
She follows in the steps of fellow columnists Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, who have both accused the GOP of racism for opposing Obama with similar flights of fancy.
Frank Rich in his July 12 column [2] [2]imagined Sarah Palin thinking of Obama as "shiftless" when she mockedhim during the campaignfor being a "community organizer": "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities." Paul Krugman's August 7 column argued that the tea party protesters were "probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing...than to who he is."
Not to be outdone, Dowd imagined a derogatory "boy" at the end of Rep. Joe Wilson's shout at Obama during the president's address to Congress.
Interesting how easily these racially crude remarks come to these supposedly tolerant liberals, isn't it?
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!
Dowd proceeded to collect all the race-related incidents from Wilson's career, to fill out her charge of racism:
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring "You lie!" bumper stickers and T-shirts.
The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina's state Capitol and denounced as a "smear" the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the '48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.
Dowd summarized:
But Wilson's shocking disrespect for the office of the president - no Democrat ever shouted "liar" at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq - convinced me: Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it.
She then went on to bizarrely impute every anti-Obama reaction by South Carolina Republicans as racist, including Gov. Mark Sanford's refusal of stimulus money.
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.
The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to "break" the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was "just one of Michelle's ancestors." Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president's stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.