Ninety minutes after Obama finished his address, the South Carolina representative, Joe Wilson – who yelled out “You lie!” after the president said he had never proposed providing coverage to illegal immigrants—issued a statement explaining he “let my emotions get the best of me.” So far so good. He became emotional and behaved irrationally. It happens to the best of us. Let’s forget this and move on.
At least some of us will. Some wont. Here’s what happened next :
Online Fallout :
The fallout to Joe Wilson’s indiscretion was as expected with both Democrats and Republicans chastising his lack of self-control. “There ought to be a reprimand or censure of Rep. Joe Wilson to discourage that kind of conduct in the future,” Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa. tweeted on Twitter.
The indignation over this carried over to Facebook. A Facebook group titled No tenure for Joe Wilson does have too many members (just 252 as of today) but has a long thread of discussion taking place on its wall.
According to The Nation, Rob Miller, a Democrat, who was planning to run against Wilson in 2010, raised more than $50,000 for his campaign within just a few hours after Wilson’s outburst. Miller had lost to Wilson 46 to 54 percent in 2008. But, with Wilson so effectively putting his foot in his mouth last night, Miller’s campaign has been given a new life. He tweeted Wednesday night: “55K raised, let’s double THAT in 12 hours.”
As of 9pm today (Sept 10), the ActBlue Rob Miller donation page showed that 5800 supporters had raided $200,000 with almost half of that sum coming from readers of the progressive blog Daily Kos.
The Huffington Post jumped on the bandwagon too with a scathing article on Joe Wilson and how his immature outburst had created an unwelcome distraction to the real intent of the Republican Party’s opposition to health care reform.
A short clip of Joe Wilson’s outburst on YouTube has about 50,000 views. All in all, the mainstream media and political commentators criticized Mr. Wilson’s boorish behavior. But, has the fallout been as wide as the media implies. Not really.
Though, As Google Insights attest (see image), Mr. Wilson has been rather popular on the Internet recently.
Conclusion :
In summary, there has been criticism of Wilson’s outburst and he has apologized for the same. The fallout of the Internet may have been exaggerated by the mainstream media. People are mildly upset about this. Obama’s a cool customer and something like this didn’t affect his speech at all. Wilson should be grateful that this issue hasn’t eclipsed the all-important health care reform debate and should keep a low profile so that this incident fades from public memory.
We’re American and typically, after we’ve expressed our indignation at something we don’t like, we tend to forgive the party at fault and move on to think about the next big thing. Let’s do just that here.
