Democracy Needs Hecklers

Calls to censure the execrable South Carolinian Movement Republican Joe Wilson (not to be confused with the honorable Ambassador Joe Wilson, also long a Republican, hounded together with his wife for bravely exposing the lies of mighty criminals at a time when few in his position did the same), for heckling the President in his joint address to Congress on healthcare, represent a pointless distraction from the actually urgent work of Congress at this moment.

I wouldn't be displeased at all, frankly, if Presidents were greeted more often with public disapproval and heckling from the Congress -- as have Prime Ministers in the United Kingdom for years and years, to the sharpening of their wits and to the benefit of their constituencies.

Those who fear that toleration of such breaches in decorum would likely unleash the full-on madness of the rancid obstructionists and irrationalists of Movement Republicanism are right to expect that result but wrong to fear it. The country benefits little from a mannerly concealment of their obstructionism and deception and fear-mongering behind courtly declarations of unfelt and unmerited respect.

The country would have benefited immeasurably by more heckling from Democrats of the war criminals and corporate cronies of the Killer Clown Administration.

I do not agree that only hypocritical sufferance of deception and greed restrains the eruption of anarchy in Congress. And I believe that if the liars and thugs of Movement Republicanism were indeed to reduce the Congress to a full-on brawl, they would be evicted soon enough and for good from the People's House by the appalled will of the People themselves -- few of whom, whatever their disagreements with secular democrats, would see such a development as one from which they would be likely to secure much benefit.

Only a marginal minority of Americans truly want to live in a Christianist theocracy, want to dismantle government services and oversight, want to relinquish all power to moneyed minorities driven by nothing but short-term profit-taking rather than a desire to serve public interests. The ugly irrationality of that minority needs to be exposed to the light of scrutiny, not insulated from view by false equivalences in the media or false courtesy in the halls of government.

The Republican bully who barked that our President was lying about healthcare benefits to illegal immigrants in defiance of published facts was himself a liar. Those who love the truth are buttressed when lies are exposed as such, but no one benefits from whomped up faux outrage and point-scoring ritual humiliations that Washingtonians allow to substitute for actual work to solve our shared problems and secure our liberty.

Update: Andrew Sullivan points out that even in the more raucous and contentious House of Commons one thing one doesn't call another is a liar, as the vile bullying dullard Joe Wilson declared wrongly and dishonestly of our President.