Last night President Obama gave a health care reform speech in front of Congress that was written about, talked about, and tweeted about more then any other topic of the day. No, it was not his remarks on his reform that impassioned people so, it was a comment shouted from the crowd by South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson. He publicly, and nationally, as it was seen all over network television and YouTube, called the President of the United States a liar. As Obama addressed the topic of illegial immigrants entering the U.S. as a result of his reform, Rep. Wilson lost it….
Obama: “…the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegial.
Rep. Wilson: “YOU LIE!”
Obama: “….That’s not true….”
Obama respectfully replied to the remark and moved on to his next topic…but the crowd did not move on as quickly. The House speaker sat furiously behind Obama for the remainder of the speech and people started to form all kinds of opinions on the topic. Between last night and this morning, there has been a public apology, of course, and several Republican representatives speaking out against Rep. Wilson about how inappropriate and embarrassing his actions were. There are others who think it was an exercise of free speech.
This controversial remark really got me thinking about free speech as it relates to someone of such high esteem. In my opinion, there’s a time and a place…blogs...twitter…etc etc. But than again, look how many people he got talking about this? What do you think?
Read an article & link to the video clip here @ NBCChicago.com.
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/politics/The-Shoutout-Heard-Across-the-Hill-58305832.html
I think that Wilson was out of place to say such a statement at a forum, but that he was using his rights of free speech and his intent was probably to protect the people of the United States. Lets take Spain as an example; it provides socialized medicine for all its citizens, but ANY person that enters the doors of the hospital... and many of these people are illegal immigrants from Northern Africa. The fact is that socialized medicine would need to provide that service to immigrants if it were to truely be 'socialized'. So when Wilson called the argument a lie, he was not in the wrong, but I believe the way and the context that he expressed his opinion was unprofessional.
ReplyDeleteLindsay,
ReplyDeleteAfter listening to you talk about this instance in class and reading your post, I watched a YouTube clip of the interaction. I agree with you that there are times when freedom of speech should be suspended (for lack of a better term). This was an address and not a debate; it would be as if someone started interrupting Anne in the middle of a lecture for no reason.
It did get people talking which is maybe what the Senator wanted, but it is also talk for the wrong reasons. People are not talking about the content of the President's speech, but rather Senator Wilson's actions. This took away from the purpose of last night, so I think it actually may have backfired on Senator Wilson. This was a good post that was very interesting to read and talk about overall! Well done bringing an interesting topic to the forefront!!
I also belive that there is a time and a place for some issues to be brought up and this was neither. one thing that this outburst did do that nobody talked about was have an impact. if someone is so adament about the topic, that they will stand up during a national speech and yell out, hen he topic must be important. hopefully the news crews will investigate the imprortance of the topic adn see if the outburst had any merit to it. if anything can come out of this, it is that the health care reform that obama is trying to push through will be scrutinated over the national scale and the info will be brought to the publics attention.
ReplyDelete