The neighing and braying of jackasses on the hot still Carolina wind like the fetid breath of Satan after he's attended a cheese-tasting party

South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson was raised
in a barn by a mangy semi-feral cat and a rusted bucket with
a frowny face painted on it.

See that man in the picture, above? That man is a braying jackass. That man is an elected Representative from a state that shares half a name with my native state, but whereas my state, North Carolina, gave the world John Coltrane and Nina Simone, Michael Jordan, William Sydney "O. Henry" Porter and Thomas Wolfe and at least had the grace to offset the karmic debts created by Jesse Helms with Mr. Sam Ervin, South Carolina is a cultural desert and environmental swamp whose great contribution to American civilization was to instigate the bloodiest war in American history for the sake of the right of wealthy men to treat imprisoned, enslaved men and women like commodities, like beasts of burden. South Carolina is a great, stinking, swampy abyss that now exists solely to make the drive from Charlotte to Atlanta and back a tedious inconvenience. The main argument for not digging up the entire state and dumping it into the sea is that there's already a vast island of garbage in the ocean and basic decency requires us to forbear.

It remains a historical mystery why, after freeing the slaves, the Union didn't simply withdraw from South Carolina with newly-liberated blacks and allow the remaining inhabitants to go on mistaking cattle for their cousins until the population base completely collapsed from a failure to replenish itself naturally, perhaps freeing the United States to convert the former "state" into a vast natural preserve dedicated to the enjoyment of people (if any) who like to visit swamps and vast uninteresting tracts of sand. Such a solution might have saved the rest of us from having to put up with jackasses like Representative Joe Wilson, pictured above in the act of braying at the elected President of the United States while the President was addressing a joint session of Congress and Joe Wilson. Granted, this nature preserve would have required periodic spraying or perhaps draining for mosquitoes (much like an old tractor tire sitting in the back yard, South Carolina is a breeding ground for the beasts; also like an old tractor tire, South Carolina would stink and generate a thick, clinging, rancid black smoke if you managed to burn it, an experiment William Tecumseh Sherman attempted with mixed success in 1865).

Mr. Wilson shouted, "You lie!" which suggests some confusion on Mr. Wilson's part: it's possible he was remembering one of the times former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin claimed that a national healthcare plan would produce "death panels" that would euthanize folks' grandmothers. It's also possible that upon his head's brief emergence from his own asshole he thought he was playing Portal and was confronting GLaDOS about the cake. I don't know. What I do know is that there while it is occasionally entertaining to watch MPs yell at the Prime Minister of Britain or to read about fistfights breaking out in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, there's been a long tradition, at least since Wilson's spiritual ancestor Preston Brooks beat a man within an inch of his life on the Congressional floor (another fine moment South Carolina contributed to the national culture), of at least pretending that Congress bears some dignity or respect.

The expected defense to this is that there have doubtlessly been moments when Democrats blah blah blah--because, as we teach our very small children, all the bad behavior in the universe is justified when somebody else did it first somewhere at some point in time. All this argument really proves is that some people are neither smarter nor more moral than four-year-olds, and one wonders how in the world such infants, however precocious their spelling skills and ability to string together sentences, are ever given jobs at newspapers and cable television stations or elected to various offices, or even how they ever pulled their mouths from their mothers' tits long enough to drool such ridiculous and hollow nonsense. Better men--Senator John McCain, for example--are already calling for Wilson to apologize, but let's be honest: Senator McCain is wrong and Wilson shouldn't apologize.

This may surprise you, given everything I've said so far about the ridiculous little excretion from his mother's bilious womb, raised by animals without even the barest sense of good manners or public decorum, or so I'd presume if I didn't know that most animals will eat issue like Wilson or kick it out of the nest rather than allow it to waste the vital time and energy a beast normally bestows upon its progeny. But let's be honest, any "apology" that Wilson drools out onto the paper somebody has written it on for him to read (or more likely has taught him to recite phonetically) will be insincere and unmeant at best. At worst it will be self-justifying theatre, with Mr. Wilson explaining he was overwhelmed by his passions (one suspects any passions the brute possesses have more to do with melanin than an understanding of healthcare issues, but nevermind) and will quickly segue into some prattle about how job-stealing Mexicans (a vital part of his state's economy--but nevermind that, too) don't deserve healthcare or how private corporations designed to generate profits for stockholders in an uncompetitive quasi-monopolistic business ecosystem already function quite adequately (which, by the way, is perfectly true if you contemplate the tangible and immediate benefits rescission has for the insurance corporation stockholder) or how a public option brings the nation one step closer to socialism or how Obama is a grandma-murdering Kenyan alien robot from the future--honestly, there's no telling what else can come out of these people's mouths at this point, and while I concede a basic First Amendment right for them to froth at their mouths like rabid marmosets I really am sick of dodging spittle. Given a choice between Wilson's inevitable fauxpology and his silence (preferably by ball gag in Maynard's basement, but what are the odds of that happening?), I'd much prefer the sounds of Wilson's soft, husky mouth-breathing, raspy and humid as the soft Palmetto State breeze.

As I write this, it seems Wilson has apologized with a bit more brevity and less self-justification than I would have expected (thanks, Vince). We'll see if he leaves it at that; for now I'll stand by my invective, although I have to confess Wilson's rapid folding--I wonder if he thought his guttural outburst would be well received--has, for now, deflated my toxic typing. We'll leave this at that, except to add (in case the point wasn't adequately made already): South Carolina sucks.

Thank you for your time and consideration.