In a rather silly column, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat said these things:
Now take Joe Wilson, who shouted out at President Obama. Unquestionably rude. My judge critic is right that if everybody lost it like this, there'd be chaos.
. . .
Obama said health-care reform won't cover illegal immigrants. He is right in that it won't pay any money for them. But another part of the plan requires that everyone in the country have health insurance, here legally or not. . . .
Away from all the partisan shouting about Wilson, a group of senators convened to try to fix the language on immigrants."We really thought we'd resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President's speech . . . we wanted to go back and drill down again," Democratic Senator Kent Conrad told Time magazine.
Interesting. I'm not saying the heckler was right. Wilson's "You lie!" was itself a whopper, and I doubt he's interested in crafting sensible health policy for immigrants. Yet we may end up with a more coherent law anyway.
(Emphasis added.)
So Westneat admits that the anti-reform plans being pushed by Obama and the Democrats in Congress may cover illegal immigrants. But at the same time Westneat is certain that Wilson, who may genuinely believe that the plans cover illegal immigrants, was telling a "whopper", that is, a very big lie when he said, indirectly, that they did.
For a statement to be a lie, the person making it has to know it is false. To claim that Congressman Wilson was telling a lie, Westneat must know what Wilson really believes, must be able to see into Wilson's heart.
If Westneat can do that, he ought to tell the rest of us how. (For one thing, police departments may want to use his techniques, since they often need to know whether someone is lying.)
It is possible, of course, that Westneat has no idea what Congressman Wilson actually believes, that, as a leftist (and sometimes intellectually lazy) journalist, Westneat was just insulting — or to be blunt slandering — a man he disagrees with politically. I would prefer not to come to that conclusion, so I'll send Westneat an email asking him to explain how he knows that Wilson told a "whopper".
Oh, and to encourage Westneat to reply, let me add this link to a recent Pew poll on attitudes toward news organizations.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
Posted by Jim Miller at September 14, 2009 12:25 PM | Email This