“You lie!” – You’re shouting it to the wrong U.S. president, Joe

I’ve been waiting a long time to hear a crowd chanting “You lie!” about the president of the United States.

Problem is, they’re chanting it at the wrong times and, for the most part, about the wrong president.

Let me step back a couple of months, to January 20, 2009. We had elected our first African-American president, and in a moment of sheer joy—and more than that, of sweet relief that the national abusive relationship with George W. Bush was over—the crowd booed Bush and sang “Hey hey hey, goodbye” as his helicopter flew away.

Others—including some people I heard on the Metro on my way home that day—complained that they weren’t showing proper respect to the former president. The president hadn’t shown us much respect during his eight years in office, but that was beside the point. We owed some deference still to the man who had lied us into war, justified torture, and let a city drown; or at least that was the implication.

Many of us watched the inaugural parade that day and had to choke back fear when Barack and Michelle Obama stepped out of the armored presidential limousine and walked part of the parade route hand in hand, with just a few police officers and secret service agents between them and throngs of unvetted onlookers. Those of us too young to remember Dallas still had visions of Kennedy somewhere in our minds. We knew the violent rhetoric at campaign rallies wasn’t gone. It was just masked by the joy in the largest crowd ever to witness the swearing-in of a president.

That violence has erupted in full force back into the public discourse just a few short months after that inauguration, and people showing up at Obama’s speeches and town hall meetings carrying automatic weapons seem to prove those of us who feared for Obama’s safety right.

The crowd that gathered in Washington last Saturday for a “9/12” rally against the president—there’s really no clearer way to explain the goals of the “movement”–had taken up the chant of “You lie!” from Representative Joe Wilson, the South Carolina congressman who interrupted Obama’s health care speech. There might be nothing funnier than a crowd chanting “You lie” in response to a speech they support, when the object of their accusation is nowhere nearby, but the adoption of the chant has a broader meaning for those ranters.

Obama lies, not by saying that there are no provisions in the health care plan to protect undocumented workers, but by claiming to be president in the first place, according to these people. He is presuming a right that cannot possibly be his because he is not a white man. While we owed Bush respect simply because of the authority of his office, Obama is treated as a usurper. Talking about killing the president is a federal crime, yet a Baptist pastor felt free to pray for Obama’s death from the pulpit. While we were unpatriotic and un-American if we questioned Bush’s decision to go to war, the current president deserves not even scorn but violence, despite a greater electoral mandate than Bush ever had.

In Iraq, a journalist served nine months in jail for hurling his shoes at then-President Bush. Muntader al-Zaidi was freed from prison Tuesday and has plans to leave the country in fear for his safety. He also says that he was tortured in prison. All this for throwing a shoe at the leader of a foreign country that continues to occupy his own. Yet the men who show up to Obama rallies holding loaded weapons are allowed to stand there, as though a semiautomatic rifle is the same as a protest sign.

“Respect for the office of the President” is a loaded phrase. America is a country that fought for its right to elect representative government, not to have royalty that demands fealty. The president deserves only the respect that he or she earns. Joe Wilson’s original outburst might have been rude, but to some degree it is the job of the opposition party to question the judgment of the president—a job that the Democratic party largely abdicated, it should be noted, in the months and even years following 9/11.

Joe Wilson’s shout didn’t come out of a vacuum, and petitions to censure him may just make him into a martyr. He has already become a hero if the recordings out of Washington’s 9/12 rallies are to be believed. But more importantly, the shock and pearl-clutching over a perceived insult to the office of the president has suddenly shifted sides, and it’s not a road that the Left, which has seen its concerns systematically shoved aside in favor of mythical “bipartisanship” in the Obama administration, wants to head down.

Yet Representative James Clyburn, House Majority whip, South Carolina’s most prominent elected Democrat, makes a persuasive argument that ignoring Wilson does allow his actions to continue to fuel the fires. Maureen Dowd quoted Clyburn:

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” . . . .

“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”

Clyburn, a veteran of the sixties Civil Rights movement, has drawn comparisons several times between the protests now and the ones he saw back then, and he hasn’t been the only one to point out that this is race-based. Though, as Glenn Greenwald noted, the Right has been howling and making threats and trying to delegitimize Democratic politicians for a while, it should be noted, too, that this anger dates back to the very same time period in American history when racial issues were brought to the fore—and Democrats were blamed.

What is more frightening now about the rabid right-wing anger that Wilson represents and with which crowds at rallies overflow is that it has a basic lack of respect for Obama as a human being. I’m all for a large streak of skepticism and satire toward the government—my favorite political writers have long been those, like Molly Ivins and Hunter Thompson, who combined a deep love and respect for democracy with a healthy disrespect for elected leaders who failed in their duty. But when you shout out in the middle of a major speech, when you attempt to drown out another’s words instead of letting them talk, and most especially, when you brandish a weapon and pray for their death, you are not expressing political speech any longer. You are disavowing that person’s very right to human status.

So what can we do about it? How do we simultaneously decry delegitimizing attacks on President Obama while maintaining our own skepticism and independence from the kind of attitude that prevailed during the Bush years? If anything, we need more venues for criticism of the president that don’t descend into vitriolic, frothing mobs spewing uninformed insults. We need healthy debate and dissent, not demands for “respect,” and we need to bring the debate back to reality. We need to not let accusations go unchallenged—not by silencing others, but by speaking up ourselves.