In the wake of Joe Biden’s State of the Dumpster Fire address Tuesday night, the media is throwing a collective hissy fit over him getting heckled by Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert. Let ’em. They’re wrong.
“And they come home — many of the world’s fittest and best-trained warriors in the world — never the same: headaches, numbness, dizziness, a cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin. I know,” Biden said.
“You put them in. Thirteen of them,” Boebert shouted, in reference to the 13 U.S. service members who were killed at Kabul airport during the chaos of Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And then Biden brought up his late son, Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer.
After the speech, Boebert defended her actions on Twitter. “When Biden said flag draped coffins I couldn’t stay silent. I told him directly he did it. He put 13 in there. Our heroic servicemen and women deserve so much better,” she tweeted.
The White House, however, was not amused.
“And that was the moment in the speech where the president was talking about his unity agenda, and talking about priorities that we should all be able to agree on,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told MSNBC’s Jonathan Lemire Wednesday morning. “Look, one American dies every five minutes of an opioid overdose. There’s no question we should do more to help our nation’s veterans, people who have been hurt by the impacts of burn pits. Of course, we need to do more to work together to cure cancer,” she said. “And they were heckling around that time and that moment. I think that says a lot more about them than it does about how important these priorities are, and how much the vast majority of people who are sitting there watching in that chamber last night could work together to solve exactly those problems.”
Actually, it says a lot more about Biden that he didn’t take a moment during his State of the Union address to honor those who died because of his recklessness. It says a lot that Biden didn’t even mention the withdrawal at all. Someone had to call attention to those heroes who are no longer with us.
Related: This Ad Lib During Biden’s SOTU Speech Went Horribly Wrong
But let’s not pretend that Democrats actually care about decorum, okay? It seems like we go through this cycle of Democrats mocking or heckling Republican presidents during their addresses to Congress, but when the parties are switched, Democrats are scandalized.
In 2009, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) infamously shouted “You lie!” at Barack Obama during his address to a joint session of Congress when Obama claimed that illegal immigrants wouldn’t get free health care under Obamacare.
The media denounced Wilson. The Democrats were scandalized. “No president has ever been treated like that. Ever,” Obama’s then-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said afterward.
Clearly, he had a terrible memory. As Glenn Thrush wrote at Politico back in 2009, “Democrats were pretty rough on George W. Bush during a joint sessions a few years back,” and cited two examples. The first was when Democrats booed Bush during his 2004 State of the Union when he called for the renewal of the Patriot Act, and the second was a year later at this 2005 State of the Union, when Bush called for Social Security reform, and Democrats “howled, hissed and shouted ‘No!'”
Of course, Thrush suggested that the heckling of Obama was different because rayyyyycizzzzzzzuuum, and not because Obama was lying through his teeth. Still, it should be noted that Bill Schneider, CNN’s senior political analyst at the time, was taken aback by the Democrats’ behavior in 2005. “It was unusual. I had never heard it at least at that level before,” he said. “The Democrats clearly were booing, heckling, saying ‘no’ when the president talked about the crisis in Social Security.”
At least Boebert was demanding respect for our fallen heroes.
Nancy Pelosi couldn’t say the same when she broke decorum in 2020 by ripping up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech right after he finished delivering it. That was pure partisan hostility.
At the time, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich condemned her behavior and called for her to be censured. “As Speaker of the House for four State of the Unions by a President of the other party I am disgusted and insulted by the viciously partisan action of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the speech,” he said.
So give it a rest, liberals. No one buys your phony outrage over Biden being heckled. You’ve all done it before, and you’ll do it again.
And if any Democrat claims the contrary, tell them, “You lie!”
