How sorry is Joe Wilson?
About half an hour after the House of Representatives voted to voice its objections to his angry shout at President Obama last week, Rep. Joe Wilson was walking through a Capitol tunnel Tuesday night, when he bumped into a fervent supporter. “You were so great today,” Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, told the South Carolina Republican, who’s become a hero to the right since he interrupted Obama. She gave him a big hug and a warm smile for his troubles. Bachmann’s love, of course, wasn’t enough to keep the House from chastising Wilson, even if the form the rebuke took — a “resolution of disapproval” — was essentially meaningless. Though Republicans reached new heights of melodrama in protesting the way the resolution threatened to soil Wilson’s name, the vote carried no punishment. Like Wilson’s shout, it seemed destined to become a political Rorschach test — with Democrats insisting it was necessary, and Republicans insisting it wasn’t, and both sides trying to capital
