Vice President Joe Biden has harsh words for Republican voters who jeered an openly gay soldier.
The Republican Party’s face of hate got a makeover last week when the audience at the GOP presidential debate booed a gay soldier who asked about the recently repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
It was an atrocious moment, one that reminded us all that right-wingers are filled with venom and vitriol — it was also one that Vice President Joe Biden described at “reprehensible.”
“I did have a visceral response to it,” Biden told the ladies of ABC’s ‘The View’ today.
“I’m not sure if it’s because my son spent a year in Iraq. And I know my sons and all the kids with them — kids, they’re grown men — I don’t think they give a damn whether the guy firing a rifle to protect them is gay or straight. I don’t think they care about that. Look this kid risked his life. This kid is there for them. And I, quite frankly, I thought it was reprehensible.”
Sam Stein at Huffington Post points out that President Obama has also criticized the odious audience’s response that night.
“You’ve got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don’t have health care and booing a service member in Iraq because they’re gay,” said the president during a speech in Silicon Valley. “That’s not reflective of who were are.”
Well, it’s not reflective of America and its ideals, but clearly it’s reflective of a certain backward American population.
September 28, 2011 at 1:22 pm, Matt Durrett said:
Don’t get me wrong — I watched the debate and was as shocked by the incident as the next sane person. My first reaction was “WTF? Did someone just ‘boo’ a soldier?” Then it was “isn’t Santorum going to say anything?”. It’s true, it was a sick and sad incident that unfortunately someone out there is probably proud of.But statements like this one only contribute to a ‘black and white’ perspective which good citizens should recognize and challenge: “It was an atrocious moment, one that reminded us all that right-wingers are filled with venom and vitriol”This is overly simplistic and naive. It is shameful that none of the candidates stood up for the soldier, nor others among the audience. But ad hominem and association fallacies are dishonest and destructive to an intelligent dialogue I hope to participate in by reading sites like d+t.The bigger commentary to me is: how sad is it that candidates have to appeal to a certain group of people to have any realistic shot at getting a nomination? I think this is partially what you are implying, but that is not the question you are asking, and, if you ask me, our biggest problem as a people is that we have a media trained to ask the wrong questions (and making it good business) and people too stupid to tell the difference.