the joe wilson thing has got the most remarkable people trance-channeling richard nixon. so you ask a couple of black women downtown and they're all like: "i thought it was disrespectful to the Office of the Presidency." now i wonder how worried you've really been over the decades about disrespect for the Office of the Presidency, which was ultimately nixon's argument: it would be bad for the Office of the Presidency to reveal evidence of the felonies and general disgusting basic behavior of the individual who holds that office. to be totally honest, i think that "the Office of the Presidency" is rather an abstract, empty, or imaginary object to sustain real respect or for that matter to be disrespected. in fact, if it weren't some kind of ontological mistake, i'd pistol-whip and then ass-rape the Office of the President of the United States. wait: the Office of the Presidency ain't got no ass! i want to make this clear to the secret service. i would never harm barack obama or any human being. but i herewith threaten to assassinate the Office of the Presidency. only: which way do i shoot? actually, it seems hard to express disrespect for the Office of the President of the United States. it's not as good as the Office of the Register of Wills! i don't know. maybe i should stick to expressing disrespect for actual human beings. of course, that you can't successfully disrespect the Office of the President of the United States entails that you can't successfully respect it. it's like respecting the number '5' or the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme or something. it's kind of indifferent to your positive regard. the idea appears to be that wilson is calling "the Office of the President of the United States" a liar, rather than barack obama, the alleged individual human being, if any. but the Office of the President of the United States doesn't even have lips in order to make assertions that could turn out to be true or false. or maybe the idea is that by insulting the concrete individual human being - if obama still is a concrete individual human being, which seems unlikely - we are insulting the persisting eternal abstract object that currently inhabits or possesses obama's body. good luck making that make sense, but the very charm of primitive supernatural explanations is their wondrous whimsicality.