Joe the Plumber Derangement Syndrome,
It seems a man named Joe from Ohio, a plumber, standing in a rope line at an Obama event, asked the candidate a question about taxes. This , as best I can tell, was the exchange:
Joe the Plumber was then used as an example in the final debate between Obama and McCain. The Media, who has yet to ask, let us say, William Ayers pinko terrorist about his links to Obama, found the time to camp out on Joe’s doorstep.
Here is an article on the matter, from The New Editor
How the Left Works
By now everyone who follows politics has heard of Joe Wurzelbacher, a guy from Toledo known now as ‘Joe the Plumber,’ who asked a question of Barack Obama in a campaign rope line, and was referenced numerous times in last night’s debate.
Like many of us, Mr. Wurzelbacher has questions about Barack Obama’s tax policy, among other things.
So what happens to Mr. Wurzelbacher for expressing his views?
Reports in the mainstream media appear claiming that he is unlicensed (even though he doesn’t need one as an employee of a business or as a contractor working on a residence), and that he apparently has a tax lien filed against him.
Not to be outdone, the Daily Kos published his home address for all the world to see.
The Democratic Underground just threw whatever they could at the guy.
Better think a little longer next time if you wish to criticize a Chicago Democrat running for president (or anything else, for that matter).
You might get ‘the treatment.’
Update: Atlantic Monthly smear artist Andrew Sullivan chimes in — in what appears to be part of his full court press to be named honorary Democratic Party Chicago precinct captain — here and here.
Update II: More from the excruciatingly slimy Sullivan, who takes issue with the fact that Joe is Wurzelbacher’s middle name, not his first.
Update III: Plumber’s union, City of Toledo go after Wurzelbacher in order to stop him from working.
And another article, this one from the Pen of the invaluable Michelle Malkin
Operation Destroy Joe the Plumber
Sen. Biden launched the first salvo against the
[…]
Wurzelbacher never claimed to be making $250,000 a year. He told Obama that he might be “getting ready to buy a company that makes about $250,000, $270,000″ a year. His simple point was that Obama’s punitive tax proposals would make it more difficult to realize his dream.
Obama’s followers couldn’t handle the incontrovertible truth. Left-wing blogs immediately went to work, blaring headlines like “Not A Real $250k Plumber!” Next, they falsely accused Wurzelbacher of not being registered to vote (he’s registered in Lucas County, Ohio, and voted as a Republican in this year’s primary).
Next, they called him a liar for identifying himself as undecided. Only registered Democrats and fake Republican tools used in mainstream media stories and YouTube debates are allowed to use that label, you see.
Next, award-winning liberal blogger Joshua Marshall cast Wurzelbacher as some kind of rabid freak for calling Social Security a “joke” – as if no working-class Americans could believe that the federal government’s entitlement programs were a rip-off unless they were bought and paid for by the McCain campaign.
Then, suddenly, the journalists who wouldn’t lift a finger to investigate Barack Obama’s longtime relationships with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright sprang into action rifling through citizen Joe Wurzelbacher’s tax records. Politico.com reported breathlessly: “Samuel J. Wurzelbacher has a lien placed against him to the tune of $1,182.92. The lien is dated from January of ‘07.” Press outlets probed his divorce records. The local plumbers’ union, which has endorsed Obama, claimed he didn’t do their required apprenticeship work and didn’t have a license to work outside his local township.
[…]
After Wurzelbacher told Katie Couric that Obama’s rhetorical tap dance was “almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.,” the inevitable cries of “bigotry” followed. (There are now tens of thousands of hits on the Internet for “Joe the Plumber racist.”)
I began to notice when I started keeping a livejournal that those who lean to the Left tend not to make arguments, but, rather, make personal attacks meant to stand in lieu of argument, and the farther to the Left they lean, the more frequently and the more bitterly they do it. The writers I know who are out and out socialists respond with ad Hominem to the exclusion of any other form of argument, even to the point where they cannot reply to expected questions posed in polite terms.
Is there an explanation for this? My own speculation (I have not enough proof to call it a theory) is that modern Leftism is a pseudo-religious movement, not a political faction properly so called, and the personal acrimony we see is Odium Theologicum.
The other frequently encountered quirk of the Left that I see endlessly repeated is their boasting about their own intellectual superiority: and I have heard this boasting often, but never from someone whose academic accomplishments even equal my own modest achievements. The first time I came across this was the first time I ever posted a comment to a board some years ago; the latest time was yesterday morning.
Is there an explanation for this? My speculation here is that the accomplishments of modern empirical science, which proceeded when smart men like Einstein overthrew the previous models, generated envy in other fields, so that those who wish to overthrow non-empirical bodies of knowledge such as morality or political economics, impersonate or imitate them. Since smart people like Einstein get to overthrow old teachings like Newton (so the pseudo-reasoning goes), smart people like Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein get to overthrow old teachings about fornication and adultery by older teachers like Moses, Confucius, Buddha, and Aristotle.
‘Smartness’ becomes a passkey to the glorious free frontier-country of the freethinkers, where we none of us need practice the ancient virtues of justice, moderation, temperance, fortitude.
Hence, being smart is the baptism of the new cult: those not of the cult are condemned as stupid, even if they are smarter (by any measurable assessment of intelligence open to us) than the average member of the cult.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
