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On Joe The Plumber

I don’t get the fascination. Seriously. Not at all.

To the right, he’s some sort of everyman, regular Joe bringing a middle class clarity to everything from taxes to the middle east. He’s almost elevated to saintly pundit status for the conservative crowd. He got a cool job out of this deal.

To the left, he’s an evil shill of the right who should be destroyed for having the audacity to be standing there when Obama happened to want to ask him some questions.

To the press (but I repeat myself), he was worthy of having his personal records ransacked by local political hacks (who then lost their jobs) because he was a threat to Obama. The country watched as they attempted to dig up every bit of dirt on a regular Joe that they could.

Seriously, why is he perceived as such a threat to the left? And why is he perceived as so awesome to the right?

I really don’t get it.

25 Responses to “On Joe The Plumber”

  1. Laughingdog Says:

    “Seriously, why is he perceived as such a threat to the left? And why is he perceived as so awesome to the right?”

    I think the second question is answered, in large part, by the first one.

  2. Lornkanaga Says:

    I agree with Laughingdog. Like Sarah Palin, the right loves him because the left sees him as a threat–he’s not the ignorant, gun-grubbing redneck or the monied, white-collar executive the left portrays the right as; rather, he’s likeable, which makes the left nuts ’cause he’s not easily portrayed as a demon and therefore dismissed. Also, the right loves him because the left is devoting so much time to trying to tear him down, and failing miserably; moreso, the more they try to tear him down, the more pathetic they look, which makes the left hate him all the more (hehehe).

  3. Breda Says:

    I dunno…I’d just like to see him in a utilikilt.

  4. Rustmeister Says:

    I think it’s because he is an average guy.

    They don’t like it when us regular folks get all uppity.

  5. Tom Says:

    Why is he a threat to the left?

    I thought this was obvious to you prags, he’s a threat because he’s out there asking questions and getting people to think. Remember the whole “question authority” thing, and “don’t trust the man” well, just WHO IS the authority and the man these days? They’re being fought on their terms and are peeved because the memory hole doesn’t always work.

    As for the right, it’s because unlike most dolts in the party he IS an everyman, not some lifelong politician that gives the dems a run for their money on how they can stick their nose up your ass and find some cash for themselves.

  6. _Jon Says:

    He (and Sarah) are treasures to the right because he cares for more than just himself or his popularity. He has a strong moral compass and won’t do whatever it takes to be famous. He wants to learn, improve and do new things. But most importantly, he wants to make a better life available to others.
    (Contrast that with the sentiment of wanting to make life better for others – that’s a socialist idea that you can make a horse drink.)

    If he becomes successful and popular, it will cause significant problems to the liberals and leftists that seek to foist themselves as the most popular and those who know what is best for others. Essentially, if ordinary people begin assuming positions of leadership and encouraging others, then elites will lose some of their control. That would be bad for them.

    The right and left feel that undercurrent.

  7. nk Says:

    I’m no friend of his and no enemy either. God bless him trying to earn his daily bread. And it’s not an answer to your question.

    Ok, how about there’s no accounting for peoples’ likes and dislikes? Kind of like putting bacon in chili?

  8. Haruhara Haruko Says:

    He’s entertaining to me. Why should I need more of a reason to follow him?

  9. Robert Says:

    I think the left dislikes him so much so because not only is he really the everyman that all above say he his, but he is quite eloquent and smart about it. Instead of being the left’s stereotypical “They took er jerbs!!!!!!” that they want to potray the every day sorta guy as, he is a fairly well spoken, smart individual. He is the individual that they are pandering too, but he wants nothing to do them.

  10. GrumpyUnk Says:

    As you pointed out, look at the anal exam this guy got for asking a simple question. The response to that sort of BS by other, Regular Joe’s explains a lot of it.

    Seeing the Power of the State brought to bear on a guy illegally as was done to him, and used by the Leftists and the Media the way it was, elevated his status considerably.

    That the Left is still, Batshit Crazy about him says more about them than it does, Joe.

  11. Robert Says:

    And my closing in the above reponse is why he is seen as so awesome to the right… He is the every day sort of guy the left try to get to snatch up in droves, but he didn’t buy into the BS and started asking questions and tripping up their candidate.

  12. N.U.G.U.N. Says:

    Why a threat to the Left – “because he was just an average guy who had the gumption to comment that the emperor wasn’t wearing any socks, (when in fact the emperor was butt naked)…because the Left likes to claim they are doing what they do for the avg joe. But it’s all a lie. And he embarrassed them, made them look bad.’

    Why a hero to the right – I think because he survived. And we’re tired of the media’s claims of being unbiased when they’ve gone so far as to be worthy of PAC status. We on the right are so tired of being demonized. Joe isn’t so much a hero, but he’s the little boy that proved to many of us that the media is evil, and that the MSM is our enemy. Many of us felt that the attacks on Palin were deliberate and engineered. But there was always the caveat that Palin was running, she was a target. She was new and in the spotlight. Then Joe came around. And we realized that our gutt reactions, our internal instincts and the alarms going off in our head were NOT out of whack. We were indeed right. The attacks were coordinated, deliberate, vicious, obscene, and very targeted.

    And 2008 will be the year that I, and many others, declared that the MSM is not merely “no friend of mine”, but in fact an enemy.

  13. gattsuru Says:

    He’s an inexperienced jackass. On the other hand, he’s an inexperienced jackass that stepped forward and started thinking.

    The right likes him because he’s an example of their ideology gone perfect. A normal Joe with the individuality to take an opportunity and make a big change, and it wasn’t just luck — if Obama never went to his door, he’d still be working at making it big in the plumbing business. That he’s a relatively sane libertarian is just icing on the cake.

    The left hate him because he’s conservative. Same reason they really hated Palin. People hate him because he’s a gun-owning, anti-abortion woman who actually stuck to his guns. If you play a Republican in Massachusetts sometime, you’ll notice that there are quite a few people convinced that Republicans exist merely due to ignorance or inexperience. They like guns because they’ve never dealt with real violence, they hate abortion because they’ve never experienced the horror of an unwanted baby, they hate gay people because they’re ignorant bible-thumpers that wouldn’t know a gay man if he gave fashion advice to them, they hate social services because they’ve never seen a mother have to work or deal with unemployment, they can be for the war in Iraq because they think war is just an oversized game of risk. Without the inexperience card, the ignorance one is the only way to wrap their brains around the current worldview. While a good number of the saner nutty left wing actually snap out of the fugue (and I will say they’re at least more open-minded than the nutty right), you can end up with some really rabid individuals. Pretty much the same reason a lot of Republicans get pissy about Hollywood actors, albeit without all the hypocrisy.

  14. gattsuru Says:

    Gr… typed to fast. That should have been :

    People hated her because she’s a gun-owning, anti-abortion woman who actually stuck to her guns. They hate him because he’s a working man that doesn’t want the deal with the devil.

  15. Southern Beale Says:

    To the left, he’s an evil shill of the right who should be destroyed for having the audacity to be standing there when Obama happened to want to ask him some questions.

    Actually you aren’t even close. To the left, he’s a buffoon, an endless source of amusement. We’re as completely befuddled by the folks who think he’s got anything worthwhile to contribute to the discourse as you are. So we just stand on the sidelines and watch and laugh hysterically. But keep it up, by all means. He’s the gift that keeps on giving.

    Ditto with Sarah Palin.

    Palin/JoePlumber, 2012!

  16. Harold Says:

    One other detail that’s a subset of him and Palin and her family being “everyman”: they have blue collar cred. Joe’s a plumber. Both the Palins do commercial fishing and in the off season he’s a union oil worker. Etc.

    These new “stars” of the right put the lie to everything the Left says about the proletariat who’s interests they so diligently protect….

    Side note about his reporting in Israel: a regular who was a more typical war correspondent type, a bachelor and so on, was pleased by Joe’s “everyman” observations. Someone from a more normal suburban existence like Joe notices a bunch of things he and his type didn’t.

    This was in regards to reporting from Israeli residential areas that have been getting rocketed for years; one good comment Joe made was that in their situation you don’t e.g. dare get soap in your eyes while in the shower (there’s very little warning time for short range Quassams (sp?)).

  17. Phoronus Says:

    Pretty much what Southern Beale said. He’s a joke. He’s got extremely simple, childish views and opinions that he unveils as if they were masterpieces. The only thing that is slightly worrisome is that someone with these views is getting as much (though it’s really not that much) positive coverage as he is.

  18. Yu-Ain Gonnano Says:

    Yep, if he had any intelligence he would support Obama. /lefty

  19. tgirsch Says:

    SoBeale:
    To the left, he’s a buffoon, an endless source of amusement.

    Amen to that. I love how gattsuru accuses him of “thinking,” when he goes out there and publicly calls for a return to the days of government-produced war propaganda films, and keeps thrusting himself into the spotlight to insist “I’m not the story.” gatt thinks “Wow, this guy’s an independent thinker!” I think, “Wow, this guy doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about!” I hope to hell the middle class has more knowledgeable conservative-leaning “everyman” types to offer, because if that’s the best they can come up with…

    To me, it seems as if the right, in a knee-jerk reaction to perceived “elitism,” has openly embraced ignorance as some sort of virtue or highly desirable character trait. And JTP is a perfect example of this.

    For the record, I think JTP got a raw deal during the presidential campaign — he got turned into a cheap political prop, without his consent (at least initially), and got treated poorly by the media, largely undeservedly. But that was then. Ever since, he’s pretty much sought out the spotlight, or at the very least hasn’t tried to avoid it, and that makes him fair game.

  20. Dan Says:

    Probably elitism mixed with disgust at a middle-class person who is not a lock-step democrat. Being poor, err, middle class is ok with the left as long as the middle class think the same way. I thought it was pretty sick that Joe got vetted far more than Obamer did during the campaign.

    His popularity on the right feeds off the senseless rage and hate that the left displays towards him. Same with Sarah Palin. There is a certain charm to characters that buck conformity.

  21. chris Says:

    he was one of the only people in the entire campaign to walk up to Obama and ask a real question…

    if the average reporter had half the stones he did, Obama wouldnt have ever had a chance.

  22. gattsuru Says:

    gatt thinks “Wow, this guy’s an independent thinker!” I think, “Wow, this guy doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about!”

    Either I’m not conversing this topic correctly — and I’ll admit today’s not a good day for my neurology, hence why I haven’t responded to your rant from yesterday — or you’re willfully misunderstanding what I am trying to say.

    The point is not someone thinking intelligently, or even thinking the right answers. It’s thinking in the first place, rather than merely reacting like Coulter or O’Reilly or Olbermann, or “telling their truth” like Limbaugh or Dan Rather or the thousands of idiots with poor skills at statistical analysis and a sponsor with cash to waste. I’ve got no problem with elites or the smart or the ‘strong’, but the brawn nor brain nor the proud Newsweek rating of your college changes the truth, and more than a fair share of elites seem to miss that point or get obsessed with arguments of authority of layers of fact-checkers that don’t know the difference between a clip and a magazine or generic and unnamed experts that specialized in a different field.

    I can think of a number of good reasons for government sponsored war propaganda — after all, WWII was the last time troops could come home from a war and not be spat at or threatened by ranting idiots — although I can think of many, many more for the opposite. You don”t have to be right to be worth paying attention to. Quite a few important revelations boil down to nothing more than someone thinking wrong enough.

  23. straightarrow Says:

    Why he has remained in the public eye so long is entirely due to his detractors. They were afraid his one question would cause other people to think. That cannot be allowed if you’re a leftist or a moderate.

    Ergo, in their effort to destroy the dangerous spectre of individual thought they showed just exactly what they think of the rest of us. Encapsulated it is “Shut up and obey.”

    As we can see in some of the less intelligent commenters right here that is the mantra. Can’t destroy the message, destroy the messenger, even if he is an accidental messenger.

  24. straightarrow Says:

    Can’t destroy the message, destroy the messenger, even if he is an accidental messenger.

    Did I mention “FUCK YOU”.

  25. straightarrow Says:

    I don’t believe no. 24 is mine, but as Dan Rather would say “It may not be true, but it is accurate.”

Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.

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