Thursday, April 02, 2009

The truth about Joe the Plumber -- he's as clueless as he is stupid

By Michael J.W. Stickings

When last we checked in with Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher, he was off to the Pennsylvania heartland to campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Well, as you might have expected, it -- that is, campaigning for an anti-labor group in a part of the country that is built on labor -- didn't go well. As Think Progress notes: "Wurzelbacher faced a tough crowd near Pittsburgh on Monday, where union members rallied against him. He faced a similarly critical audience in Harrisburg [on Tuesday], and then "skipped a subsequent rally in Philadelphia."

But maybe it also didn't go well because, well, Joe the Plumber didn't really know what the hell he was talking about. Indeed, when asked by Keystone Progress about his opposition to the legislation, he admitted that he hasn't actually read it and, well, that:

I don't know everything about everything.

Or anything about anything, for that matter, or at least nothing about this.

It was a genuinely revealing moment. Here is a celebrity-hero-icon-myth of the right basically admitting, with a camera in his face, that he doesn't have a fucking clue. Not that not having one has stopped him from cashing in on his 15 minutes, now stretched into months, whenever possible, whether it's heading over to Israel to "report" for the right-wing insanitarium or heading off to Pennsylvania to screw America's working men and women -- in both cases, we are supposed to believe that he's just a regular working Joe telling it like it is and standing up for America when what he really is is an empty vessel for right-wing propaganda.

The good people of Pennsylvania -- have I mentioned that I love Pittsburgh? -- basically told him to fuck off, to their everlasting credit, and, in the end, he was compelled to acknowledge his utter ignorance. But the right will stand by him, you can be sure of that, and that says much more about the state of American conservatism today than it does about Joe himself, who is far too much of a stupid opportunist to know what the hell's going on and how he's just being used.

Shame on "Joe" the "Plumber," but far more shame on his enablers and cheerleaders on the right.

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