OPINION:
COMMENTARY:
Six-term Sen. Joe Biden’s got some nerve going after citizen Joe the Plumber. But the entrenched politician from Delaware, who fancies himself the nation’s No. 1 Ordinary Joe, had no choice. The Obama-Biden ticket simply can’t tolerate an outspoken citizen successfully painting the Democratic candidates as socialist overlords. So a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.
The left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life and predictably wielding the race card once again - standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine.
Mr. Wurzelbacher, in case you’ve been in hibernation, is the small-business man from Ohio who questioned Sen. Barack Obama about his tax plan during a Toledo campaign swing last weekend. The revealing exchange was caught on tape and broadcast widely across the Internet and TV airwaves.
In response to Mr. Wurzelbacher’s question about why he should be “taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” Mr. Obama sermonized that he needed to “spread the wealth around” because “it’s good for everybody.”
John McCain flung that chilling Marxist mantra back in Mr. Obama’s face during Wednesday night’s presidential debate and repeatedly cited Joe the Plumber’s plight. Mr. Obama squirmed.
The dirt-diggers started Googling. And the next morning, six-term Sen. Joseph Biden launched the first salvo against the Ohio entrepreneur on NBC’s “Today Show,” challenging the veracity of his story: “I don’t have any Joe the Plumbers in my neighborhood that make $250,000 a year.” Under an Obama-Biden administration, they’ll make sure no Joe the Plumbers ever earn such a salary. “It’s good for everybody,” don’t you know?
Mr. Biden, as is so often the case, twisted the facts about Mr. Wurzelbacher. No surprise there. Slick Joe Biden is the one who tells fables about visiting a diner in Delaware that hasn’t been open in years; spins yarns about getting “forced down” in a helicopter over Afghanistan because of perilous conditions that turned out to be weather-related, not al Qaeda-related; and continues to slander the family of the man involved in his wife and daughter’s fatal car accident (crash investigators cleared the now-deceased driver of drunk driving, despite Mr. Biden’s insinuations). But I digress.
Mr. Wurzelbacher never claimed to make $250,000 a year. He told Mr. 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 Mr. Obama’s punitive tax proposals would make it more difficult to realize his dream.
Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Wurzelbacher as some kind of rabid freak for calling Social Security a “joke” - as if no working-class Americans could believe 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Obama, claimed he didn’t do their required apprenticeship work and didn’t have a license to work outside his local township. Hang him!
After Mr. Wurzelbacher told Katie Couric that Mr. 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.”)
Welcome to Joe the Plumber Derangement Syndrome. If you can’t beat him, smear him. It’s the Obama way.
Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.”
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