Bastardisation of the East: Leaking sympathy

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Leaking sympathy

If you already have one foreign policy moron on your books it seems selfish to grab another. But John McCain (whose own foreign policy expertise and judgement has always been totally overblown) is not content with Sarah Palin and has repeatedly given a forum to his other attack lemming of the common man, Joe the Plumber, who seemingly finds time between fixing leaky pipes to follow events in the Middle East. Fair enough. If there's one thing this Bush administration has reminded us it's that Arabs and pipelines go hand in hand. BUT WAIT. I thought Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (let's ditch the silly nickname, shall we) was tired of being in the American media spotlight. Does he really want to go global?

Just like with Palin, the National Review and friends segment of the pro-Republican media gets extremely defensive, pompous and hypocritical when this whinging campaign mascot comes into play. McCain campaigners are permitted to harness his common touch to try and smite the Democrats, but playtime is called off when any questions are asked about qualifications or life experience, and how this might contradict the claims he makes. Yes, it is destructive and a little frivolous to delve too deep into Wurzelbacher's private affairs, and yes, a citizen does have a legitimate right to put his concerns to a presidential candidate, no matter how wrong his end of the stick might be. But there were valid inquiries to be made about how much he was earning, since McCain wanted to exploit Wurzelbacher as a poster boy for suffering caused by Obama's tax plans even though the plumber wasn't even close to raking in enough to suffer a tax raise.

At the same time Wurzelbacher was doing press conferences from his house and appearing on national TV, some of the cranially well-insulated wing of anti-Obama central piped up and claimed he was being hounded. Hounded by Obama's campaign and the elite left liberal media, they claimed, none of whom had forced him into the media spotlight it should be noted. Wurzelbacher himself moaned a bit about all the attention he had waded into with these interviews, apparently unaware that pictures from CBS news and the like are beamed into a magic box in the homes of millions of Americans. This uncalled for media frenzy is probably what prompted Wurzelbacher and John McCain to scale down the high profile Joe the Plumber brand.

My last post was about members of the public being forced unprepared into the media furnace, so I could muster up some sympathy if I thought this was a similar situation. Yet this guy is still making appearances spouting his worthless and uninformed opinions (ahem) on the national stage. His claims about Israel and Obama have no basis. Obama has already pandered to the AIPAC lobbyists and made some vague threats to Iran. Chances are that Obama will neither show the negligence to bring the destruction of Israel, nor the initiative to force through the most concrete way of preserving her in peace: a Palestinian state alongside Israel and comprehensive peace negotiations with her neighbours.

¶ posted by the leech at 10/29/2008

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