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'Joe the Plumber' and other wasteful things
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They're trying to Lewinsky you. They're trying to use your average Joe (or Monica) to distract you from the reality of their Man.
Whether or not Joe the Plumber is indeed a plumber, whether he has a union card or even knows the first thing about the trade is irrelevant. Because whatever the truth is about Joe the Plumber the one thing that remains true is Barack Obama's core belief: Socialism is good.
That the hatchet-swinging Progressive Media has now done more to tell us about Joe the Plumber than young Obama's drug dealer – or, frankly, anything else about the Junior Senator from Illinois, including details about his long relationship with William Ayers – one can fairly assume that the Progressive Media shares Mr. Obama's core belief. (By extension, one would be well-advised to take everything the Progressive Media says about economics with a few grains of salt.)
When Mr. Obama said, "It's not that I want to punish your success... My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody... I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," he assumed Joe the Plumber was as Joe presented himself. There is no logical reason to believe Obama's general principles would be any different if he were talking to Joe the Not-Plumber, Bob the Builder, Amy the Attorney, Holly the Hotelier or Pete the Programmer.
Either way, Obama the Oppressor let the mask slip. Hope and Change is Viva La Revolución with a more savvy marketing department.
The obvious problems with Mr. Obama's Progressive maxim are that a) Socialism must punish success, often explicitly; b) Socialism rarely makes people better off from the bottom up, it simply tears down the top and wastes resources throughout the process; c) capitalism, in fact, is what makes people better from the bottom up because investors have to wait for a return which may not arrive for years while workers get paid every two weeks; d) spreading the wealth around isn't good for everybody. It's usually only good for those in the business of spreading the wealth around.
All this leads one to ask why Mr. Obama hasn't bothered to spend much of his and his wife Michelle's considerable treasures on helping their impoverished African relatives. For just pennies a day they could double his Kenyan half-brother's annual income. Perhaps in the whole two decades of Mr. Obama's membership in Reverend Wright's Happy Church of Hate they didn't spend any time teaching Mr. Obama about plucking the beam out of his own eye before trying to get the specks out of the rest of ours. Too much God-damning America and not enough Matthew 7.
No matter. I'm sure the rest of us will cheerily chip in on his nearly $1 trillion foreign aid / United Nations welfare program should the New Adam come to His throne, doing the job the Junior Senator from Illinois hasn't the integrity to do himself.
SPEAKING OF WASTE
The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is debating the naming of a sewage treatment facility after George W. Bush. This is clearly intended to be a juvenile slight against the president who, despite his many faults, led America and her scores of allies to freeing some 55 million people in the Middle East, while taking the fight to the fulcrum of Islamic radicalism.
But, like Joe the Plumber, this plumbing story tells us something else about Progressives: their disdain for what they benefit from everyday.
Without plumbers and sewers, cities and cocktail parties would not exist. Not without unending battles against Cholera and every other tiny thing Mother Nature conspires to kill us with. It's dirty. It's ugly. Nobody will print your photo in Vanity Fair and nearly everyone will pause before shaking your hand. But the people who make it work make the rest of our lives possible.
Like sewers, President Bush spent every day taking – well, you know – from ungrateful people who would rather not think about the dirty jobs that have to be done. Everyone agrees that Mr. Bush messed up a number of things, some quite spectacularly. But with Democrats who think they can play Keystone Kops with terrorists - who pretend that Osama Bin Laden = Islamofascism, and therefore spend what little imaginations they have aiming their horse-blind stare at the mountains of Pakistan - we may one day regret our attacks on a flawed man who was willing to face the ugly stuff for what it is.
There is a pattern here. Look at how quickly Progressive emotion-leaders turn on middle America. (I can't bear to use the term "thought leader" so profligately.) Notice how readily they will say one thing to your face and another to their friends, as in Mr. Obama's infamous statement about clinging to guns and religion; or when his campaign told Canadian officials that his rhetoric concerning trade relations with Canada and Columbia was all bullocks meant to dupe the Proles into supporting him. Notice how the Progressive Media, Hollywood and Democratic politicians find it so easy to slam middle America - which is probably you if you think about it for a minute - when they think the cameras are off, or whenever they feel you've walked off their ideological plantation.
It is no accident that Progressivism is the favored ideology of most college sophomores, Hollywood types and convicted felons. There is an ambitious narcissism to Progressivism that prevents many a Progressive from seeing people as ends in themselves, or appreciating the value they bring. Instead, people tend to become only means to a particularly self-centered end: the Progressive's own self-congratulation.
If you believe that in fact everyday Progressives care about "the workers" you are probably correct. But then most of us care about one another - we just differ on how best to make everyone better off. On the other hand, don't expect too much authentic concern from Progressive leaders like Mr. Obama or his sycophantic media. They will tell you anything to get you to give them power over your lives, but they appreciate your value as well as they appreciate plumbing that works; and to them, you're as expendable as Joe the Plumber.
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