Joe the Plumber蘑菇视频 words of wisdom?
On Oct. 12, 2008, Samuel Wurzelbacher confronted Sen. Barack Obama while he was on a campaign stop in Wurzelbacher’s Ohio neighborhood.
Wurzelbacher asked, “I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year. Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?”
Not only did Obama dispute Wurzelbacher’s thesis, it was later revealed that he was in no position to buy a company, anyway.
That was the day Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher became “Joe the Plumber,” the personification of a “working man,” who’d be crippled by Obama’s supposed plans to snatch riches from the rich and to throw them at the poor.
Within weeks he became a traveling mascot for the McCain/Palin presidential campaign.
It didn’t really matter that Joe the Plumber was found not to have been registered as a plumber under Ohio’s strict building regulations. In other words, Joe the Plumber, wasn’t even a plumber. He was simply equipped with a working-class face, and a ready-made disdain for Obama’s proposed tax policies, even though they would have no effect on him or the company he worked for at the time.
It’s obvious Joe the Plumber was basking in the glow of his new-found notoriety. He’d brazenly asked a future president a question, and, as a result, became a darling of the political right.
Even after the McCain/Palin campaign met its demise, Joe the Plumber persisted in remaining in the spotlight — sharing his opinions with anybody willing to take them seriously.
In June of 2012, he opined that Germany’s gun control had led to the extermination of six million Jews between 1939 and 1945.
“Different countries around the world have tried to disarm their citizens and then have tried to exterminate their own now-unarmed citizens,” the would-be plumber said to defend himself against criticisms by the National Jewish Democratic Council after his rewriting of WWII history.
That same year, Wurzelbacher decided he’d run for Congress in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District. It was a true test of his powers of political persuasion. In the end, his cheap, dime-store opinions didn’t serve him well. His Democratic challenger, Marcy Kaptur, took 70 percent of the vote. But Joe the Plumber has visions of political relevancy dancing in his troubled head.
The recent killing spree in Isla Vista, Calif., led the father of one of the victims to make impassioned pleas to take congressional actions to try to curtail gun violence.
Christopher Martinez was one of the shooting victims. His father Richard was understandably filled with emotions when he tearfully said, “Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live?”
That sent “Joe the Plumber” into his own tirade. He penned a terse open letter to the parents of the victims of the Isla Vista tragedy.
“Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights,” wrote Joe the Plumber “Gun Advocate.”
Life must be interesting for a man who seems to think the world can’t move forward from a tragedy until he shares his opinion about it. Samuel Wurzelbacher’s response to a father’s sincere grief, falls squarely under the category — “Who Asked You?”
Martinez freely admits he’d not paid much attention to the political arguments that have arisen after the oh-so frequent mass shootings that have shaken the nation. But it is his son now who has fallen. He has now joined thousands of parents who have been forced to mourn the loss of a child, who had simply “been in the wrong place at the wrong time” — when an irrational gunman needlessly put them in his cross hairs.
His anger is palpable. He knows now that even after 28 people died as the result of a madman in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, U.S. Senators, and even the president, have only paid lip service to making incremental changes in gun laws.
Mr. Wurzelbacher’s cheap political argument is troubling. Giving Martinez anything but sympathy crosses a line. One in which somebody with such limited intellectual heft should never dare to cross.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net