Some articles of particular note:
Claudia Rosett: First They Came for Joe the Plumber…:
Within days, reports were all over the news that Joe owes back taxes, he doesn’t have an Ohio plumber’s license, his real name is Samuel, and he is — shock and horror — a registered Republican. Within days, Obama and Biden were holding up Joe to public ridicule, and by implication mocking any American working stiff who might have the audacity to want to earn more than $250,000 per year.
Obama may be full of talk about delivering the American dream, but he apparently has enormous disdain for Americans who actually sweat to earn it for themselves. He wants to take Joe’s money and spread it around in the name of helping others get ahead — but if anyone gets ahead more than Obama deems fitting, watch out.
Ruben Navarette Jr.: The Democratic Party’s Drubbing of Joe the Plumber.
Iowahawk: I AM JOE
neo-neocon:
Like Iowahawk, I’m finding that the attacks on Joe the Plumber have made me angrier than almost anything else in this long and nasty campaign.
Power Line: Two faces of socialism:
Barack Obama’s candid comment to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” brought back memories of a similarly candid moment during Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign.
The criticisms of Joe Wurzelbacher have reminded me of a quote from “The West Wing” that I took note of around the time I started to sour on the show’s ideological bias and occasionally heavy-handed rhetoric: “That’s the problem with the American Dream,” intoned the fictional President Bartlett, in frustrated in response to the notion of people having the audacity to complain about their taxes being too high. “Everyone worries about when they’re going to be rich.”
Because hey, higher taxes are OK as long as it’s somebody else who’s paying them, right?
Via Instapundit: An interview with the now-famous “Joe the plumber” (not this “Joe the plumber”) whose tax question at an Ohio campaign rally elicited Barack Obama’s now equally famous “spread the wealth” comment. Very interesting stuff.
And now this video: Obama Mocks Joe The Plumber, Crowd Laughs.
That’s quite a hefty dose of sneering condescension. Don’t politicians realize by now that everything they say is recorded by someone, somewhere and can and probably will come back to bite them?
Meanwhile, Joe’s been put under the microscope:
Glenn Reynolds:
They’ve done more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they’ve done on Barack Obama in two years … .
Daniel Glover:
[W]hy is it that political reporters only get curious when a conservative Joe America storms onto the scene?
James Pethokoukis at U.S. News: Did Barack “Spread the Wealth” Obama Just Blow the Election? (hat tip: Instapundit):
A while back I chatted with a University of Chicago professor who was a frequent lunch companion of Obama’s. This professor said that Obama was as close to a full-out Marxist as anyone who has ever run for president of the United States. Now, I tend to quickly dismiss that kind of talk as way over the top. My working assumption is that Obama is firmly within the mainstream of Democratic politics. But if he is as free with that sort of redistributive philosophy in private as he was on the campaign trail this week, I have no doubt that U of C professor really does figure him as a radical. And after last night’s debate, a few more Americans might think that way, too.
Another fine article from Bill, over at NRO. This point in particular resonated with what I’ve been thinking about the whole mess:
So how do we inflict some badly-needed pain on people who need to feel it, without hurting the rest of the good and honest folks who pay their bills responsibility?
Much easier said than done, unfortunately.
There’s a comment thread for the article over at Bill’s place.
Heh:
Seems to me that the inability of somebody like Rangel to keep his taxes straight is, at the very least, an argument for radical tax simplification of some sort. Not that that gets Rangel off the hook, any more than it would for you or me.
Interesting item that went by this week while I was too busy to blog about it:
An excellent, uncharacteristically long post over at Instapundit about the subprime mortgage crisis and, somewhat peripherally, Senator McCain’s recent comments on the matter. One especially interesting reader comment:
According to many in congress and social commentators, one of the main causes of the subprime mess was mortgage brokers doing loans for people that we knew could not repay the loan.
As a mortgage broker if I had a customer sitting in front of me who qualified for a loan (according to lender guidelines in place at the time), I was supposed to tell them that I was not going to do a loan for them because I don’t think they will make their payments? Can you imagine the uproar if lenders and brokers did that to customers? Especially if the customer happened to be a minority. It comes down to a case of brokers being damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
Worth reading the whole thing for a variety of comparably interesting perspectives on what’s happening. And be sure not to miss this excellent 2006 SNL sketch guest-starring Steve Martin. I had never seen it before myself, but the radically “new” idea being pitched pretty well sums up what my approach to credit has been all my life: if you don’t have the money now, don’t buy it! I don’t know to what experiences I might owe my natural aversion to spending beyond my means, but it has certainly served me well. Buying a house, of course — especially in California — is one purchase for which the need to borrow money is nearly unavoidable, barring truly extraordinary business or investment talents. But even given that, one does have a choice about whether and under what conditions to proceed. A couple of years ago, the assortment of house prices and lending instrument terms being offered in the SF Bay Area entered the realm of the truly absurd. I’m certainly glad I exercised restraint and didn’t buy then.
As for McCain, I’m generally inclined to like the guy better than any of the presently available alternatives, but I didn’t much appreciate his comments about “greedy people on Wall Street”, which Glenn Reynolds followed up on here, here, and here. As James Taranto put it in the WSJ:
He seems to view the making of money — that is to say, the production of goods and services that people want, and the act of supplying them through voluntary exchange in a free market — as a less than honorable pursuit.
Certainly, I feel obliged to point out, this is not the point of view I would choose if I were assembling my idea of an ideal candidate from scratch. But I’m a practical man, and politics is rightly enough the art of the possible, not the ideal. I’m still sad about Fred Thompson having withdrawn his candidacy, as are others, but even as my first choice he wasn’t someone with whom I agreed on all issues. If anything, I appreciated his straightforward honesty about his convictions, whether I agreed with him on a particular philosophical point or not. Much preferable to crowd-pleasing evasion and fungible, poll-driven responses-du-jour in my book.
In any case, Fred’s bowed out of the race, and all the write-in votes the country has to offer seem unlikely to change that. So for now at least, I’m with McCain. I’m no big fan of McCain-Feingold, or of his recent, left-echoing “econo-baiting”, but he’s got it right on the one issue that overrides all others for me: seeing things through to a tenable conclusion in Iraq, and showing the Jihadists who mean with demonstrated determination to bring harm to the United States and the West at large that we will not back down.
Update 2/3: If he doesn’t win re-election to the Czech presidency on February 8th, can we draft Václav Klaus?
This recent comment following Dr. Helen’s post “Time for Another Boston Tea Party?”, struck me as aptly put:
There are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week. We all get that, rich or poor. What one does with that time is up to that individual. 3% of the population, on average, has a library card. It’s free! The contents of a library are free to borrow! The cumulative knowledge of mankind is at hand, free! There are librarians there to help you, if you don’t understand the Dewey Decimal System. Free!
All men are created equal. After that, it’s up to each and every one of us. The reason one is rich, one is poor, one lives in a huge house, and one lives in an 8×10 cell is what’s between his ears. Always has been, always will be. Emotional IQ as well as intelligence IQ. A fair tax is a killer idea. If it’s fair. That is, as long as fairness is not the same as beauty, being in the eye of the beholder.
I am far and away from being wealthy. I believe in paying the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is good to help those who cannot help themselves. Food, clothing, roof over the head, help to get back on your feet. Then the “training wheels” need to come back off.
I have great sympathy for those who truly struggle, and believe those of us who are better off should do what we can to help others lift themselves up out of debilitating poverty. But if we value this magnificent free society that allows the production of this wealth that we are so fortunate to enjoy, we must do so by means of voluntary good that is consistent with the free society’s principles, rather than by coercive means, and we mustn’t allow the perpetuation of a “victim” mentality, or a soft bigotry of low expectations, to substitute for doing real, practical good.
Bill Whittle eloquently yet succinctly addressed the issue of poverty, what to do about it, and what not to do about it in his 2003 essay “Trinity” — highly recommended, and always worth another reading.
