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.
Jennifer Rubin, quoting Sol Stern regarding Bill Ayers’ Annenberg Challenge agenda:
Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive.
So even if Obama is never queried on whether he was the only adult in Chicago unaware of Ayers’s Weather Underground background, shouldn’t someone ask why he was working for and helping to fund an organization which supported this type of curriculum? Again, perhaps he wasn’t paying attention, or they never mentioned all this in his presence, or Obama figured out it was all a bunch of bunk, but it seems it is an area worth exploring. After all, the media spent weeks puzzling over whether Palin wanted to teach creationism in schools. (For the umpteenth time, she doesn’t.) Don’t we get to know if Obama wanted to teach Marxism?
Seems like a fair enough question to me. Hat tip: Instapundit
More here, with an apt comment from Megan McArdle:
The problem Obama’s critics have is not that he once spent some time talking to Bill Ayers; it’s that he refuses to apologize for it now. That refusal to apologize is why the charge has proven hard to counter. You can argue that it isn’t a big deal, but you can’t argue it isn’t true, and unfortunately for Obama, some voters think it is a really big deal.
Still more, from Victor Davis Hanson:
Why in the world was Barack Obama still communicating on the phone or via email with Bill Ayers up until 2005 — when in 2001 Ayers gave widely publicized interviews claiming he had no regrets about the bombing, indeed regretted that he had not done enough, and did not necessarily have any remorse either about his Weathermen career?
Ponder that: the possible next President of the United States, well after 9/11 and in the climate of hourly worry over terrorism here at home, was still friendly and communicating with an associate that had to abandon his book tour due to popular outcry, and was widely quoted as absolutely unrepentant about his terrorism. That is a damning indictment of his judgement — among other things — and it is no “smear” to raise the issue.
Josh Strawn writes at PJM:
American exceptionalism gets a new name in a recent New York Times column from Roger Cohen: Palinism. This is a bizarre form of compliment from a detractor of Mrs. Palin — using her name to label a tradition in American ideology that’s been “around since the Founding Fathers,” which he admits is an “inspirational notion, however flawed in execution, that has buttressed the global spread of liberty.” But where Cohen sees antagonism between universalism, embodied by Barack Obama, and the American exceptionalism of Sarah Palin, in reality there is not much.
It sure sounds like that’s more than just blogosphere perception, according to this e-mail Glenn received:
A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: “Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.”
UPDATE 10/1:
Demanding a Sarah Palin press conference:
Only one candidate is being sheltered from tough press questions with the active complicity of the press.
OK, this is just a bit too creepy. And I truly believe I would find it no less creepy if something similar had been done by a candidate I actually favor. Can we at least agree to leave children out of our ideological battles?
