Iowahawk responds to a critic who feels he’s neglected poor scandalized Bill Ayers in his fervor to stick up for Joe the Plumber. Hilarity ensues:
I AM BILL. I am the everyday forgotten little guy in your neighborhood, the quiet anarcho-syndicalist family man who gets up early and punches the clock at the local state university, writing the manifestos and polemics and grant proposals that keep America humming. I’m just doing my job, and all I ask in return is a little respect. And tenure. And Chicago Citizen of the Year awards. And two graduate assistants to grade exams for Practicum in Imperialist Racist Hegemony 311, because I’m teaching two sections this semester. Also, a sabbatical to Italy next summer would be nice.
Read the whole, delightful fisking.
Another great installment of Chris Muir’s reader-supported “Day by Day” cartoon. Guest-starring Joe the Plumber!
At PJM (hat tip:
Little Green Footballs):
The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game. With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.
Zombie has acquired a copy of Bill Ayers’ 1974 manifesto, “Prairie Fire”, and posts scanned excerpts and analysis.
This essay only exists to correct and unequivocably debunk claims routinely made by the mainstream media over the last few weeks about William Ayers, his beliefs, and the purpose behind his bombing campaign during the 1970s.
Specifically, when questions arose during the 2008 presidential race about Barack Obama’s past associations with William Ayers, many media reports and articles blandly described Ayers as a “Vietnam-era radical” and the Weather Underground as a group that set bombs “to protest against the Vietnam War.” Both of these characterizations are demonstrably inaccurate.
Read the whole, revealing thing, which makes it seem imperative that we get some much-needed clarification on the extent or limit of Senator Obama’s relationship to Ayers. Could Mr. Obama really have reviewed another of Ayers’ books in 1997, let alone served on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with Ayers, without having developed any awareness of Ayers’ virulently anti-U.S. radical-revolutionary ideology?
Thanks to Monster and Little Green Footbals for pointing this out.
Update 10/23: The “Ayers’ Current Views” wrap-up to the essay is now up. It concludes with this chilling quote of undercover Weather Underground infiltrator Larry Grathwohl, regarding the group’s plans for post-revolutionary America:
I asked, well, what’s going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate; that are die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
And they were dead serious.
Update 10/28: More in a Bob Owens interview with Larry Grathwohl: Eyewitness to the Ayers Revolution
A must-read, can’t-be-adequately-summarized-with-a-quote plea to the press by Orson Scott Card: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
(Thank you Instapundit!)
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?
