For your morning moment of rage, here’s Joe the Former Plumber’s Assistant first campaign commercial, pitting a worker/conservative vs moocher/liberal. Joe styles himself as a “worker”, but when was the last time this guy held down a real job? That said, to Joe’s credit, he’s an Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes by teabagger standards, since he acknowledges that taxes actually pay for useful things, like parks and police.
Also, too: Joe needs to learn how to shut off comments on YouTube. They’re brutal.
mark
Holy crap. Thanks for linking to the comments. The best one?
“This is AIDS.”
Egg Berry
I thought OWS was all unwashed college students and drum circles?
amk
wasn’t jtb whining about his ‘taxes’ in 2008 ?
Joey Maloney
Wow. Even for Youtube those comments are harsh.
Oscarbob
Absolutely epic rant by Cousin Avi. Not to be missed.
http://cousinavi.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/republican-insult/
sb
@mark: Yep. That one’s a winner.
Betty Cracker
I posted a response video using some old footage I happened to have on hand….
Keith
Shorter Joe the Plumber: “Liberals drive like this. Conservatives drive like *this*.”
Egg Berry
@Betty Cracker: So we have established that Not Joe the Not Plumber is also Not a Comedian.
Smiling Mortician
@Betty Cracker: That was intensely painful. Thanks!
Amir Khalid
Who’s that on the “liberal’s” T-shirt?
Jim C
@Amir Khalid: Rod Blagojevich, of course.
FlipYrWhig
The “lib” has a Rod Blagojevich t-shirt? Does anyone remember anyone defending Blagojevich? And it really hinders the concept when the two guys meant to represent antithetical options look like they could be brothers .
Porco rosso
@Amir Khalid:
Blagoivich
Burnspbesq
Owwwwww. My brain hurts.
It’s too early in the morning for this stuff.
delphi_ote
You got me, Joe. The liberal in that video is SO me! My face is red.
mai naem
The winningest comment -“I see Joe’s running his campaign like he’s ran his plumbing business.”
Seriously what a freaking idiot. He looks like a latte sipping volvo driving leeberal. And then they use Lib vs. Con as the title. Really, you want to use Con. Okay, Joe the plumber is low hanging fruit.
The Fonzee of Freedom is on MHP this morning. She should have had Freedom Fries for his breakfast. He didn’t have his leather jacket on.
jefft452
“…but when was the last time this guy held down a real job?”
That would be never
Although he once had a job as a gopher at a plumbing company, he got fired from it
During and prior to his short lived employment, he was locally famous as a serial caller to local right wing talk radio
– in the middle of the weekday, you know, when real working people are at work
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
Somebody please tell me this retard has no children.
jwb
@mai naem: Yes, Joe looks like a “latte sipping volvo driving leeberal” and “the liberal” bears a resemblance to Rush Limbaugh. So there’s that too. Weird id-shit going on here.
Jay C
So that’s JtNaP’s selection for the typical “Occupy liberal”? A fat old white dude in a Rod Blago (!!) t-shirt?
Jeez, who picks these things out? I mean, OK: if
SamJoe wants to dress “upmarket” to make himself (and – one presumes – by extension, his viewpoint) look better? OK, then. But when you contrapose yourself against a cheap stereotype, you should at least pick one more recognizable, and less ludicrous: like, say, a black-clad Gothoid with a nose ring and a goatee. Or maybe that classic Republican standby: a scruffy, bearded “hippie” in an Army dufflecoat and Grateful Dead t-shirt.Man, no sense of design…..none!
Provider_UNE
@Betty Cracker:
While that was like watching a very slow motion trainwreck with out any of the excitement. And as I blew off the video in the original post, I guess this will have to serve as penance.
He certainly holds himself in enourmous regard. Whenever I see something like this I cannot but help to think of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
…
ThresherK
And I thought I’d never get to use my nickname for him ever agian.
Salud, “Plumber’s little helper”.
Omnes Omnibus
What the fuck did I ever do to you that you would try to make me watch this? I am a nice person. You bastard!
PurpleGirl
Maybe it’s too early for anything to make sense… but what was/is the point of that?
Mark S.
Uh, no thanks.
And I’ll usually click anything just to see how bad it is.
Ben Franklin
Republicans like to foster the myth ‘everyone can be rich’. Really? Don’t those service co’s have employees who must cater to the narcissus rubes who allow their feet to be washed by the vast unwashed?
If those workers were rich, would they perform such service or expect to be serviced? By whom?
Joe the Plumber is worried that someday his unemployed bankrupt ass will have a Bizness which could be rocked by taxes.
The American Dream.
Comrade Coffin
To paraphrase my favorite wonkette comment: “I’m surprised the liberal isn’t made out of straw”
Provider_UNE
@Oscarbob:
Thanks for the Cousin Avi link, it was a thing of beauty. I’ll have to add him to my list of things to check out frequently.
…
Egg Berry
I didn’t realize this, but Charles Pierce is a panelist on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.”
That’s OT, but the show is much more entertaining than that video.
EriktheRed
Couldn’t help but notice the “Occupy” guy is wearing a Blagojevich t-shirt. Is there ANY self-respecting, self-identifying liberal out there who’s EVER considered Blago to be a Lib just becaue he was a Dem?
quannlace
Really? Can’t see the dead-beaver-pelt hair style.
So what is Joe running for?
quannlace
Oh yeah, he’s on a lot. He has a great laugh.
Egg Berry
@quannlace: I just never connected the Charlie Pierce on WWDTM with the Charles Pierce at Esquire. Weird, I know.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Right Wing Zombies never die
Long as they get a bone to chew on,
every once in a while.
salacious crumb
Apparently liberal men have man boobies too! oh, the mind of a conservative..
jeffreyw
-Ridley Scott
Ruckus
@quannlace:
So what is Joe running for?
Town moron?
Otis Campbell II?
salacious crumb
you know what sucks for the guy playing liberal? he has to live with fact that Joe chose the ugliest guy to play a liberal..
Egg Berry
@salacious crumb:
Wait, I thought Joe was playing the conservative?
jeffreyw
Thread needs better YouTubes.
Mark S.
FREE BLAGO!
Southern Beale
The wardrobe of the “stereotypical liberal” is interesting to say the least. And is that Blogojevich on that T-shirt? Is that supposed to be a dog whistle of some kind? Ditto the flowered shirt over it: is that supposed to be “gay”?
As I wrote today, Republicans just aren’t good at the subtle message any more. Not sure they’re even trying.
gene108
I think Joe disqualified himself from getting the support of the base by admitting working people, who pay taxes, support public infrastructure that benefits everybody.
That’s way to liberal for the modern Republicans. I’m surprised no true right-wing challenger hasn’t sprouted up to refudiate his claims about taxes benefiting the general public.
Unsympathetic
What is it that makes kneejerk conservatives miss the fact that liberals have to bust their ass working for a living to make enough to be able to pay taxes? I’ve worked hard all my life – I’m still not where I want to be – and yet I also think we as a nation [and I as a person] should be taxed more to pay for the services we all receive. This isn’t the bizarro-land conservative stereotype of liberals, but that’s why stereotyping is wrong.
Stuck in the Funhouse
And this, my friends, is how you make lemonade out of a lemon.
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/05/19/quote_of_the_day.html
4tehlulz
Lookin’ kinda metrosexual there Joe.
Another Bob
I loved reading the comments to “Joe”‘s video. Ones like this:
LOL!
g
Lame.
Ken
This could be even more fun in November. He’ll have to use his real name on the ballot, and there’ll be thousands of people trying to figure out why “Joe the Plumber” isn’t on the ballot. Even better, the Democrats need to find someone – anyone – named Joe to run third-party.
Mnemosyne
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Don’t worry. The same people who were bitching and moaning about how Obama wasn’t saying the right things about gay rights even though he was taking the right actions will be around any minute to bitch and moan about how this is “just words” and while Obama is saying the right things, it will be meaningless until he also takes the right actions.
Thor Heyerdahl
Typical Republican behaviour (from Reuters)
[Curt] Schilling game firm can’t make Rhode Island payment
Thor Heyerdahl
@Thor Heyerdahl: Ack – blockquoting didn’t work – even tried to put a “_” between paragraphs
PurpleGirl
@jeffreyw: LOL! Thanks for that.
I think I’ve written here before about Norwegian TV showing English and American TV shows with subtitles in Norwegian. They had decided it was too expensive to dub the shows in Norwegian so the leave the sound track alone. One by-product of this is that students can hear real spoken English and it helps them with their English classes in school to hear how English is spoken.
Provider_UNE
@Southern Beale:
Read your piece, had a couple of ideas for you but cant seem to get past the wordpress goalie.
Instead I get the following:
Please log in to post your comment.
[email protected] belongs to an account you are not currently logged into.
WordPress.com or Gravatar.com credentials work.
I dont ever recall setting up a worpress account and my email is my Gravatar credentials.
In any event you have started an interesting discussion, and while I would like to contribute, I don’t think I am exactly on my a game today, though I have save the comment and will post it if i can figure away around that goalie.
.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne:
I think they’re actually satisfiable, in the sense that they want something that doesn’t exist, but at least they want something specific. They want him to yell and swear and call the bad guys names and throw some of them in jail AND get unprecedented results. In fact, the most important disconnect is their belief that the above approach leads to the best possible results. I’ve heard it over and over since Obama was elected. With the stimulus, with the debt negotiations, with DADT, with Wall Street, they want Action Movie President.
Amir Khalid
@Thor Heyerdahl:
A single underscore won’t do it. You need two underscores (like this: “__”) to get the block quote to continue across paragraphs with a blank line in between.
FlipYrWhig
@Frankensteinbeck: And how. It always comes back to how the more aggressive, more militant Obama of their wishes would _also_ win more and be more appealing to people not like them. And that’s really just a variant of the David Brooks / Tom Friedman view that the best course any politician could ever take is the one that satisfies _them_, because to satisfy them is obviously to satisfy America.
Or, as we have said many times, the claim that Obama should try harder or fight harder never really takes into account fighting and losing. It’s always a vision that if he fought, he’d win, QED.
JoyfulA
@Provider_UNE: That happens to me whenever I try to comment on Southern Beale, too. I’m glad to know I’m not the only idiot, persecutee, whatever.
Origuy
@Ken: He’s running in Ohio CD-9, Kucinich’s old district. The Democratic candidate is Marcy Kaptur. Samuel Werzelbacher (who?) doesn’t stand a chance, even after redistricting.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Amir Khalid: Thanks!
Another Bob
@Mnemosyne:
Thanks for bringing this up. Just because “the same people” are nowhere in evidence at the moment and would undoubtedly be voting for Obama even if they actually did exist, doesn’t mean that they should get a free ride from the O-bots. Being a strawman should never protect a vanishingly rare sub-species from a much-deserved kick in the ribs.
Frankensteinbeck
@Another Bob:
Bear in mind, this vanishingly rare sub-species drowns thread after thread in bitching without provocation. This makes them an active and constant concern to those who strongly disagree with them. Whether or not you are part of this group, they are most decidedly not a strawman.
Mnemosyne
@Another Bob:
I was actually alluding to a specific person without using their nym since I didn’t want said person to derail this thread along with all of the other threads he’s derailed lately, but thanks for playing.
Citizen_X
@4tehlulz: NotJoe the NotPlumber is like an American metrosexual V.I. Lenin.
Legalize
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Which is why you have to shoot them in the face at the first sign of turning.
Jennifer
When you’re getting owned in comments on youtube, of all places, it’s time to hang it up.
Nick
@Ken: I’m pretty sure that it’s permissible for people to use their middle name on ballots — for instance, Mitt Romney wouldn’t be listed as “Willard Romney”, would he? So Joe the Fake Plumber could still be listed as “Joe Werzelbacher” on the ballot even though his first name is Samuel.
(This is a guess on my part — I’m Australian so I don’t know if America actually does have a “must use first name and not middle name” rule.)