If there is one guy I never, ever want to hear about again (though we all know I will), it’s Joe The Freaking Plumber. There is no annoyance scale capable of scoring my hatred for the phrase "Joe The Plumber". It’s worth at least ten "My Friends"s, and perhaps as many as fifteen "You Betcha"s. Truly, it was the hokey, hackneyed lowlight of the entire debate. I certainly didn’t expect, going in, to hear Joe The Plumber’s name referenced more often than Ayers, more often than Sarah Palin. It just didn’t make sense.
And yet both Obama and McCain continued, relentlessly and unerringly, to treat Joe The Plumber as if he was not just a metric to judge their economic plans but the only applicable standard by which to gauge the economy. Suspiscions ablaze, I did a bit of digging into this Joe The Plumber guy and what I found, quite frankly, shocked me. . .