Thursday, October 16, 2008

Joe the Plumber: Racist?

Katie Couric got the "get" with Joe Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio, now the world's most famous plumber. Wurzelbacher said:

You know, I've always wanted to ask one of these guys a question and really corner them and get them to answer a question of--for once instead of tap dancing around it. And unfortunately I asked the question but I still got a tap dance . . . almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.

This obviously got a huge blog reaction, with lots of liberal bloggers implying that Joe is a racist. Of course, he applied the tap-dancing metaphor to both candidates, and while I suppose it might have been possible to compare Obama to Fred Astaire -- a skinny guy with big ears -- it's kind of hard to find bigoted malevolence in the comparison to Davis, who (a) was universally beloved and (b) supported Richard Nixon in 1972.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin does a column on JTPDS (Joe The Plumber Derangement Syndrome) and says:
There are now tens of thousands of hits on the Internet for “Joe the Plumber racist.”
One of the top links? Me. But I still don't understand how it's an insult to compare someone to Sammy Davis, Jr., one of the most beloved entertainers in American history who was -- brace yourselves for a neutral, objective fact here -- a helluva tap-dancer, and proud of it:

4 comments:

  1. We all know Sammy was Jewish. Please.

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  2. Yeah, steve. Comparing Barry Obama to a black man is just about as racist as it gets, isn't it? How could one possibly make that comparison. I mean, they have absolutely nothing in common, do they?

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  3. Well, regardless of whether or not he's racist, he's an idiot. There, I said it. He's a dumbass who doesn't know what he's talking about, obviously doesn't know much about how government works, and just tried to get Obama with a 'gotcha' question that --Oops--- painted him as a total retard.

    A) Obama's plan would benefit him
    B) It's very unlikely he'd be making more than 250,000 a year if captain I-make-20,000-dollars-a-year managed to somehow buy his boss's business
    C)Oh yeah, he owes back taxes.


    What a joke.

    Everyone's feeling so sorry for this guy and making him into some hero. Maybe he's not a racist, but to me he's just Joe...that dumb guy down the street that thinks he knows something.

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  4. Okay, let me take a time being the one black/Jewish woman who moved across the pond to get away from my black and white country cousins in America.
    There are legitimate incidents of racism that have taken place and then there are the accounts of people looking for the racist in the bushes. With the Sammy Davis comparison, it is the latter. Believe it or not, although Sammy Davis was a dynamic entertainer, he was never embraced by black America. He is seen as a sellout mostly as a result of loyalty to the "Rat Pack" despite racist jokes at his expense. Thus, his image was unjustifiably placed in the bafoon category. Especially since he did the unthinkable and converted to Judaism.
    The racist hiding in the bushes is not Joe the plumber this time. It is actually the bully mentality of some black people who want to continue pushing this limited definition of blackness.
    Joe the plumber, not racist. Ashley the A--wipe, racist.

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