“Joe the Plumber: Pelosi Un-American”<\/a><\/p>\nI know, I know: the first and natural response is, “Who cares?”<\/p>\n
Nancy Pelosi is one of the most powerful people in America, the first women in our nation’s history to win the Speakership of the House of Representatives.<\/p>\n
It’s fine to disapprove of her policies; it’s perfectly American to want to vote her and her party out of its current dominance. <\/p>\n
But un-American? Sigh. <\/p>\n
Joe Wurzelbacher is, in political terms, roughly the equivalent of Vanilla Ice. He’s an invention, a product of cable news’ 24-7 silliness and a stiff dose of political motivation.<\/p>\n
He has absolutely zero credentials, not as a spokesman for conservatism and certainly not as arbiter of what is and is not American.<\/p>\n
Here’s why he’s interesting: Try to think of a similar figure on the left.<\/p>\n
Yes, there are movie stars and musicians and non-politicos who sound off and get attention because they were famous.<\/p>\n
But a figure like Wurzelbacher? Someone who’s famous just because he really really really hates liberals?<\/p>\n
I can’t think of a single hard-core liberal yacker who’s been inflated into a national icon. <\/p>\n
The closest I come is Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist who set herself up in opposition to President George Bush’s war in Iraq.<\/p>\n
But Sheehan had one undeniable qualification: Her son had been killed serving his country.<\/p>\n
Wurzelbacher’s qualifications? Honestly, I’ve read a ton of his yak. He makes Sarah Palin look like an editor of Foreign Relations magazine. <\/p>\n
There’s a general meme in our society that journalism is a left-of-center institution. <\/p>\n
Hard to square that with the fact that Joe’s fifteen minutes of fame have stretched now to fifteen weeks and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was a little startled today to stumble across this headline on Politico, the influential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}