Joe the Plumber aka Joe the Opportunist aka Joe the Journalist aka Joe the Fucking Idiot, aka Samuel Wurzelbacher from Ohio has been granted another extension on the 15-minutes of fame awarded him after John McCain plucked him from anonymity during the campaign.
Instead of allowing his simple-minded understanding of domestic affairs to be exploited by Republican spinmeisters, this time it is Israel taking full advantage of the accidental journalist’s limited knowledge of international affairs.
Joe is being given a carefully-managed trip through the Israeli side of the Gaza conflict, and believes it makes him informed enough about the 50-year-plus conflict to conclusively determine the right and wrong of the current spike in violence. And he’s pissed that other journalists covering the battle try to do their best to cover all angles of the conflict, rather than focusing on the valiant defensive efforts of the IDF (which he charmingly refers to as the DoD in recent video clips), the moral authority of Israel to completely destroy Gaza, and the brave endurance of the Israeli people.
Maybe Joe slept through that year in journalism school when the professors teach that reporters ARE supposed to report all sides of a story and ARE NOT supposed to act as mouthpieces for a government. Oh that’s right, he has no formal training as a journalist.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” he told foreign reporters in Sderot, according to The Jerusalem Post.
“You should be patriotic, protect your family and children, not report like you have been doing for the past two weeks since this war has started,” he said.
So a man with a limited knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and no understanding about the standards and practices of good journalism drops into the conflict and starts telling seasoned professionals they’re doing everything wrong.
He contends in his latest PajamasTV video, “Some of (the media) say I’m going out of my way to make them dislike me, but I’m just being myself.”
Joe seems to be a fairly ignorant jerk, so that sounds about right.
He described himself as a “peaceloving man” to the Jerusalem Post, but added, “when someone hits me, I’m going to unload on the boy. And if the rest of the world doesn’t understand that, then I’m sorry.”
In Joe’s mind, this simplistic reasoning represents a parallel to what Israel is doing to Gaza. If someone hit Joe, I agree he’d have every moral right to “unload on the boy”–assuming the boy hadn’t hit Joe with his fist and received the unloading of Joe’s .45 clip in response.
But Israel’s current “defensive” campaign would represent a closer equivalent to Joe unloading on the boy who hit him, then going after his parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors, and entire community. And since most of the world DOES understand this distinction, it’s good of Joe to apologize for his ignorance.