Samuel Wurzelbacher is an unlicensed handyman from outside Toledo who made national headlines when he was caught on video regaling Barack Obama with his delusions of someday earning enough money to enter the top income-tax bracket.
There is no reason America ever needed to know this human's name, his nickname, or his fantasies of wealth except that he asked Barack Obama this question once. But he went on to parlay this brief video exposure -- and multiple mentions in the third presidential debate -- into a series of debasing "jobs" intended to harness his "fame": He founded a terrible Web site about nothing, shot a few commercials promoting digital television converters, and now he will be a war correspondent.
As everybody already knows, because news about Joe the Plumber travels surprisingly fast, this utterly insignificant man will be reporting on the war in Gaza for Pajamas TV, some online video thing.
With every professional journalist/reporter/writer in America on permanent unemployment and warring for scraps over at The Daily Beast while news stations and papers shutter their foreign bureaus, you might wonder who would be left to report on important events abroad. Well, now we have our answer: it is some mook from Ohio who helped make a tragic circus of the last days of John McCain's campaign.
Joe the Plumber once famously agreed with a Jewish voter who suggested that "a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel." Imagine his surprise when he gets off the plane and finds that there's even still a country there!
Sara K. Smith writes for Wonkette and occasionally reports from dangerous war zones abroad, just like Martha Gellhorn.
