IT’S OK NOT TO BE SAD
Death of a Plumber
Does every death have to be mourned and is every death sad?
Failure to alert
I usually get news alerts whenever a celebrity dies or blows their nose. I was alerted when Bob Barker from The Price is Right died at age 99. I was alerted just today of an unknown random woman who got stabbed in the back by a stingray chilling in the shallow water. Hell, I was even alerted to the death of Whitesnake’s guitarist Bernie Marsden. Who? Yeah, exactly. No idea.
I just so happened to be scrolling news headlines while on break at work, and of all the alerts I didn’t get, and lo and behold….I just about jumped out of my chair.
Joe the Plumber died at 49 from pancreatic cancer.
Joe, who?
If you’re not up to date on the political celebrity flash in the pans; let me catch you up.
Samuel Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio also known as “Joe the Plumber”. This will be the last time I use his full name for this article😑. You can thank me later.
Joe from Ohio rose to fame via the Right Wing propaganda machine known as the “Mighty MAGA Wurlitzer” (I just made that up) for spreading disinformation about Barack Obama’s economic policy. Oh my gawd, he was everywhere! Fox Entertainment(formerly known as Fox News), Conservative Radio, Facebook, Twitter, you name it, he was on it.
He also toured with John McCain and Sarah Palin, oh my god! If you’re sharing a stage with Sarah Palin, I start to worry about your intelligence level or your level of cynicism. If you look up the definition of dumbass, you see a picture of Sarah Palin front and center….allegedly….allegedly. People are saying….
Anyway, this bold-faced liar got to question Obama about his new tax plan by claiming he was planning on buying a small plumbing business that makes two hundred and fifty to two-hundred and eighty-thousand a year and asserted that Obama was going to raise his taxes which would kinda sorta prevent him from buying and growing this business in the first place. Turns out he wasn’t even a licensed plumber but did work for a plumbing company. As it turned out, there was no way in hell he was ever going to buy a business generating that kind of income.
Why are these Republicans such liars? They have to lie in order to make their point almost every time.
Rewatching this exchange, I was impressed at Obama’s intelligent, measured and patient response. As it turns out, this guy would have directly benefited from this tax system because “Joe” didn’t make anywhere near two hundred and fifty thousand. Joe the Plumber was listening to words being spoken and managed to miss the point completely.
I’m completely flabbergasted with this whole thing and just hope I’m not making too much of a fool of myself and hope I can get my message out there.
-Joe the Plumber
Don’t worry, Joe. You managed to make a complete ass of yourself, and yea, your “message” of misinformation reached all of us.
Sigh.
This stooge became an overnight sensation and a Right Wing spin-city talking point.
It gave me the opportunity to get out there and ask Americans to get educated on the facts of what’s going on, get informed about the decisions they’re making and the people that they’re voting in to elect them.
-Joe the Plumber
Yeah, thanks a lot, Joe. Instead of getting educated, people took your narrative of bullshit and ran with it.
The last fifteen years of his life have been dedicated to spreading false and misleading information that people pounced on because they needed yet one more reason to hurt their neighbors by voting against Democratic candidates who wanted to address the very concerns he claimed to care about.
Agent of chaos
In 2009 in an interview with Christianity Today, Joe had this jewel of wisdom. He remarked that he had friends who were homosexual and that,
They know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children.
-Joe the Plumber
Yeah, fuck you, Joe.
I could name hundreds of born-again believers who I wouldn’t have anywhere near mine or anyone’s children, and you know why that is? Because their mugshots were released to the media along with the charges of sexual crimes against children they’ve committed.
His death reminded me of how I felt about the death of Rush Limbaugh.
Do I mourn his death? Am I in the least bit sad?
Not one bit.
Thank you for reading. This has been another Honeylu rant. If you liked what you read or hated it, send me a line. You can subscribe to me by hitting that green envelope on my profile and get them sent directly to email.
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