Joe The Plumber Finally Gets His Book Deal

Of course he did. I'd rather read binary code during a simultaneous root canal/rectal exam.

Working title: "An American Floater: The Story of One's Citizen Refusal to be Flushed Away into the Sewer of Identity Politics." Cover photo to the left. Foreword to be penned by Ashley "Backwards B" Todd. Hannity has already committed a jacket blurb sight unseen: "This is the greatest book God has established in the history of the world."

The Potatoe has been granted an exclusive first look at the opening sentences of Chapter 1, nonsensically titled: "If he looks like a Muslim, has a name like a Muslim, hates Israel like a Muslim, then he sure ain't a duck":

Behold! On the stump like a snow hill. It is Barack Obama. Mmmm. I like dark meat.

I furtively moved forward through his adoring mob of apostles, trying not to arouse suspicion, reflecting sunshine into the inquisitive eyes of this enemy hoard with my gleaming bald noggin, tactically buffed to a shimmer, a trick I picked up snaking drains outside Cambodia in '68.

I was a hero then too; our boys never felt the cringe of humiliation seeing toilet water cresting over the top of the bowl after releasing an ungodly monster sh*t in the latrine. Not on Joe's watch.

So I had been here before, called to doody (i.e., a pun right there) by the demands of my country. Time to play the hero again, Joe, against another communist foe.

Was I afraid? In the words of our 2012 President, Sarah Palin, "you betcha." But the training keeps you steady - once you've swam through a 50-foot cesspool of sh*t-smelling foulness the likes of which you cannot begin to imagine as a civilian, fear takes on the redolence of roses. I eat pieces of sh*t like Barack Sadam Hussein Obama Bin-Laden for breakfast. Let's do this thing!

The fetid stench of Marxism and my poopy-smelling t-shirt, moist and stank from morning appointments, hung heavy over the crowd. But I, undaunted. Ready to take on a Kenyan-born would-be dictator. Oh no. Not on Joe's watch. I f**king love Israel . . .

From what we've read so far, An American Floater is a well-received, poignant Bildungsroman novelette snatched from the still-beating heart of German Enlightenment, as its protagonist, citizen Joe, a pulpy denizen of the real realm, an uber-slob sentinel of the proletariat, the deserving scion of the rustic, vulgar Romanticism within Emile Zola's Germinal, sprouts, blossoms and embodies the American polemic, given martyrdom by liberal schadenfreude, as he bends, but never breaks, becoming the Zeitgeist of his moment.

Or, it's a piece of sh*t.

Robert Gibbs To Be Obama's Press Secretary

From Politico:

Robert Gibbs, a top aide to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on his campaign and in his Senate office, will be named the White House press secretary, a top Democratic official said. Gibbs was usually the senior official on Air Obama, the campaign plane.

As communications director of Obama's Senate office, Gibbs was a key strategist in Obama's rapid move to the national stage.

Transition planning is still at an early stage and the job has not been formally offered or accepted, officials said.

You may know Gibbs from his savory evisceration of Sean Hannity in the spin room after the second presidential debate:

Joe The Plumber, Allow Me To Introduce You To . . .

Mark the Patriot!

Also, how about "Sarah the Liar." Speaking this afternoon in a surprising exclusive with Fox News' Sean Hannity (finally! He got her! You couldn't run forever, Palin!), Railin' Palin' hooted about Senator Obama's economic proposals:

So, what we have to do is go back to his record and see where he has come from so that we can then understand where he wants to lead America. He voted 94 times for higher taxes. He had all those opportunities to be on our side, the people's side. Instead, he was for bigger government.

And now his proposal to increase spending, nearly $1 trillion more, the only way he's going to be able to pay for those proposals, increase taxes. He voted, of course, for higher taxes on those middle-class, hard working Americans, making $42,000 a year. That's his record.

Barack Obama voted to tax Americans making $42,000 a year? Say it ain't so, Joe!

Okay - it ain't so. Verdict on CNN's fact checker? Misleading.

GOP Gigolo Hugh Hewitt Declares Bill Ayers An "Advisor" to Barack Obama

I'm pretty eager to get a good night's rest. But then the intellectual charlatans now practically running McCain's sputtering campaign just refuse to let me sleep.

Fine. Let's make this brief: Hugh Hewitt is a hebetudinous pig of a commentator and an out-and-out liar. After ignoring the white noise of standard GOP twaddle, my ears perk up as Hewitt offers this dirty fable on Hannity & Colmes: "I often hear in Barack Obama's rhetoric and especially in the rhetoric of some of his advisers Bill Ayers . . ." Pressed that Ayers is, of course, not an advisor to Barack Obama, Hewitt prattles on "he might not be an advisor this year . . . he has a 20 year relationship with Barack Obama."

Repugnant and typical. Even if Barack Obama is elected and elected by a sizable margin - ie., the empirics of a political mandate - GOP hitmen like Hewitt will never embrace him as President and will never accept a unified citizenry trying to work together despite ideological differences. The unthoughtful demagogues of dying Rovian conservatism will tear this country asunder for sh*ts and giggles.

Feigned torpidity, America - the righty hacks play dumb just long enough to stand corrected, but not before foisting their flimflam upon the audience and scoring points. Fortunately for the rest of us, everyone at Fox News or watching Fox News is either irredeemably in the Republican tank or playing watchdog to keep them honest. A forum for independent or undecided voters it is not.

Still, you say things enough times and the Orwellian dystopia emerges turning four fingers into five.

9 Days. Fight it. Earmuff it till the voting booth if you have to.

Alaska Independence Party and the Palins: A Simmering Controversy

Against the better wishes of my fellow contributors, Warm Apple Pie will continue to push this fact-driven story: The Palins' ties to the Alaska Independence Party ("AIP") and the unwillingness of the mainstream media to explore the history of the relationship. There is a ton of unfinished meat on the bone.

Some say this is "out there" already and yesterday's news cycle. But I believe it is ripe for media plucking considering McCain-Palin's incessant push to link Obama to William Ayers.

And others are starting to agree (Colmes to the rescue? Colmes? Say it ain't so, Joe!):



From last evening's Hannity and Colmes. Around minute three, Colmes raises the parallel between the Ayers-Obama attack and the Palins' unchallenged AIP involvement. He notes how Democrats have decided not to play in this pigpen (lipsticked pigpen that is). Former Deputy Governor of Maryland, Republican Michael Steele, after two minutes of usual, overwrought shredding of Obama on his dubious connections (with the help of the always-willing Hannity), suddenly becomes very terse when confronted with AIP allegations, dismissing them as merely "irrelevant."

A simmering controversy, not a stale one. And it is starting to creep out of the blogosphere to the print media.

The Hannity Dilemma - McCain's Jane Fonda

I'm coining a new phrase - The Hannity Dilemma. From this pint forward, the Hannity Dilemma will be used to describe the situation where a standard developed by a hard line partisan hack like Sean Hannity, intended to be used only against those heathens with opposing political views, is instead applied to a member of the standard-setting hack's own political party. The horror.

The award is named for Master Hannity because of his wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonder____ (that's 5 1/2 for those counting - you'll see) near aneurysm after his own standard (paraphrased here) asserted against John Edwards - "people who lie to their families by having affairs can't be trusted by the American people" - was applied to John McCain by Hannity's own weak-kneed liberal pushover but awoken from his castrated slumber co-host, Alan Colmes. Hannity gets so fired up that the standard he developed is used against one of his own, that . . . well, he starts quoting math and yelling protest slogans.



In that clip, Sean Hannity was faced with the Hannity Dilemma. His response: Donna Martin Graduates! Donna Martin Graduates! Donna Martin Graduates!

Now that we have an illustration of how The Hannity Dilemma works, lets apply it:

The Standard: The personal acquaintances of presidential candidates are valid, especially when such acquaintances are or were anti-American.

The Intended Application: In applying this standard, just about every talking head on the right (and some on the left), as well as the Republican Presidential ticket, have been hammering the Obama-Ayers and Obama-Wright connections, and particularly the anti-America angle. Fine. As I've stated before, I think those topics are fair game. As long as the same standard is applied to everyone.

The Hannity Dilemma: Joe Klein draws a comparison today between the scrutiny given to Obama's "radical friends," as opposed to the right's absolute silence on McCain's friendship with his own personal Jane Fonda - David Ifshin. As Klein explains:

Ifshin, you see, had been a vehement anti-Vietnam radical. He had even gone to Hanoi at the height at the war and given a speech denouncing the American pilots dropping bombs on North Vietnamese civilians as “war criminals.” The speech was broadcast repeatedly in the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain was being held captive. More than a few people thought Ifshin was guilty of treason.

He was also a close friend of John McCain until he passed away in 1996.

Klein's telling of this story is quite personal and worth the read, as Ifshin was also a friend of Klein's. It also shines a very favorable light on McCain (or, rather, the man McCain used to be). Their friendship was forged out of a respect for each other, despite their polar-opposite opinions so many years before. Ifshin was vocal about his regret for giving the above-referenced speech, and McCain forgave him. The McCain-Ifshin friendship was also detailed with admiration by the NY Sun in 2006. It's really a great story.

But as much as he regretted it, Ifshin did give that speech, just as Jane Fonda gave similar speeches attacking American soldiers. Guess what the right wing pundits think about Jane Fonda? Well Sean Hannity's guests, like Ollie North, think she's a "traitor" for her actions during the Vietnam war. I don't think it's a stretch to claim that that view as common among the right.

Now here's the dilemma: If Fonda is a traitor, so was Ifshin. So if Obama's associations with people like Ayers who, as John McCain described Ifshin "a long time ago, in the passions and resentments of a tumultuous era in our history, I might have considered my enemy," are fair game that must be examined, shouldn't the right wing pundits be examining McCain's association with this person who was a "traitor" by their own standards? Who is the real John McCain? Can we tolerate a president who palled around with traitors? Donna Martin Graduates!