The Saddest Thing: Joe the Plumber's DC Book Reading

First-time authors have it rough, for sure. As a general rule, they aren’t media savvy, they are nervous and sweaty, and when they give a reading, they can pretty much bet on nobody attending unless they are some sort of sexy genius, like Sarah Palin or Malcolm Gladwell. As a Democrat who is sick to the eyeballs of dumb right-wing automatons peddling the same dumb tropes over and over and over about socialistic, America-hating gay liberals wanting the government to sodomize all American children while praying—hand over heart—to Satan and Stalin, I can’t help but look at the above picture of Joe the Plumber at a Borders in Washington, DC and find myself awash in schadenfreude. But as a human being with a beating heart and a measure of empathy, I can’t help but admit that this is the saddest picture of the morning.

Sure, Joe the Plumber isn’t a plumber and his name isn’t even Joe. Sure he says idiotic things on Fox News like that the election of Obama means the death of Israel. Sure, his opposition to Obama’s tax plan during the campaign was based on a fear for what it would do to a small plumbing business that he didn’t even have yet (and that would have actually benefited from Obama’s plan, had it actually existed). Sure he wears the SAME FUCKING OUTFIT EVERY DAY, because he’s a real American man, and American men don’t give a shit how they look. But, as hard as this may be to believe, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Joe the Plumber has feelings and that it is possible that, upon learning that his planned-for 3-hour Borders extravaganza was, in actuality, petering out after a limp-wristed 55 minutes, his heart probably sank into his ill-fitting britches. So sad.