A few days ago, I linked to Michael Barone's article about the thuggish nature of politics under a possible President Obama. Here's an excerpt:
"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors," Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. "I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face." Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people's faces. They seem determined to shut people up.
That's what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign emails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg's WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama's relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago — papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.
Obama fans jammed WGN's phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest emails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg's example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.
We now have an example in real life. Joe Wurzelbacher, known nationally (and perhaps worldwide) as the "Joe the Plumber" who dared to ask the Prophet Barack a serious question that elicited an answer embarrassing to The One, is being hounded for his insolence:
Now, we have people crawling over his tax records, his voter registration, his professional licensing, and whatever else they can find in the public record. Someone has linked him to the long-deceased Charles Keating, suggesting that somehow Obama managed to pick a McCain plant out of a ropeline full of people by accident. How much longer before a certain blogger at The Atlantic demands a paternity test to see if Joe the Plumber fathered Sarah Palin’s baby — or Bristol’s, for that matter?
There is a stench of desperation surrounding this, as if they sense defeat coming from a moment of honesty from Obama about his real intentions to institute a regime of redistribution. They want to discredit the man who only asked the question as if he’s some political operative who magically forced Obama to sound … well, a little like a Marxist.
Keep that in mind: All this plumber did was ask Obama a legitimate question, which Obama answered. Trouble is, the answer is embarrassing to Obama because it reveals to the world his socialistic instincts — that government should legislate economic outcomes, rather than create conditions for equal opportunity. But the US is a Center-Right nation and, as a poll from Gallup showed, the majority of Americans, a majority so large it has to include Democrats and independents, as well as Republicans, are dead-set against wealth-redistribution programs. Obama's Freudian (Marxian?) slip could cost him dearly.
Thus the need to dig up dirt on Joe and punish him, to make him the story, rather than his question and Obama's answer.
Again, it does not matter and I do not care who Joe Wurzelbacher is: a plumber, a baker, a cop, a teacher, or even a cross-dressing comedian at gay night clubs. His question and Obama's answer are what matter here. And as an American citizen he had every right to ask that question and expect an answer. Yet Obama's followers and the media (redundant, I know) are willing to trash this man to save Obama from his own unintended candor.
The Clintons used to rant over and over about the "politics of personal destruction" (while practicing it, themselves); you will never have a better example than this.
Imagine what could happen if Obama and his Chicago cronies have the power of the IRS and the Justice Department at their disposal? 
"Thugocracy," indeed.
Meanwhile, the McCain campaign has not wasted any time turning l'affaire Joe into a campaign commercial. It's a good one:
RELATED: Power Line wonders if the "Joe moment" is the game-changer McCain needed. I hope so. See also their citation of a report from the Republican Party of New Mexico claiming proof of fraudulent voting, not just registration, in the Democratic primaries there. PUMAs take note.
LINKS: Allahpundit reports on The One discussing Joe, and the McCain campaign firing back. Ace has what should be McCain's next commercial. Sister Toldjah is disgusted. More at Pax Parabellum (including McCain's apology to Joe), Jim Treacher, and The Anchoress.
UPDATE: I linked to The Anchoress above but I want to pull a quote from her that captures I think why so many of us are increasingly repelled by The One — and it ain't because of racism, morons:
America just heard the President Presumptive tell them, essentially, “don’t dream too big. Don’t dare to dream too big, because if you do, we’re just going to chop you down to size, so that everyone is the same.”
That is not an American recipe. It is a recipe that’s been tried several times and
all it ever does is sap people of ambition, creativity and freedom. What’s the point in excelling if your excellence will be the equal of mediocrity? What’s the point of dreaming, if your dreams are going to be subject to the whims of others?
America likes its dreams, its ambitions and its freedoms. Between Obama’s slip-of-the-tongue and the increasingly troubling stories of voter fraud – excuse me, voter registration fraud (which is mean to enable voter fraud) – rampant in one state after another, he’s making a lot of Americans wary.
Americans does not like being told it can’t do something. They do not like being told not to dream glorious dreams. They do not like being told that excellence must subdue itself. And they really don’t like cheating the vote. And while Americans may tolerate little lies, the big, bold ones can get under their skin.
Things turn on a dime. This election may well turn not on who “Joe the Plumber” is – but who Barack Obama is revealing himself – finally – to be.
Spot. On. 
Posted by Phineas Fahrquar 
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