Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:45 pm
Poor Joe the Plumber, wherever he goes trouble follows. Joe the non-Plumber/pseudo-journalist was interviewing some Tea Party protesters when one of them asked him, “If you could water board Obama what would you get out of him?”
Here is the video courtesy of Think Progress:
Now this is more like what we all expected to see from these protests. Credit must be given to Joe the non Plumber though, because he didn’t take the bait. He laughed, and said that he wouldn’t want to water board Obama, but this is the element that the kind of extremist language that the Republican Party and Fox News have been using. The GOP first tapped into this degree of extreme rhetoric during the 2008 presidential campaign, and unless the party can get back into step with the mainstream, they may have to go even further to the right in 2010 and 2012.
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
I don’t see anything humorous in torture. I don’t think jokes about water boarding anyone, whether they are Democrats or Republicans are funny. Water boarding has only served to make America less safe. The day that the Bush administration decided that torture was acceptable was a dark day for America. These aren’t anti-tax or anti-deficit rallies. They are anti-Obama rallies, which are perfectly fine and acceptable. My problem is with their organizers being too cowardly to call them what they really are.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
