Joe the Plumber (alias: Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher), famous for, well, nothing to tell the truth, is running for Congress. That’s nice. Like many teabagger Republican wannabes, lil’ Joe is running a campaign highlighting just how manly and drop dead ignorant he is. Nothing gets a teabagger all hot n’ sweaty like swaggering stupidity and Joe’s got it in spades. Here’s his latest campaign ad:
Get it? The Nazis killed millions of Jews because they didn’t have guns to defend themselves. The clear implication is that President Obama and the Democratic Party are going to take your guns and it’s off to the concentration camps with you!
Fuck you, Joe.
No, seriously, fuck you and fuck your disgusting message.
You see, Joe, I am of Jewish decent. My grandparents left Europe before the war and never, ever spoke to me about the Holocaust. I honestly don’t know if they ever felt persecuted before they left or how many of their friends or loved ones they lost to the camps. But, like all Jews with any sense of history, they were aware, keenly aware, that a methodical, systematic genocide had been carried out against us. I, too, am keenly aware of this fact. The Holocaust is a blight on the human soul that will be remembered for all time. That is not in question. What is in question, however, is whether it will be remembered accurately or whether it will be reduced to a political punch line for hacks and scumbags to appeal to the paranoid and uneducated.
Let’s take a look at what the Nazis stood for.
1. Nationalism – Germany is for Germans! German sovereignty was extremely important to the Nazis. Foreigners were an existential threat that had to be dealt with by closing the borders to immigrants. Where have I heard that before? Oh, right! ”Complete the dang fence!” – John McCain. Yeah, conservatives are all about keeping evil foreigners out of America, the country founded by immigrants. You freaks are so paranoid about other countries you regularly whip up conspiracy theories about the United Nations taking over the United States. Agenda 21 sound familiar? I’ll just bet it does.
2. Fear of minorities – The Nazis believed in racial purity because other races were lazy leeches on society. Not only does the conservative movement believe that minorities like black and Hispanics are “destroying” America and taking white people’s money (see conservative hero Pat Buchanan’s “End of White America”) but that they shouldn’t even be allowed to marry outside of their race.
Question 14 in a PPP poll: Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal?
Legal 40%
Illegal 46%
Not sure 14%
That was last year in Mississippi. Last. Year.
3. Fear of homosexuality – The Nazis thought homosexuality was a “choice” that could be “cured.” This is a tenet of faith among conservatives. In fact, it’s the basis for all of the discrimination against them. Homosexuals were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to camps to die. One of the main objections were that homosexuals could not have children and were unnatural.
Build a great, big, large fence…150 or 100 mile long…put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out – Conservative Pastor Worley, May 2012
The last several years of conservative rhetoric might as well have been written by the head of Hitler’s SS, Heinrich Himmler.
4. Tough guys – The Nazis were overly concerned with appearing “manly.” Women were for the home and producing babies. Hitler passed a law encouraging women to produce at least four children by giving them a loan with each child reducing it by 25%. Female teachers and doctors were fired en masse and expected to marry. Conservatives have been decrying women in the workplace for decades. They won’t support equal pay, ostensibly because it’s “bad for business” but in reality, conservatives simply believe that women are incapable of equal work.
Here’s two quotes. One from German women of that era and one from Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum:
“Take hold of kettle, broom and pan,
Then you’ll surely get a man!
Shop and office leave alone, Your true life work lies at home.”
“What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.”
Which is which? Does it matter?
On the flip side, conservatives are obsessed with appearing studly. The fetishize guns, war and big cars as if any of these things will make up for their insecurities. They constantly seek to undermine punishments for rape because forcing a woman to your sexual prowess is considered “manly.” Conservatives openly long for the days of the cowboy, when men were men and women (and minorities) knew their place. Here’s a little kid playing “I’m a macho man” now!
He’s got a gun! So manly!
I could go on about how Nazis were against abortion and despised unions (just like the GOP!) and how they loved stating wars based on lies (just like Iraq!) but I’m sure you got the idea now.
So Joe, care to tall me again about how Obama and the Democrats are plotting to take away your guns and that banning things like extended clips for handgun is the first step to genocide? Let’s ignore the fact that President Obama hasn’t made a single attempt to expand gun control in the almost four years he’s been in office and just pretend it’s actually a secret plot, shall we? Those darn Democratic Nazis!
People like you make me sick. You so blithely toss around the Holocaust as a campaign tool. Do you even understand what it was? Have you ever once looked at the pictures from Auschwitz? Did you see the bodies stacked ten feet high like cordwood? Did you see the emaciated faces of what could almost laughably referred to as survivors if it wasn’t so horrible? Did you know that many of them died almost as soon as they were rescued from eating more than their shrunken stomachs and weakened bodies could handle? Can you even imagine that? Having been starved for months or years and dying just from eating?
Nah. That doesn’t matter to do you. Taking one the greatest tragedies in human history and using it for a cheap and childish political stunt is just about the speed for lowlifes like you. Obama’s a Nazi? Look in the mirror, Wurzelbacher. Say, isn’t that a German name? What a coincidence! I’m sure it doesn’t mean that you have relatives that were Nazis or anything. Of course, I can’t prove that you didn’t, either. Don’t get upset with me, I’m just asking perfectly innocent questions! I’m not insinuating you’re related to death camp guards anymore than you’re insinuating Obama is a Nazi. Because you’re not actually doing that, right? Of course not.
Go back to playing “grown up” with your toys and leave running the country to actual adults.
Kudos Justin. you are so spot on. I have a conservative friend of German heritage and I really wish he would read this but he probably won’t. Thanks for another bulls-eye blog.
Brilliantly done! I have no idea how any rational person with two brain cells could possibly believe the BS that guy, and others like him, pulls out of thin air. Thanks for voicing what should be common sense!
Thank you for that concise and compassionate response to the blatant ignorance and stupidity
of people like Joe.
And the best part is, he doesn’t even have a message! How does he expect his dipshit followers to know what he’s talking about – he only IMPLIES that taking guns away would mean the unarmed would be “exterminated.” He doesn’t point it out directly – he’s being a filthy liberal elitist and confusing the poor, simple folk who are his base!
Go Marcy Kaptur beat his ass!
The absolute maddening and frightening things is that in these United States, in today’s world, a guy like that could actually get elected.
I don’t think he will win. He’s in a heavily democratic district…
of all the despicable thing someone can do is use the Holocaust for political-financial gain. Makes me think of Steven Spielberg, Joe Lieberman, and every other hollywood washington “Only Jews have suffered” bigot. No film or public TV documentary, ( until may 2010) could be shown, funded or aired if it included the suffering of anyone other than jews. The suffering of Gays by the germans could be included in the late 1980′s with the onset of HIV Aids. However the continued incarceration of the gay concentration camp victims, until their deaths in the 1950′s was forbidden to be discussed, and the 7 Million Polish people murdered PRIOR to the first jewish murders were suppressed, to foster the political myth that “Yes people have suffered but no one has suffered more than the jews.”
This is very true, the Jews were far from the only people to be killed by the Germans. To be fair, though, the Nazis had a special place in the black hole where their hearts used to be for the Jewish people.
Actually, Spielberg refused payment, for Schindler’s List. That kind of hurts your diatribe, doesn’t it?
Great post.
The only “upside” to “Joe the Plumber” is that he is a poster boy for the right. Samuel Wurzelbacher isn’t smart enough to understand that he’s letting the world know how arrogant, hateful, illogical, irrational, and intellectually corrupt right wingers are.
Remove the mask from a John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. and you’ll find an opportunistic Joel the Plumber.
YOU ARE A FAT ARROGANT ASSHOLE !
Yeah, i totally don’t like Joe the Plumber, either!