A response to an earlier post:
Talk about arrogance, but apparently New York Times Columnist Timothy Egan wants to stop Joe the Plumber from being allowed to have his book published and calls the government oppressed blue collar man a “no good citizen” and a “no good plumber.” Arrogantly, Egan imagines that Joe somehow doesn’t deserve to have a book deal.
Egan imagines himself more qualified than Joe to write a book and in his column Egan asks Joe if he wants him to fix a leaky toilet? He then haughtily replies, “I didn’t think so.” You see, Egan thinks he is smarter than anyone as low as a Joe the Plumber.
Maybe Joe can take Mr Egan as an apprentice when the NYT goes under.
Stupider than usual for the New York Times. Maybe what we’re seeing is the beginning of what’s gonna be a rash of insipid and random guest columnists at the New York Times so as many of their dirty socialist pals as possible can bank the credit for their resumes while Pinch sets the deck chairs just so. This one was just fail I think. That’s not provocative or edgey other than to say he’s having a hard time letting go of the hatefulness to where he can embrace the hopey changey farce what actually got elected. Baracky already ain’t doing it for these people it doesn’t seem, but bitching about Sarah Palin for four years isn’t gonna be enough in the way of sustenance for these losers. I’d say this foreshadows some creative and unusual demonizations to come.
There is not bottom to the depths of their perfidy.
Oh, my. I shouldn’t have brought up Joe the Plumber in the previous post. My nephew is a plumber in Utah. Conservative Utah. By the time he was 24 he was making 70k a year and maybe more now and is on demand to be a supervisor by 30 so he knows about Joe the plumber. Pretty much convinced him to vote for Obama as most of the other real plumbers out there could tell Joe wasn’t a real plumber, but just a low bid sidekick for his small unlicensed contractor boss. Maybe Joe will make that 250k this year….as part of the stylist fees coming from Cyndi McCain I guess.
I dunno, Timmy? Can you fix it? Because it isn’t that hard. Some plumbing things are a little bit involved but fixing a leaky toilet isn’t one of them. That’s kind of a simple thing that most people should be able to do for themselves given a few dollars worth of tools and a modicum of common sense. Perhaps that is beneath you.
Why are you afraid of competition, Timmy? Is it because you are barely scratching out a living at your chosen “cough” craft? And just what is your craft, Timmy? Hosing gullible editors into giving you space? If people wanted to read you, they would. If people want to read Joe, they will. I suspect he has more to say to them than you. Artfully crafted sentences that present jejune ideas are so passe, n’est ce pas?
datadave why is it that even when left-wingers tell personal anecdotes they sound like lies? Seriously, you’re “bragging” about having a relative dumb enough to cast his vote based on a guy who asked Obama a question when the messiah showed up in his yard?
I actually have a lot of sympathy toward good writers who struggle to get published, but that column just made me laugh and laugh.
JD-Have you er, plumbed those depths personally?
Gee whiz, NYT columnists seem to be experts in everything – so I suppose that they can plumb too. They know how to wage war better than Soldiers and Marines, I am told.
Hmmm, the whole “we’re so much smarter than you” thing was kinda “cute” during the election season. Not sure it’ll continue to be cute for the next 4 years though.
God, does newsbusters have this jester’s number…
Maybe Egan’s friends could get a grant from the government so they can publish their stories that no one seems to want to read. It works for the artists.
Which makes me ponder: why do liberals always seem to want to do work that no one else (except the liberal government) seems to want to pay for? Writers, artists, most social scientists… They’re all tortured and misunderstood. Could it be that no, we understand you fine. We just don’t want to pay to hear your junior high angst-ridden navel-gazing.
“I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.”
Apparently the irony is lost on Mr.Egan.
Publishers, let’s set some ground rules: Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.
I wonder if he carries that sentiment over into the music industry.
Tim Blair tears strips of Egan.
Mr Egan thesis puts me in mind of a Randy Newman song, “It’s Money that Matters”.
Huh, last time I saw datadave on this blog, he was sock puppeting some idiot who claimed he could save $20 a week in gas by keeping his tires properly inflated. He was laughed at then, also. I can see why someone of his meager intellect would like Obama for president. We are definitely talking about someone who would be pushed to the edge of the herd.
At least Timothy Egan doesn’t fall for that “Diversity” crap.
Apparently the highbrow Mr. Egan somehow never encountered the famous aphorism that “when a society holds it philosophers with unwarranted respect and its plumbers with undue contempt, in the end neither its theories nor it pipes will hold water”.
Mr Egan does have one teensy, tiny point – that is, that a lot of very accomplished but non-celebrity can’t, don’t or won’t bother with trying to get the time of day from traditional publishing.
Those writers who have a nice manuscript in hand, and who don’t have the opportunity to whine and condescend all over the pages of the upper-East Side fish-wrap – go ahead and publish and market their books independently.
I’m on my third-through-fifth book in that manner; a historical trilogy called “The Adelsverein Trilogy – all about the substantial German colonies in central Texas, just before the Civil War. I’ll bet the egregious Mr Egan never knew there were German colonies in Texas… or ever heard of publishing independently. What a wuss.
Drawing simply from Mr. Egan working for the NYT, I’d say there’s an extremely high probability that indeed Mr. Egan is quite a bit smarter than Joe “the Plumber.” The NYT has been known to hire bright persons. But the point is Mr. Plumber, upon finding a publisher stupid enough to publish his book, is entitled to his pursuit of happiness.
Indeed, Thor. The publisher might be stupid enough to publish a book that sells and makes money. Stupid, stupid, publisher.
I’m pretty certain your over-estimating mystery value when it comes to questions of origin of the original settlers in Texas towns with names such as New Braunfels or Munster.
The Doobie Brothers’ China Grove, there’s a 30-year-old parallel embedded in there for ya to work off of if you can find it.
Why do liberals fight for a rigid class system? Indeed, it almost resembles a caste system. Using shame (this article) and brutality (government persecution) to maintain the castes was rightly criticized and now this Egan guy finds a convenient reason to dust off old style tyranny. I hereby remove the term ‘Liberal’ from Egan and his ilk call them what they are, bastards…bastard filled bastards with a creamy bastard inside.
They just keep on lookin’ to the East.
The Jews assassinated Celine’s publisher.
And though it’s a part of the lone star state, people don’t seem to care.
All of them?
Tell us more about your girlfriend in Canada, DD……….
Those pesky Germans. You just can’t keep them out of your back yard.
There was even a colony of them in Alabama. Nuisance, really.
What with all the noise from Saturn V boosters being tested, and all.
Why do liberals fight for a rigid class system?
Because they’re anything but liberal.
They dream of a warmed-over feudal caste system (with themselves in the privileged position, of course).
They lack the historical grounding and imagination to understand that there are Robespierres and Bonapartes for every Rousseau, and Stalins and Pol Pots for every Karl Marx.
An Obama for every Reagan!
She says … shhhh, just you shut your mouth, my little.
“The Doobie Brothers’ China Grove, there’s a 30-year-old parallel embedded in there for ya to work off of if you can find it”
Thanks, but that’s too recent for me. I prefer the 19th century.
I’d say that if Mr. Egan really is incapable of fixing a leaky toilet, then he’s a pantywaisted nimrod too worried about chipping his metro manicure or getting icky stuff on his ever-so-perfectly moisturized mitts.
Ferpete’ssake, I am a certified mechanical incompetant, and I can deal with a leaky john. In the plumbing sense, not the “Eliot Spitzer fun-time pal” sense.
“The New York Times Company plans to borrow up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building, to ease a potential cash flow squeeze as the company grapples with tighter credit and shrinking profits.”
I don’t know about Egan, but JTP is certainly smarter than the owners of the NYT.
The Tribune Company is also in trouble. Can’t sell the Cubs and can’t sell Wriggly Field.
Sam! Got change for a nickle?
Wrigley
Just sayin’
The last I heard, the value of the NYT was roughly equivalent to the value of the real estate they occupy.
That’s right: the paper itself is worth ZERO.
doh!
Why do liberals fight for a rigid class system?
Because they just can’t help themselves. So they try to “help” the rest of us to become the homogenized lower class as their form of “good works”, a win-win – for them, of course.
“The Tribune Company is also in trouble.”
They just filed their bankruptcy papers (about 12:30pm, CST).
(My best Nelson Muntz impersonation): Ha-HA!
Ah, the politicals and academics as lords and ladettes, and we the peasants a-tuggin’ at our forelocks…sorry, but a good plumber, or even the half-wit from Roto_rooter who came by a couple months ago, is worth more to me than twenty Egans and their self-preening prose.
He wrote a book about the Dust Bowl that looked good and I think maggie or especially RTO might like it but then when he was promoting it he fagged out and said the Dust Bowl blah blah blah many striking parallels to Hurricane Katrina cause the grass what had held back the dust is just like the levees in New Orleans and also after both of them lots of people moved away and it made me about 87% less interested in reading it.
oh. Ha-HA! is more Mandark from Dexter’s Lab. Nelson is more a HA-Ha I think.
They just filed their bankruptcy papers
I’m looking forward to all those smirking reporters at the LAT who covered for Baracky hitting the unenjoyment line.
It’s gonna be hard for them to find work unless they have useful skills what they’ve been hiding I think.
#19 Sgt. Mom:
Admiral Chester Nimitz came from one of those colonies. A very good American.
I think Mr. Egen is feeling a wee bit threatened – I guess the Fanfare for the Common Man is over; get back to your labors, peasant, and never question your betters again.
I remember reading something about ‘The alternatives being a bolshie with neither guts or manners, or a dark horse with a questionable past. At this point they wouldn’t object to a God-fearing plumber’.
Lord Peter Wimsey to Charles Parker, IIRC (something like that).
Still, Mr. Egan is a snob of the first water. He knows better witers? Then perhaps they should write something that others actually want to read.
Oh yes, Mikey – I know about Chester Nimitz. As a matter of fact, his grandfather, C.H.Nimitz is a recurring character in the Trilogy. Fredericksburg and New Braunfels are just up the road from where I live, and I am having several signing events in those towns over the next month or so.
Most people outside of Texas are quite startled to discover that not only were those towns and a handful of others founded by German settlers, but German was the common language throughout all of Gillespie County and some good chunks of Kerr and Kendall… up until the 1920s. They were also Unionists and abolitionists, in a Confederate and slave-permitting state, during the Civil War… which made matters unusually interesting in those parts.
Frankly, I found this all quite fascinating to research… much more interesting than whatever Timothy Egan has got his shorts in a knot over!
Sgt. Mom, the link under your name seems broken (or at least, only results in a page load error for me.) Is it possible to read any of your work online?
Yes, sorry Sdferr on 12 – my book website is http://www.celiahayes.com. Sample chapters, reviews, misc. essays, the usual. I also have a regular gig at http://www.ncobrief.com, which used to be known as Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief – now, just the Daily Brief. If that weren’t enough, I also post at a couple of other venues under the Sgt. Mom nick.
I lost all respect for journalists quite a while ago – this doesn’t surprise me. When I was 17 I wrote a negative comment on an online article (I forget what site it was on). And I laughed when all that the author could respond with was to ridicule me for my age. This man was old enough to be my father, and yet all he could come up with was ‘Well I’m older which means I’m right!’ Which I stopped hearing in about, oh, I dunno, 3rd grade?
Since then I’ve seen little to suggest that he is an aberration in his field.
When I was 17 I wrote a negative comment on an online article
God, I feel old.
Lefties hate Joe the Plumber, whatever his qualifications, because Baracky doesn’t look so lofty standing next to real working people. That kinda points up his inadequacies. So Joe must be destroyed since he was famous for actually engaging the O in a conversation where Baracky didn’t come off looking so good.
Baracky looks much better as an abstraction at a podium than faking being an honest, git-er-done kinda person.
But what do I know? Baracky has written BOOKS!