Shameful attacks on Joe the Plumber

This is Timothy the Bookseller and I'd like to put in my two cents about Joe the Plumber and recent newspaper and Internet articles about his story having "sprung a leak."

It's one thing for the attack dogs in the media, their partisan handlers and fellow travelers to trash a candidate for office who just happens to be a hockey mom, as uncivilized and utterly reprehensible as this is.

It is quite another thing to trash an ordinary citizen exercising his free-speech right to ask a question of the man who would be his president.

Politicians have come to expect such treatment, and although character assassinations have now sunk to the gutter level and below, it goes with the territory.

It is unconscionable, however, for those barbarians masquerading as holier-than-thou know-it-alls to unleash their fury on a person who is not like them but more like the rest of us, flaws and all, who just asked a question of the man who would be his president.

This sort of digging up every imaginable piece of dirt to discredit, humiliate and cower someone into silence ought to send a very cold chill through every Joe and Jane Citizen.

That treatment of Joe the Plumber shows us other Joes and Janes exactly, I fear, the depths to which that candidate's supporters will go to advance his agenda if he becomes president - to cower each and every one of us into a slavery of silence and acceptance.

Is this what our forefathers came to this country for? Is this the American dream they strove for? Is this what hundreds of thousand men and women of every race and ethnicity in this country have fought and died for?

By unmercifully hounding and attacking an ordinary citizen for asking a simple question to the man who would be president, they have shown themselves for what they are: modern-day barbarians assaulting the gates of Rome, assaulting our very liberties, which that ancient republic inspired in the framers of our Constitution.

Timothy Taylor

Mount Prospect