Harsh, you know, I wonder who put your blinders on too, and if you’re even aware of them. Like the thing about Joe’s “lies”. The usual list I hear (it’s in comments above already) that he uses his middle name as his given name; that hile he worked as a plumber for a plumbing contractor, he actually called himself a plumber without being a licensed plumber; that he suggested to Obama that he aspired to buy the firm he worked for sometime in the future; and that he was concerned that Obama’s frankly redistributionist tax policies would make that more difficult.

The first is ludicrous: it is very common, especially for someone whose first name is a family name that might cause confusion, as Joe’s is.

The second is rather silly: we don’t refuse to allow the shovel-drivers on a landscaping crew to call himself a landscaper, even though they aren’t licensed landscaping contractors. The guy who comes to my apartment to fix the toilet is a “plumber” in common parlance, even though he’s a handyman who works for the apartment.

The third and fourth are, at best, unknowable, although I can tell you that it’s not at all uncommon for a contractor with a substantial firm and no one to take it over in his family to pick out a promising, ambitious employee, groom them, and eventually make appropriate arrangements to allow them to take over the business. So, I suppose we can charitably assume it’s ignorance on your part, and on the part of the press.

Less charitably, we might wonder if it’s an essential classism, that causes you to assume that someone who is a plumber’s apprentice now will never be able to aspire to being a business owner.

The essential point, I think, is that you are blinded by something; it leads you to repeat the stories you’ve been told without actually examining them.

So I’ll ask the same question I asked above: who owns you? And what is it they don’t want you to see?