I started a joke, which started the whole world laughing,

Remember recently when a conservative organization, straining desperately to gain some relevancy and credibility, attempted to raise up a woefully under-qualified clown to some national prominence?

Psych! I'm not talking about the Republican Party/Palin debacle. I'm actually talking about Pajamas Media & Joe the Wurzelbacher going to the Middle East as a war correspondent:

By now many of you have heard that Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher is leaving for Israel tomorrow to be a war correspondent for Pajamas TV. This has created quite a brouhaha in the media - cable television, newspapers, wire services, etc. Everyone from CNN to gawker.com has something to say about Joe heading for the Middle East. He will appear on Fox and Friends tomorrow morning before his departure.

To be honest, some (maybe much) of this reportage is pretty snotty. Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC - herself a MA in international relations, lahdeedah - fairly frothed at the mouth at the prospect of the unqualified Joe having the temerity to report news in a foreign land. Those hipoisie over at Gawker weren’t too charitable either.

Evidently, a lot of people are annoyed that Joe’s fifteen Warhol minutes aren’t quite over yet. Or perhaps they’re threatened that a common man can be a reporter simply by asking common sense questions - no Columbia J-school degree required. (Hemingway didn’t have one. He didn’t even go to college, as I recall.) But the larger question is the role of expertise in general. Of course, experts are valuable, but so are those who ask the seemingly too obvious questions of the supposedly uninformed - dumb questions that can end up having more value for the public than all the experts combined. Sometimes, anyway.

Hemingway? Heming-fucking-way? Are you breathing air, or has your brain expired? And 'dumb questions'?

The comedy, it writes itself. But Roger Simon outdoes himself:

I must say I find amusing the idea of Joe lined up with all the telephoto cameras at that Gaza media overlook with Cooper, Amanpour, et al. It’s certainly the stuff of Frank Capra.

Frank Capra? Maybe when he directed Porky's. Wurzelbacher is no Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. For starters, he's not going to Washington. For 2nds, he . . .

He's nothing. Yet PJ Media has hitched onto his star . . .

Yep, they're also nothing.

Bastards.