Joe the Plumber - War correspondent and clog remover

Joe the Plumber is in Israel covering the military offensive in Gaza as a rookie war correspondent. How weird is that? A few short months ago, he was just a plain old dad playing catch with his boy on his Ohio suburban street. That is until he refused to bow down to The One, when the messiah-elect's campaign stumbled onto his quiet neighborhood. Instead of fielding a softball question from one of his glassy-eyed followers, Obama found Joe The Plumber. Joe's probing question about taxes was able to roto-rooter out of Obama the "spreading of the wealth" comment (which should have flushed his candidacy immediately down the drain).

*sigh* But that was then and this is now. And right now, Joe the Plumber is in Israel. The official line is that Joe was signed on to cover Israel's side of the story because the UN and the MSM refuse to, and Joe happens to be "an expert on media bias." I think there is more to it.

In a randomly selected unrelated story...(?)
Fierce focus on tunnels

The 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza regard the tunnels as a vital lifeline to the outside world, from which they are otherwise almost completely shut off by the Israeli military's control of land, sea and air access to the north, east and west of Gaza. To the south, Gaza has been sealed off by Egypt... Israeli forces were also facing an extensive tunnel network in Gaza City and elsewhere across the Gaza Strip, built to help fighters ambush Israeli troops.

Hmmmm, thinks I. Tunnels clogged with Hamas debris. Joe is in Israel. Joe is a plumber. What is one of the main tools of the trade of a plumber? A plumber's snake. What is it? A plumber's snake is a flexible auger of metal coils used to remove pesky clogs in plumbing that cannot be loosened with a plunger.

If you were Israel and you secretly built the world's largest plumber's snake to deal with these tunnels, who would YOU want at the controls of this experimental device?

The part of the tunnel clog in picture was played by the Hamas Bear.