Like wilding hordes, the media are now racing and ransacking through the life and livelihood of Joe the Plumber, grasping at the fistful of dirt, sucking at the salacious drop of juice, all to punish him. Why? For calling out the Barackian Idol, whose unscripted response to Joe on the Ohio hustings revealed radical and redistribution designs right out of Karl Marx. As Obama put it, straight and succint, "I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."

And here's the dangerously twisted problem: Instead of the media making it their duty to explore the origins and ramifications of this avowedly socialist message coming from the mouth of the Democratic presidential candidate, they made it their mission to discredit, if not destroy, Joe for his role in bringing it to light.

And here's what's worse. Just this past week, documentation indicating that Barack Obama was a  member of the socialist New Party in the mid-1990s was discovered--despite efforts by person or persons unknown to "scrub" (erase) the online record. I wrote about this discovery by the blog politicallydrunk  in this week's column--hypothetically flipping the scoop around to speculate on the media outrage that would surely erupt if John McCain were discovered to have been a member of, say, a far-right extremist  party. The Obama-New Party documents are here and here. Read them ... and weep for our democracy, ill-served by a Fourth Estate that is not only subprime, but totally bankrupt.