WaPo Football Writer Mocks Joe the Plumber in NFL Wrapup

November 17th, 2008 7:41 AM

While the vast majority of political reporters have dropped off the snotty comments about the McCain-Palin ticket and their campaign messaging, that’s not true of the football writers at the Washington Post. In the chatty wrap-up of the NFL scores appropriately called "The Slant," Post sports writer Desmond Bieler could be called for unnecessary roughness on Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher. In Monday’s paper, he came up in summarizing the St. Louis Rams being thumped by the 49ers:

Remember when the Rams shook off their awful start and actually played pretty well for a few weeks? Well, they’re back to being about as relevant to the national conversation as Joe the Plumber. Over its past three weeks, St. Louis has been outscored in the first half by a total of 99-10. We haven’t seen lopsided figures like this since the numbers started rolling in on election night! Sorry, Joe.

I’m not sure anyone saw 90-10 numbers in the presidential race on election night, unless you count returns from D.C. (where it was 93 percent to 6.5 percent, actually.) This is not the first time that Bieler has worked Joe the Plumber slams into his football slant. From October 20, the awful NFL team to mock was the Bengals:

On the other side, not even Ohio's biggest celebrity, Joe the Plumber, could plumb the depths of Cincinnati's 0-6 wretchedness. Of course, that might be because it turns out that, if having a license means anything, ol' Joe isn't a real plumber. But that's all right -- the Bengals aren't a real NFL team.