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Opinion: Gearing up for 2012 presidential bid? Joe the Plumber wins seat on GOP panel in Ohio

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Oh, Ohio: the state that keeps on giving. And in such a spectacularly bipartisan way!

Two days ago, the toupee-wearing, leisure suit-donning, ‘Star Trek’-quoting ex-con Jim Traficant announced he was running once again for Congress. Now, it’s even better. Toledo’s most famous non-plumbing plumber is making the news.

Joe the Plumber is back!

Plumber (not his real name but we gave up on calling him Samuel Wurzelbacher more than a year ago) is back in politics. No, he hasn’t joined anyone’s political campaign, reminiscent of the glorious McCain/Palin/Plumber presidential ticket of 2008. This time he’s been elected on his own accord.

On Tuesday, Plumber won one of nearly 400 seats on the local Republican Party committee in Ohio’s Lucas County. In this position, he’ll help set the party agenda and vote on the party chairman.

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It’s been a while since Plumber has been in the spotlight. It’s not like he totally....

...disappeared or anything. It’s just that he’s been working on policy matters. Like formulating his opinion on the undocumented-worker issue that’s become particularly explosive in Arizona.

Plumber unveiled a rather succinct white paper last month at a ‘tea party’ rally: ‘Illegal immigration?’ he said. ‘Put a fence up and start shooting!’

This represents yet another side to Plumber. Sure, he’s outlined some domestic and foreign policy positions before. On the topic of freedom of speech, he offered an historical perspective: ‘Back in the day, really, when people would talk about our military in a poor way, somebody would shoot ‘em. And there’d be nothing said about that.’

While working as a war reporter in Israel, he recommended that ‘media be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting.’

During the presidential campaign, he accidentally served as a foreign policy spokesman for John McCain (video below) when he agreed on-camera with a voter that a ‘vote for Barack Obama means death to Israel.’

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‘I’ll go ahead and agree with you on that,’ he said.

A year ago, he released a book, which has -- so far -- received 29 five-star ratings on Amazon. One saddened reviewer said five stars just wasn’t enough:

I pursued Amazon’s rating system for a bit and noticed that the ‘five stars’ rating is usually given to authors such as Shakespeare, Thucydides, Edgar Allen Poe, or even modern hacks such as Hemingway or Pynchon. Five stars is clearly inadequate for Mr. Wurzelbacher’s creation -- I call it the Second Bible. I will petition Amazon to create a ten-star rating just for this book. Meanwhile, I will rate it at mere five stars for now.

We don’t know how he’ll fare as Honorable Joe the Plumber, but he’s going to have to do it without the help of his former presidential running mates. He loathes them.

Just a couple months ago, he said of Sen. McCain: ‘He really screwed my life up.’ Sarah Palin too? Yep. Her sin? She backs McCain.

-- Jimmy Orr

Hey, we’ll never screw your life up. Especially if you sign up to get Twitter alerts of each new Ticket item! So follow @latimestot. Or Like us on Facebook over here.

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