Joe the Okay I'm Already Tired of Coming Up With Names

At some point somebody's gonna hafta stand up and ask the question: "Is Joe the Reporter part of Borat's next movie?" I mean, seriously, he's like a little doll you squeeze and says stupid shit, right? Except even after you stop caring/squeezing, he still pops up with gems that catch you off-guard with their stupidity, like his exchange with a "fellow journalist" who is Israeli:

JOE: The story here is people are being killed and the media’s slanting it and trying to make it Hamas is, uh, as far as, that Israel’s being bad. Do you believe Israel is bad?
REPORTER: Do I believe it?
JOE: Yeah, do you?!
REPORTER: I’m Israeli, so…
JOE: So answer the question!
REPORTER: No, I don’t think Israel is bad.
JOE: Do you think Israel has every right to protect itself?
REPORTER: Yeah.
JOE: You do?!
REPORTER: Yeah.
JOE: Have you said that on air?
REPORTER: I’m just a reporter.

"Own-goaling" is a great way to put the obvious re: Joe's insistence on plying out this guy's opinions when Joe the Whatever had previously insisted that media should have no opinion, only "news" - and, even better, they shouldn't be allowed near important shit anyway. But what I really like is what a child dude sounds like here - I mean, really, "Is Israel bad?" Why not just ask if this guy is the boogeyman?

Such black and white "we're the good guys, they're the bad guys" thinking is sophomoric, dangerous, and partly what seems to get us into trouble when it comes to the Middle East. It's shocking to think that a man in his 30's as Joe the ******* would actually expect someone to reply "yeah, we're bad. You got us." Obviously Hitler was a bad guy, but HE didn't think so, and only someone so thin-minded would believe he was living in a world from some fucking Bond movie. As I wrote a few weeks ago:

But a further point I myself have never seen or heard anywhere else is how important it is for us to recognize that the "bad guys" don't see themselves as the bad guys, like some old Spy vs. Spy "oh, you got me, good guy!" comic strip. They think they ARE the good guys, which we as a country seem to always miss. They're not thinking "the USA is so great, we should play the parts of evil just to be evil and antagonize them as much as possible."

Now, either side thinking they're the good guy doesn't make it so. But until we really start asking ourselves what different peoples from different parts of the world really want and why, we'll always be stuck in our childish "We're Luke Skywalker and they're Darth Vader" nonsense which doesn't seem to really be accomplishing much of anything.

Keep up the good work, Joe.