Sorry about that mg, and I hope very much you change your mind.

I appreciate the way in you have reacted angrily about what you have seen as unfair treatment of this bloke. And I suspect that part of that may have been provoked by genuinely slanderous and snobbish stuff that you have come across elsewhere.

But I don't think that the comments on the Mudcat have in fact amounted to that. Some criticism, coloured by the current high octane emotions which seem to be running so freely in the Sates around this whole election, but targetted on Joe's evidently inaccurate statement of his own situation in framing that question to Obama.

But I can't see how that amounts to "slander". (I don't myself see any reason why a member of the public should have to stick to the strict personal facts in such a case - there was nothing impossible about the scenario he outlined of scene who might stand to lose in a change of taxation, it was just that he wasn't actually such a person. If it's a fault it's a pretty trivial one.)

If this Joe has lost his job, or potentially has lost his job, that is nothing to do with anything anybody here has written, and is entirely down to McCain's casual use of him as a political weapon, which focussed media and bureaucratic attention on him.