There is a highly entertaining story bubbling just below the surface of legitimate journalism connecting Joe the Plumber, the everyman, workaday, lunch-pail totin' quarter-million-dollar-a-year plumber, to Charles Keating of the Keating 5 scandal.
Apparently, JTP, better known to the Ohio Department of Taxation as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, is, according to conservative blogger Martin Eisenstadt a "close relative" of one Robert Wurzelbacher, son-in-law of the infamous Charles Keating, of Keating 5 infamy.
So freaking what?
How close a relative? Is he actually a relative at all? You know how many Wurzelbachers there are floating around.
It doesn't really matter.
What matters is not whether the Ghost of Financial Scandals Past came back to bid young Joe W. haunt the Obama campaign. What matters here is, did McCain realize that the man he was about to make the emotional linchpin of his final chance of becoming president is a five-second Google search from being connected to the greatest embarrassment of his political career?
If he did know this, how could he possibly bring Joe up at the debate? If he didn't know this, WHY DIDN'T HE? Are they so secure with the process that gave them Sarah Palin that the McCain campaign has become almost superstitiously averse to vetting anyone for anything?
It seems to me that Obama has gone out of his way to not bring up Charles Keating in this campaign, but the Old Man keeps showing up like a bad penny -- or to use a more lurid simile, like a giant turd in the McCain family's Baccarat crystal punch bowl.
UPDATE: Just to clarify - I don't know if the Wurzelbachers are related and I really don't think it's the slightest bit relevant to any meaningful issue. As I wrote in the comments below, if McCain is casting around for a budding workaday entrepreneur to use as his Model Tax Casualty, how could he possibly use someone who is so readily traced to Charles Keating?
If it was Obama's team vetting him, they would probably have had a genome map done of the guy.