Timothy Egan VS Joe the Plumber - "I don’t want you writing books."

Wow, Timothy Egan's op-ed/attack on Joe the Plumber was the dumbest thing I've read in a long time.

From the first few paragraphs, "The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread.
...
Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé [sic] full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion."

I don't see the logic in any of this. Apparently Joe the plumber is planning to write a book and it could potentially sell a lot of copies. Why should this bother Egan?

Because some other authors are unpublished and unread? Would they be more likely to be published or read if Joe doesn't write his book? I doubt it sincerely.

Because if Joe gets published, and gets paid for it, he will be in the same profession, at least for a time, as Twain, Orwell, etc? What's the problem here, if you can't write as well as Twain you're not supposed to write?

Because Joe is a plumber? Is he supposed to know his place, which is apparently the toilet? (I like how Egan uses fixing a leaky toilet as his example of what plumbers do, as opposed, for example, to fixing the kitchen sink. People shit in toilets. In some cultures it's the work of the lower castes (i.e. people not fit to associate with) to clean and repair them. Would it defile the New York Times best seller list to have Joe's book on there?)

With op-eds like this, it's easy to see why the NY Times stock is junk.