WTF? Why the fuss over the scatological reference?

Hmm. I'm jumping into this pointless fray. It must be too hot to think straight, or something, because we're all hot after the topic of the Most Powerful Man In the Free World using an old, pre-Saxon Angle, monosyllabic term for excrement, or as Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House puts it, THE SH*TSTORM OVER THE WORD “SH*T”.

But it's not the use of the word that bothers me. After all, I used it just last week, in describing one of my father's youthful adventures. It's not even that everybody seems to be a little shocked that he said it -- although, I have to admit, I don't quite get the fuss. The man is an English-speaking, Texas-raised son of George H.W. and Barbara (not to be confused with a theoretical son-of-a-Hillary) who had plenty of party time in college in the late sixties and early seventies. If he didn't use the word every once in a while, especially in the company of other relatively masculine men, I'd worry (okay, Putin's creepy, but he's not a girly-man. And Blair is not entirely limp-wristed English schoolboy wink wink).

And he had every right to believe he was off mic, not being broadcast all around the globe. The man made an off-the-cuff remark while buttering a roll. Whoop-de-twang!

No, my hackles were raised by some ninny I caught at the tail end of his report on ABC's wee hours newsy program "World News Now", who came up with the oh-so-clever remark to the tune of "If the FCC fines us for that sort of thing, shouldn't the president be fined?" Or some such absurd fecal matter.

Well, for starters, the POTUS was not intending his statement for broadcast. Did we not already cover the part where he did not realize the microphone was still on? So, if you broadcast it, you probably can get fined. But just because he said it doesn't mean it's newsworthy and thus deserving of airtime. What was newsworthy was what you buried: his actual opinion. Let us cut out the "s" word and just lay out the statement on its own:

See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this... and it’s over.

Plain. Simple. To the point. If Syria were to stop playing games supporting Hezballah, if Syria were to behave itself, there would be no crisis. A simple recognition and assignation of blame. (Of course, he skipped the part where Iran was involved, but that's probably next on the agenda.) It isn't about the naughty little word. It's about one very big and nasty group of terrorists and their supporters.

And, it's about his actually being correct. The man is not an idiot. He just acts like one, sometimes.

So, let me be the first to say, the noise about his one little word* is just so much bullshit.


*Gates of Vienna mentions one story Mom told me, of Bess Truman's troubles with Harry's linguistic discipline. When a woman complained about how often Harry referred to something as "manure", Bess replied, "It took me 45 years to teach him to say 'manure'."