Much Ado – and Much Adieu – about Scatalogical Nothings

Dirty words are in the news this week. Why? Isn’t there a war or something to write about?

First up: The Decider

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

Virtually every news outlet fell all over itself reporting this microphone screwup. And virtually all of them missed the most pertinent point. So he said “shit” in what he believed to be a private conversation. Who cares? Get over it. Hey, I’m as willing as anyone to see the venality in Bush, but the fact that he said “shit” is the non-news portion of this quote.

The much more newsworthy bit is that he seems to be woefully ignorant of the relationship between Hezbollah and Syria. While they certainly share a particular  geopolitical frame of reference and Syria has undoubtedly given financial support to Hezbollah, operational decisions are made independently by Hezbollah and have increasingly been so since the group successfully forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Syria doesn’t have the juice to tell Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, this fecal matter, this doodoo, this stuff.

Once the decision was made to go for chowderheaded sensation over more difficult to digest substance, things only got worse. (Yes, I know, it rolls downhill.) At least CNN and some few others were adult enough to print the sentence as it was said. Too many media sources couldn’t bring themselves to type the letters and solemnly informed us he said they need to stop doing this s…, this s—, this s***, this s**t, this —, and this (expletive). In one particularly juvenile case, he said they need to stop doing this “(bleep)…that rhymes with spit.”

Oh, grow up!

If we really must find some complaint with his choice of words – and I’m up for that if you are – let’s find it in the fact that he has somehow gotten to be President of the United States without knowing what “irony” is.

In the On Deck Circle: Lance Armstrong

Having been hounded relentlessly by the French press over whether or not he used performance enhancing drugs to win the Tour de France seven times, at an ESPN event, Lance said, “All their players have tested positive for being assholes.” French newspaper France Soir responded by greeting his arrival in Paris with the headline “Welcome in France Trouduc,” an abbreviation of “trou du cul” – French for “asshole.”

Petty, crass, and juvenile all around? Yep, yep, and yep. Worthy of a “wave of Gallic outrage“? Please.