Evidently, Republican operatives employ the f-word a lot.
By the f-word I don't mean fifth, though certain key Republicans have indeed been availing themselves of that one.
I can remember when the Fifth Amendment was something lefties resorted to under livelihood-threatening pressure from Republicans accusing them of being Communists. Hey, it was a constitutional plea then (though Republicans scorned it), and it's constitutional now.
But the old-school Fifth-takers took it in a way that school kids could understand: "I decline to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me." Now that it's Republicans taking the Fifth, they duck their heads and say "Fifth. . . Fifth . . . "
Why do they wallow in the Fifth?
They do so in order to shed the filth of association (which they so recently reveled in, and may yet revel in again) with Trump.
Filth is not a legal term, but it is an evocative one, useful in accusations against, say, artists. Lolling with that l a little bit.
Fifth is -- as it should be -- no fun to pronounce. That -fth at the end is like you're trying to quickly push that tightly feeble fi- , at the beginning, off your lips.
But! Wait!
The f-word I have in mind is not fifth but f-ing.
"Take the f-ing mags away."
"This is f-ing crazy."
"They're literally calling for the vice-president to be f-ing hung." (That should be hanged. How the vice-president is hung is nobody's business but Mother's.)
And the big one:
"I am the f-ing President." Trump may be the first U.S. president who has felt a need to invoke the f-word on his own behalf. As with everything else he uses, he taints it. The f-word is venerable. Trump might take it out.
The word actually spoken in each of these instances, we may assume, was fucking. A Congressional hearing is one of the last places, these days, where people feel compelled to euphemise. But so much euphemising ...
Republicans, how can I put this?
Are known to run things into the ground.
Watergate gave us "rat-fucking." Nixon aides -- Haldeman, Segretti, Chapin -- brought that unpleasant term for political tricks to Washington from their nerdy-gurdy days in college politics. It's not a pretty image -- at the national level, it became CREEP -- and it didn't catch on. More recently, Dick Cheney, as vice-president, said to Senator Pat Leahy, on the Senate floor, "Go fuck yourself." (Reported in the New York Times as "an obscene phrase to describe what he thought Mr. Leahy should do.") Cheney's daughter is trying with dignity to make up for that sort of callow outburst now.
But Trump pushed on beyond basic GOP fiddle-fuckery. He called fellow Republican John McCain, a hero, "a fucking loser." If that wasn't enough to sour the Republican base on draft-dodger Trump (and it wasn't, in fact it established him, cheaply, as a bad-ass), how about when Trump's First Lady, for fuck's sake, was quoted as saying "Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff?" In my day, that alone would have been enough to end a presidency, and a marriage, as dumb-ass as Trump's.
And yet, when another fellow Republican, Robert Mueller, was appointed to prosecute Trump's first impeachment, Trump was quoted as saying, "I'm fucked."
And yet he wasn't.
Some years ago, I wrote a foreword to a book called The F-Word. (The publisher, without a word to me, put out a later version of the book with a different foreword, by someone who, as I recall, is known from television.)
Here is how my foreword began:
"Our softest consonant (fluff), followed by one grunt of thrust (uh!) or blankmindedness (uh...), followed by our hardest consonant (kick); and that's it. Enough to perpetuate the race."
So do we want to live in a world
In which Trump trumps fuck?
No. We don't. Boom. k-Boom. p'shoooooo b'bab bab pockle psh'i'pshi'i'pshi ... BOMMMMM
Happy Fourth!
And Here, in Keeping With Our Limerick Policy,
Is a Sort of Value-Free Economic Explanation
of Trumpism
Says a Christian businessman, Wesley,
"I tend not to focus expressly
On tenets of worship,
For entrepreneurship
Embraces them all more or lessly."
Your limericks I truly enjoy.
This was one of your best ones, my boy.
I would have to be deaf
To give it an F, and thanks for not f-ing up, Roy.
Glad you didn't take the fifth on the fourth.