Politicians' profanity (NSFW language)

[lpetrich]

F-bombs away: Why lawmakers are cursing now more than ever | TheHill

Profanity — once considered a major no-no among those seeking public office — is no longer an earth-shattering political snafu. And according to new research, this year could be on track to see members of Congress swearing up a storm more than ever before.

In analysis conducted exclusively for ITK, GovPredict, a government relations software company, found that the frequency of lawmakers using words that might make one’s grandmother blush has increased steadily since 2014.

This chart shows the obscene amount of swearing lawmakers are doing in public - MarketWatch
Democrat Rashida Tlaib calling Trump a ‘mother*****’ reveals America’s strict hierarchy of swearing - MarketWatch

• Sen. Bernie Sanders "wrote the damn bill" on "Medicare for All"
• Beto O'Rourke on Trump: "He's been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. Members of the press, what the f---?" and about assault weapons, “keep that sh— on the battlefield. Do not bring it into our communities.”
• Sen. Cory Booker: “Listening to the president. Such a bullshit soup of ineffective words,” and “We are not going to give thoughts and prayers, which to me is just bullshit. I’m sorry to say that as a man of faith, but I was taught that faith without works is dead.”
• Rep. Maxine Waters: “Demand the Members of Congress get rid of ALL assault weapons or kick our ass out of Congress!”
• Rep. Rashida Tlaib: "We're gonna go in and impeach the motherf---er."
• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: "If we are not helping people, we should go the f--- home."
• Sen. Kamala Harris: “This guy has completely trampled on the rule of law, avoided consequence and accountability under law,” she said of Trump. “For all the sh— people give me for being a prosecutor, I believe there should be accountability and consequence.”
• Anthony Scaramucci: “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” and “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”

Plenty of examples from both sexes.

 

[lpetrich]

A Brief History of Presidential Profanity - Rolling Stone

• Abraham Lincoln: about a picture of George Washington in an outhouse in Britain after the Revolutionary War: "There is nothing to make an Englishman shit quicker than the sight of General George Washington."
• Barack Obama: Kanye West is a "jackass", Mitt Romney is a "bullshitter", and what an old high-school friend sounds like: "You know that guy ain't shit. Sorry-ass motherfucker ain't got nothing on me."
• Mitt Romney: the likes of "gosh darn", "good grief", and "H-E-double hockey sticks."
• Joe Biden: on signing Obamacare: "This is a big fucking deal."
• Dick Cheney: to Sen. Patrick Leahy: "go fuck yourself."
• George W. Bush: NYT reporter is a "major-league asshole."
• Bill Ciinton: about a squabble with Barack Obama: "I don't think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?"
• Richard Nixon: "Expletive deleted" became a national joke. Like "son of a bitch".
• Lyndon Johnson: "People said my language was bad," recalled Nixon, "but Jesus, you should have heard LBJ." Like "I do know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad."
• John F. Kennedy: about something potentially embarrassing: "This is obviously a fuck-up."
• Harry Truman: General Douglas MacArthur was a "dumb son of a bitch," and Nixon was "a shifty-eyed goddamned liar." "I never did give them hell," he once reminisced. "I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."

I'm leaving out the current one, because he deserves a post of his own.

 

[Patooka]

I can't believe I'm defending Scaramucci, but his quotes weren't in a public setting.

 

[lpetrich]

These Are the Most Foul-Mouthed Presidents, and How Donald Trump Compares
A History of Political Cussing
WTF Did Biden Just Say? A brief history of bad language in Washington.

• Andrew Jackson: Reportedly very potty-mouthed, and his parrot Poli picked up some of his profanity.
• Abraham Lincoln: He was known to tell off-color stories and jokes.
• Dwight Eisenhower: he used only mild profanilty, and he couldn't stand others using profanity.
• JFK: he'd swear like a sailor - he once was one.
• LBJ: “I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket” and “I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy's window, and say it smells like roses.” Also about J. Edgar Hoover as FBI head, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.” About a Canadian Prime Minister's opposition to the Vietnam War, “You pissed on my rug.”
• Richard Nixon: Time notes that in a 1971 conversation between Nixon and two aides, the president called Mexicans “dishonest.” Nixon also said that blacks lived “like a bunch of dogs.” And he characterized San Francisco as a city full of “fags” and “decorators.” As Time notes, “that was just one conversation.” CNN reports that on other occasions, Nixon made antisemitic comments. And he also referred to the presidents of Ivy League universities as “sons of bitches.”
• Jimmy Carter: About running against Teddy Kennedy, “I’ll whip his a**.”
• Ronald Reagan: NBC reports that in 1983, Reagan “got into a shouting match with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau at a London economic summit. Assailed for not more aggressively promoting détente with the Soviet Union, Reagan pounded the table and shouted, ‘God damn it, Pierre.'”
• George Bush I: “When discussing his 1984 vice presidential debate performance, he said, ‘We tried to kick a little a**.'”
• George Bush II: “What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this sh*t and it’s over.”
• Barack Obama: about the BP oil spill, he once tried to decide on “whose a** to kick.”

 

[lpetrich]

The Profanity President: Trump’s Four-Letter Vocabulary - The New York Times

In a single speech on Friday alone, he managed to throw out a “hell,” an “ass” and a couple of “bullshits” for good measure. In the course of just one rally in Panama City Beach, Fla., earlier this month, he tossed out 10 “hells,” three “damns” and a “crap.” The audiences did not seem to mind. They cheered and whooped and applauded.

... He had a foul mouth long before politics, of course, but he seemed to try, however fitfully, to clean it up for a while when he set his sights on the White House. Still, he could not resist at times. At one rally during his 2016 campaign, he quoted a supporter calling a Republican rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a “pussy.”

Once taking office, he tried, at least, to keep it private, but he was uninhibited when the cameras were not on. After the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was appointed, he told aides, “I’m fucked.” Speaking with lawmakers, he called African nations “shithole countries.”

But he got all prissy about profanity when Rep. Rashida Tlaib referred to impeaching the "motherfucker".

Back in 2011, he used the f-word a lot to some Republican supporters. About Iraq, “We build a school, we build a road. They blow up the road. They blow up the school. We build another school, we build another road, they blow them up. We build again, in the meantime we can’t get a f***ing school built in Brooklyn.”

In a 2016 campaign rally, “We’re gonna have businesses that used to be in New Hampshire, that are now in Mexico come back to New Hampshire, and you can tell them to go f*** themselves!” He also promised to “beat the sh*t” out of whoever attacks the US. In office, he called African nations and Haiti “sh*thole countries.”

 

[lpetrich]

The cursing president - Trump
How Trump took swearing mainstream - The Washington Post
With such goodies as
Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "The Do Nothing Democrats should be focused on building up our Country, not wasting everyone’s time and energy on BULLSHIT, which is what they have been doing ever since I got overwhelmingly elected in 2016, 223-306. Get a better candidate this time, you’ll need it!" / Twitter

Trump's Public Expletives Another Break With Presidential Decorum | Voice of America - English

It was the country’s first president, George Washington, as a Revolutionary War general in 1776, who issued an order to his troops against cursing, stating, “The General is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing, a vice hitherto little known in our American Army, is growing into fashion.”

Trump has called Rep. Adam Schiff "Adam Schitt"

 

[lpetrich]

Trump's profanity includes a kind of profanity that certain of his followers strongly dislike.

Donald Trump's Evangelical Fans Upset Over Using Lord's Name in Vain at Rally - as "goddamn"

White evangelicals are apparently upset over Trump’s use of profanity - Insider - "they'll be hit so goddamn hard," about some Islamist militias, and to some business leaders, "if you don't support me, you're going to be so goddamn poor."

‘Using the Lord’s name in vain’: Evangelicals chafe at Trump’s blasphemy - POLITICO - "A Trump-supporting West Virginia state senator who represents many evangelicals got three phone calls from constituents complaining about Trump’s profanity after a recent rally."

US evangelicals finally find the one obscenity from Donald Trump they can't abide | Stuff.co.nz

Their main concern is with "goddamn" - which Trump, in his ceaseless eloquence, uses as a catch-all adverb when he runs out of "verys." They're also not happy with his frequent "what-the-hells" and his carpet-bombing deployment of f-bombs.

I recall from somewhere that Richard Nixon's good friend Rev. Billy Graham had as his only objection to the White House tapes all the profanity in them -- not the revelations of criminality in them.

 

[lpetrich]

I searched for more profanity from Rashida Tlaib, and I found where she dismissed some event as "racist bullshit" and where she dismissed "opportunity zones" as "bullshit". She has used profanity elsewhere.

I found some for one of her colleagues and defenders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has sometimes censored herself about profanity, like saying that a kitchen-sink garbage disposal "scared ... the daylights out of me" and pausing before referring to some policies as "garbage". But she said that “Republicans really tried to fuck with me, for lack of a better term,” that some centrist-Democrats' policies are "bullshit", that about pre-Trump times, "The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ [after Trump]. For us, it’s never been normal, and before that, the bipartisanship was shitty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, [the Defense of Marriage Act] and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything." Also, her strategy for winning re-election is to "kick ass" as a legislator.

Late in 2018, some Sunrise Movement activists protested at Nancy Pelosi's office, and AOC was there. The night before, they had gathered in a DC church, and AOC and RT addressed them. AOC said “We need the pressure because we need to show our colleagues that this is the fight for our fucking lives," and either her or RT said “We need to stand up to these Koch Brother assholes.” Likely AOC, because the tweet showed her standing on a table and speaking.

 

[ideologyhunter]

In some of the posts above, there's no attempt to distinguish between public cussing and cussing that comes to light through, for instance, hot mikes, subpoenaed tapes, and leaks from aides, fellow pols, etc. And that does make a qualitative difference. You can call it propriety, hypocrisy, adhering to a public persona, but only a puritanical outlook would cause one to get one's knickers in a knot over the revelation that someone, in private life, in fact cusses.
In the line of 45 chief execs, Trump stands alone in public profanity. 'Grab her by the pussy' was a hot mic, 'shithole countries' was reported by fellow pols. But 'little Adam Schitt' was in a tweet, 'sleepy-eyed son of a bitch' was on-stage, at a rally in PA, 'bomb the shit out of them' was at a campaign rally, as were many 'goddamns'. (Actually, I find his sadistic personal insults even more offensive.) DJT has never for a nanosecond realized that he speaks for the country, and that he is supposed to represent America at its best. A true degenerate.
BTW, no excuse offered here for the Beto or Tlaib quotes, either.

 

[thebeave]

Not so much in the profanity department, but Lyndon Johnson takes the cake for crude sex talk, dick jokes and references. Frequently called his own dick, "Jumbo" and there is an audio clip out there where he is describing his desired trouser fit to his tailor. Lots of references to which side Jumbo likes to hang, and his bunghole. Hilarious.

 

[ideologyhunter]

According to the book In the President's Secret Service (2009) -- a fairly gossipy book, btw -- LBJ was nude around his daughters, around female staffers and all sorts of pols, so much so that all the regulars got used to seeing his mammoth scrotum. Staffers began to refer to him as Bull Nuts. LBJ found out about it, and was furious.

 

[lpetrich]

Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail: Make Them Deny It | MassCommons

... and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas. The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get a way calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

Also about AOC, I recall from an interview that she said that she "worked her ass off" campaigning, and when she won her primary campaign, she stated that her campaigners "worked (their) butts off".

 

[lpetrich]

Angry Nixon: New tapes reveal an overwrought president in grips of Watergate

... “I’m not going to see Goldwater on this issue,” he tells Haig. “Goldwater has been a pluperfect ass.”

... “It’s a tough thing, Bob, for you, for John, the rest, but God damn it, I never want to discuss this son of a bitch Watergate thing again. Never, never, never, never.”

...
“The only cabinet officer that has called – and this is 50 minutes after the thing is over – is Cap Weinberger, bless his soul. All the rest are waiting to see what the polls show. God damn strong Cabinet, isn’t it?”

Nixon also tells Haldeman: “You’re a strong man, God damn it and I love you and I love John … . Keep the faith, keep the faith. You’ve got to win this son of a bitch.”

...
Nixon tells Rogers, “I've been through a hell of an experience. I was just reading (Sherman) Adams' memoirs and Adams, you know, to his credit did come in and say ‘I'll resign’ – but Haldeman and Erlichman didn’t and I had to tell them they had to resign. And that was a God damn tough son of a bitch."

Presidential salty language nothing new - Baltimore Sun