[Update -- 0907 -- From my Dad, An Old Story:

A politician came to the Indian reservation to give a speech. After each statement the tribe called out Oompah, Oompah, The politician was pleased at the response. After the speech, the Chief offered to show the visitor his prize bull. Before entering the pen the Chief warned, do not step in oompah.]

I know how to curse like, well, a sailor. But I don’t do it that often. Foul language quickly loses its power when you use it to make mundane speech seem spicy or edgy. But sometimes that bit of profanity is the only thing that works. Jeff Jarvis feels the same way in the wake of the latest idiocy from the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC has outlawed the single most essential word in political discourse and protest: bullshit.

[snip]

But bullshit is political speech. It is our single most precious means of expressing displeasure with the political and the powerful.

Without the word bullshit, we are left with far less satisfactory means of debate. Now don”t feed me the mothers” bromide about curse words indicating a limited vocabulary. Bullshit is the most expressive word we have in this context. In his delightful treatise On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt finds the most equivalent word to be humbug and he acknowledges, It is more polite, as well as less intense, to say Humbug! than to say Bullshit! Humbug”s synonyms, which he lists, are similarly unsatisfying: balderdash, claptrap, hokum, drivel, buncombe, impostuer, and quackery.

So now imagine a protestor at a televised rally against the war railing that this war is humbug! Doesn”t cut it. If, instead, she said that Bush”s war is bullshit and that were broadcast across the country, every station that carried it and the speaker herself could be fined per utterance, even into bankruptcy. If, fearing this, she censored herself, that is evidence of the chill the FCC has imposed on free political speech. If, because of that chill, a station decided to time-delay the news – a journalistically and constitutionally offensive but pragmatic necessity of the age – it could dump her words: Bush”s war is bleep. But unquestionably, that detracts from the power of her statement and that is done only because the FCC threatens fines, presumptively, for the use of the word.

People who live by generating bullshit and lies don’t like it when the gloves come off. When the spade gets tagged, it becomes more difficult to dodge and weave as General Douglas MacArthur learned following his Old-Soldiers-Never-Die speech. President Give’m Hell Harry Truman was succinct and to the point on his feeling concerning the speech. It was, he said, nothing but a damn bunch of bullshit.

If it’s good enough for Harry, it’s good enough for me. (And it seems that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinks so too.)

Who would you like to call bullshit on?

My Soundtrack: Apply Some Pressure by Maximo Park on WOXY.