Last week I wrote an expletive laden rant about Dick Ch*@%y’s ‘rebuttal’ to President Obama’s speech on national security. I think most of you are pretty clear about my motivation to write it. I was angry that this man, who has done more harm to our country than everyone locked up in Gitmo combined, was given a national platform to perform his one man horror show. His attempt to scare us all into believing that immoral acts by him and his administration could somehow be justified elicited some strong feelings from me. Many of you apparently felt similarly, and sent me to the rec list for the first time. It was a new experience for me, and the high profile afforded by a spot on the Daily Kos recommended diary list attracted a kind of attention I haven’t before seen from my participation at this site. To put it bluntly, some wing nuts freaked the fuck out.
Now I know that my invective was the type of thing some conservatives rail against, but the variety of response I received was larger and more intense than I would have expected. I had emails attempting to spin my "temper tantrum" as positive news for the conservative movement:
So if Cheney and Company have no credibility, why are the liberals having temper tantrums all over the web. Oboma is weak on National Security and AMERICANS are finally getting the fact that liberals are supporters for the terrorist and appeasers . Oboma was on the defense, angry, blame blame blame Bush....after he said 'No pointing fingers'.
Congress said no to Gitmo cons coming here, the people said no but this pompous arrogant idiot still says he is going to do it. His sucking up to the far left is what is finally going to bring him down, GO CHENEY GO ! It is working.
I had emails pointing me to a right wing blog article attempting to exploit my gratuitous use of the F-bomb to drag down the credibility of this site and by extension, that of Keith Olbermann(?):
Daily Kos Reader Favorite: An F-Bomb-Packed Rant Against Cheney http://newsbusters.org/...
Keith crows over Kos connection. (HT: J$)
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://olbermannwatch.com/...
Olbermann Calls Dick Cheney 'As Insane As Any Terrorist'
http://newsbusters.org/...
D >>>---> @
"RED EYE ROCKS!!!" foxnews.com/redeye
TOM "THE ANIMAL" XAT!!! activitypit.ning.com
I had an email from whom I can only presume to be a fellow liberal angered by my lowering of the discourse:
WOW Such a well thought out intelligent post. Your ignorant rant does NOTHING but give fuel to the ones that would refer to all of us as just like you. Try to write something a bit more ummm adult.
I guess he either couldn’t post a comment in the diary, or knew doing so would earn him some scorch marks.
And in case you thought all wing nuts would only focus on the swearing as evidence of the immoral nature of ‘libruls’ I received the most hypocritical of all responses:
No fuck you [Xneeohcon]. Also fuck your family and fuck your mother and father for raising you. Fuck your friends and fuck your relatives. Fuck every aspect of that pee brain of your and that tiny dick of yours.
Why don’t you get a fucking education or, when we have our next terror attack, see how fucking brave you are and volunteer your to be attacked.
How nice! I’m wondering how he knows how big my genitalia is. Taking a peek when standing at the adjacent urinal perhaps? Anyway, I wonder how attacking my manhood and my family really makes him feel better about condoning the torture of human beings? And I wonder if he finds my use of the ‘f’ word offensive?
What I want to know is what the big fucking deal with the word ‘fuck’ is? If my screed had not contained one so called ‘offensive’ word in it would I still have raised the ire of the wing nuts? Can they not understand that the more they freak out over the usage of the word, the more power they give it to offend? Fuck is only offensive because we have collectively made and kept it so.
There is a synonym for every ‘swear’ word in existence that is perfectly acceptable to use in any company, so it’s not the meaning we find offensive. It’s a wholly invented concept to have ‘bad’ words and, despite the fact that I sometimes am socially coerced into perpetuating these norms, I don’t think there is anything wrong with swearing. I am reminded of something the late, great, George Carlin said: "They are no bad words. [There are] bad thoughts. [There are] bad intentions. And [there are] words."
Some people use it as a linguistic crutch, substituting ‘fuck’ or one of its derivatives when they can’t conjure up a more specifically appropriate word for their sentence. This can get annoying. Not because I get offended by the word, but because any word (swear or not) used ad nauseam can get old quickly.
Some people use swear words to occasionally emphasize certain points or to convey excessive emotional enthusiasm. This was the usage I employed in my diary, and a couple times in this one. It is the most common reason for the average citizen to utter swear words. It is most often keeping the context of the listener or reader in mind that reasonable people swear. There’s no point to swear in the company of people who would be offended by it, because it distracts from the meaning of the conversation when objections to word usage are either consciously or unconsciously injected. I used that word a lot (I think the wing nut blogger counted for me) in that post because: 1) I knew that it would understood by this community in the context I meant: venting frustration; and 2) that this is place where people understand that if they are offended by crude language they ought not to enter a diary with the title "Hey Dick, F- You!!!!!"
So any of you trolling righties that want to try to impugn the character of this blog by counting how many times I use the word "fuck," remember this: YOU, whether intentional or not, read my whole diary. Some of you counted swear words, which means you had to subject yourselves to reading them. Are your eyes crossed now? Is your spine curved? Fuck no, it’s not. And you know why? Because those words can’t hurt you. Period. You know of their existence and yet the memory of how they’re spelled, and how they’re pronounced, and how many times nasty ‘libruls’ like to use them on adult content blogs somehow doesn’t negatively impact your life at all. If you are religious (and if you are a wing nut you most likely are), the word "fuck’ is not even taking the lords name in vain. You’re cool with your white bearded daddy on this one. And if you think little kids are cruising the blogs so they can learn new bad words to say in front of your ultra-puritan in-laws then you either have no clue about what kids already know, or no clue what much worse things your kids could be looking at on the internet (ie Powerline), or both. Either way, get a fucking clue.
One more question maybe you all could help me with in the comments: How does using it 20 something times any different than using it once? Fuck if I know!
Thanks for reading. Here’s an afterword just for the trolls:
That fuck fucked that other fucker on fucking Friday. Saturday that fucking fuck fucked that other fucker another fucking time! For fuck’s sake fuckers, knock the fuck off with the fucking already, and leave me the fuck out of that fucking fuck’s fucked up fuckfest.
See? Still breathing? I told you it couldn't hurt you.