| December 10, 2012 |
[Rolling Stone] When President Obama called Mitt Romney a "bullshitter" in the pages of Rolling Stone earlier this year, it set off a brief firestorm. Defenders of the Republican candidate were shocked ‐ shocked! ‐ that the man holding the highest office in the land would resort to such language. In truth, the halls of the White House (like nearly every other house in the country, with the apparent exception of Romney's) have heard no shortage of profanity over the decades. It's a dirty job, leading the free world. Sometimes it takes a few dirty words. Read on for a brief history of presidential (and vice-presidential, and presidential candidate) profanity.Honest Abe evidently loved a good off-color joke. In Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis bends the ears of an anxious telegraph crew with one of the president's favorite shaggy-dog tales, recounting the tale of Ethan Allen encountering a portrait of George Washington in an outhouse in England after the Revolutionary War. His hosts were eager to see the reaction of their visitor, who stumped them by approving: "There is nothing to make an Englishman shit quicker than the sight of General George Washington."
Our 44th president has a very vivid vocabulary. Obama famously called Kanye West a "jackass," and on the audiobook version of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, you can hear the future president mimicking an old high-school friend who evidently knew his Richard Pryor: "You know that guy ain't shit. Sorry-ass motherfucker ain't got nothing on me." But it was in the pages of Rolling Stone that Obama really drew the ire of the pious, calling opponent Mitt Romney a "bullshitter." Sometimes the dirty word is the most precise.