Oh, fuck off

One of WaPo’s MAGA affirmative action hires has guaranteed himself unanimous support for his bid to join the Both Sides Do It Hall of Fame:

Many blame former president Donald Trump for coarsening our dialogue, and indeed he tosses out some unfortunate vulgarities, including on social media. He seems particularly fond of “bullsh–” and, of course, allegedly referred in private to “sh–hole” countries.

But President Biden more than matches Trump when it comes to salty language. The most famous example came during Biden’s vice-presidency, when he was caught on a hot mic telling President Barack Obama that signing the Affordable Care Act was “a big f—ing deal.” As president, he employed the same word in a typical example of macho man bluster, declaring to a Florida mayor that “No one f—s with a Biden.” For variety, he was also caught calling a reporter a “stupid son of a b—-.”

To be sure, many presidents were known to be prolific private swearers. But Biden, like Trump, is particularly loose with his routine public utterances of “hell” and “damn.” In 2019, he called an Iowa voter a “damn liar.” At a 2021 town hall in Cincinnati, he promised to fix a “damn bridge” connecting Ohio and Kentucky and said he was “damn proud” of his son Hunter. Just a few days ago, Biden said in an interview that he had “acquired a hell of a lot of wisdom” over the years.

Biden’s casual public use of “hell” and “damn” — and the fact that many people these days think those words barely qualify as profanity — is a reflection of our lowered standards. The crude language we hear every day in public settings is remarkable.

Sure, there are some isolated instances of Donald Trump saying the occasional oopsie, but have you considered how much our public dialogue has been coarsened by Joe Biden’s private swearing and — trigger warning — public use of the word “hell?” We are all going straight to heck, boys!

I would ask why the editor didn’t send the writer back to the laptop until he had a topic of material interest to write about, but when you hire people for the sole reason that they supported Donald Trump in 2016 — so you know they’re sincere when they complain about vulgarity in public discourse — “there will be no standards whatsoever” is an implicit part of the contract.