YOU LIKE ME TOO MUCH AND I LIKE YOU

Isn’t it funny how some presidential candidates have to pass a media likeability test, and others don’t? Isn’t it funny how the candidates under the most pressure to be “likeable” are almost always women? And how the likeability bar seems always to be set just out of reach of all of them, because it’s designed to weed out progressive women?

Republicans spent nearly a quarter century demonizing Hillary Clinton. After a while, they got progressive Democrats, Greens, and Libertarians to join the dogpile. As a result, in 2016, even though she was running against a man who was the least honest, least moral, and least qualified candidate in modern American history, mainstream media decided that it was Hillary who had the likeability problem. Who knew email server security was the key to likeability?

Now those same pundits are wringing their hands in faux concern about Elizabeth Warren. There aren’t many parallels between Clinton’s history and Warren’s, but they do have one thing in common. If you guessed gender, you win the prize. Or you would if there were a prize, which there is not.

You know who doesn’t have a likeability problem? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young Democratic Representative from the Bronx. She drives wingnuts crazy, and I’m loving it. In the Republican fantasy world, young Latin American women have only two career paths. They’re either in the U.S. dropping anchor babies, or joining caravans in Mexico so they can cross the border into the U.S. and drop anchor babies.

For conservatives, the idea that someone like that could win an honest Congressional election simply doesn’t compute. They’ve tried their best to dig up dirt, but she’s the Roadrunner to their Wile E. Coyote. The biggest scandals they’ve found are that she called herself Sandy as a teenager, and that she appeared in an amateur dance video as a freshman in college. The horror!

AOC just laughs and mocks her critics, which further unhinges the wingnuts. Now the tinfoil hat crowd has been reduced to claiming that Ocasio-Cortez herself released the dance video in a false flag operation designed to make conservatives look stupid.

But of course, conservatives are perfectly capable of making themselves look stupid. Case in point: compare what we know of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s teenage years with those of new Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh. One was a dancer. One was a drunk and date rapist. Anyone who hates on the dancer is stupid.

And then there’s Rashida Tlaib, the new Democratic Representative from Michigan, who at a recent party, told other guests about a conversation she’d had with her son after the election. Among other things, she told him that “we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.” Break out the smelling salts, because Republicans clutched their pearls and repaired to their fainting couches en masse.

Back in 1973, the Supreme Court created a three-pronged test for obscenity, the first of which involved applying contemporary community standards. Let us, therefore, review some recent history of Republican community standards regarding the f-word.

Here are a few examples of famously foul-mouthed Republican politicians. In 2004, then-Vice President Dick Cheney told Democratic Senator Pat Leahy to “go fuck yourself.” He said that on the floor of the Senate. In 2000, candidate George W. Bush called a New York Times reporter a “major league asshole.” In 2017, Martha McSally, the former Arizona congresswoman who lost her Senate race to a bisexual atheist, was quoted as saying “Let’s get this fucking thing done” to encourage her fellow Republicans to repeal Obamacare. Why even Donald Trump himself has a long history of using the F-word. I’ll cite one example from his first “exploratory” presidential campaign in 2011: He promised to read the riot act to China, “Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25%.” (Because trade wars were easy to win, even back in 2011. But I digress.

Did Congresswoman Tlaib violate contemporary standards when she referred to Donald Trump as an MF? Clearly not. She was with friends, at a party, talking the way people talk. Even Republican people.

Ah, but was it appropriate to apply the term to Donald Trump? Personally, I’ve seen no solid evidence that Donald Trump ever had sex with his mother. On the contrary, he’s on record as being attracted to much younger girls, including his own daughter. So if Representative Tlaib’s comment was intended literally, she bears the burden of proof.

But my guess is that her use of the term “motherfucker” to describe Donald Trump wasn’t intended to be taken literally, but rather to convey generic contempt and disapproval, with which I heartily concur, although I tend to use less colorful language to convey my own views.

I wasn’t brought up in an environment where cursing was a thing, so I tend to use euphemisms most of the time. But in American in the year of our lord 2019, the old 20th century language taboos are observed most often in the breach.

I’m old fashioned enough to think it would be better for public figures like Tlaib to hold their fire until Robert Mueller, and/or Adam Schiff, gives them concrete evidence of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors (including having sex with his mother). Then, by all means, impeach the motherfucker.