Obscenity Is Now Allowed On The Public Airwaves: Fuck, Yeah!

Good news for fans of artistic freedom and foul language: a federal appeals court struck down the F.C.C.'s prudish indecency rules, calling them "capricious and arbitrary." You'll recall that back in 2003, when a shattered America was still recovering from seeing Janet Jackson's bare breast for a fraction of a second, Bono used the f-word during the Golden Globes, on live television, calling U2's win "fucking brilliant." Alarms immediately went off blaring at the Family Research Center, where they alerted the president, the vice president, the Department of Defense, and Homeland Security, who finally contacted the F.C.C. to save us all from Bono's Irish potty mouth. "Fleeting expletives," is what they're called, although that's kind of a euphemism, like "improvised explosive devices," the main difference being that the government won't bother keeping people safe from the latter. (In case you're worried, our government really is working to keep our soldiers in Iraq safe from the f-word, thank God.)

The best part of the ruling, of course, is that it's brought out the expletives in everybody. Moral guardian Kevin Martin, the F.C.C. chair, put forth an ironically unbroadcastable statement — containing the unmentionable words at least ten times — reading, "I find it hard to believe that the [elitist gay-marrying tree-huggers in the] New York court would tell American families that 'shit' and 'fuck' are fine to say on broadcast television during the hours when children [who those liberal New York activist judges are obviously trying to turn promiscuous and gay] are most likely to be in the audience." The argument the government makes is that there are certain words so vile that they're unacceptable in any context, but...

...and I have to say we never had irony this delicious when Clinton was fucking Monica in the Oval Office...

...the court pointed out that the seven dirty words can't be all that obscene if our president says them on a live television feed, or if the vice president says them on the floor of the Senate on the very same freaking day the Senate passed the law that raised the indecency fines on broadcasters. Ha!

It took six years, and in the pantheon of ways Bush has screwed this country and its constitution, broadcast obscenity is relatively minor, but it just feels gooooood to have these guys' behavior finally come back to haunt them. We all knew it would happen sooner or later, but it was a distant future kind of thing: the sort of long-term that escapes the administration's peripheral vision. Twenty years from now, desertification will kill the Crawford ranch. Ten years from now, it'll be suicide bombers — Christian suicide bombers. America's economy falls behind when tech jobs are lost to students from other countries, whose children haven't been left behind. And of course, the Rapture, where Michael Moore and Al Gore will be playing polo in Heaven, and laughing at the loyal twenty-eight percent way, way down below.