OPINION:
Far-left Rep. Rashida Tlaib last week went on a profanity-laced tirade against President Trump. On just her first day in Congress, the Michigan Democrat spat out some vile bile against the president.
“People love you and you win,” Ms. Tlaib said to a group of supporters in a bar, captured on a smartphone and posted online. “And when your son looks at you and says, ’Momma, look you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ’Baby, they don’t, because we’re gonna’ go in there and we’re gonna impeach the mother——er.’”
Yes, the 42-year-old single mother — the first Palestinian-American woman and one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress — says she said that to her son. You gotta wonder how her young son replied.
The profane tirade set off a debate across Washington and social media. Mr. Trump, for his part, said he “thought her comments were disgraceful.”
“This is a person that I don’t know. I assume she’s new. I think she dishonored herself, and I think she dishonored her family. Using language like that in front of her son, and whoever else was there, I thought that was a great dishonor to her and to her family. I thought it was highly disrespectful to the United States of America,” Mr. Trump said.
But nowadays, it’s par for the course. Democrats have become, in a word, profane. They think, and we’re just guessing here, that spewing foul language puts them in line with all those angry fringe liberals who, when it comes right down to it, decide which way the Democratic Party is going to go. Profane is the game.
It’s a trend that’s been rolling for a while. In July 2017, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, New York Democrat, said, “If we’re not helping people, we should go the f—k home.” She followed up with a dig on Trump: “Has he kept his promises? F—k no.”
In April 2017, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said — with children behind him on the stage, no less — that Trump “doesn’t give a s—t about health care.” Later, in Portland, Maine, he said of Mr. Trump’s new spending blueprint: “They call it a skinny budget, I call it a sh—-y budget.” In New Jersey, he said Republicans “don’t give a s—t about people.” The same month, the DNC began selling a T-shirt that read, “Democrats give a s—t about people.”
(Note: Mr. Perez seems to have s—t on his brain.)
Fellow libs, it seems, love the potty talk. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bronxistan Socialist, supported Ms. Tlaib. “I got your back,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted at her with, shockingly, no profanity.
But Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel criticized the new low road from Democrats. On Mr. Perez’s comments, she said, “I think Democrats should be denouncing his behavior To say that Republicans don’t give a blank about people, that should not be rhetoric that the head of the Democrat party should be using.”
Maybe the new profane talk from Democrats is part of a strategy to answer Mr. Trump, who used a good bit of profanity himself as an upstart candidate when he was running for the Republican nomination. Mr. Trump’s crass language often hit home with blue-collar workers, and Democrats are clearly grasping for answers with that demographic in the run-up to 2020.
Mel Robbins, a CNN commentator, posted a theory: “Politicians are swearing more because it works.”
“When you swear, other people process it in the emotion center of the brain so you don’t sound so ’scripted’ and that makes you seem more authentic and passionate about what you’re saying. And there’s yet another benefit to swearing. Author Michael Adams argues that it can help you bond with people. In his book, ’In Praise of Profanity’ he writes that swearers ’are unexpectedly useful in fostering human relations because they carry risk We like to get away with things and sometimes we do so with like-minded people.’”
“And the greatest benefit of all to politicians? When you swear you don’t sound like one. You sound like the rest of us,” Mr. Robbins wrote in the April 2017 piece.
So look for much more profanity from the Democrats. Their Teleprompters will say, “bang fist here, insert profanity.”
And that’ll make ’em look like “the rest of us” supposedly.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.