Wow.

So, Presidential hopeful John McCain was thrown a 'social curveball' on Thursday.

[MARTY] PARRISH: This question goes to mental health and mental health care. Previously, I’ve been married to a woman that was verbally abusive to me. Is it true that you called your wife a cunt?[*]

Balls. (I'm not sure what it has to do with "mental health care," however.) If there is an award for the best question asked of a Presidential candidate this election cycle and this doesn't win, the fix is in. Maybe it was not the most appropriate question, but even that is somewhat debatable given the direction this current cycle is headed.

“This is about character,” Parrish said, when reached by telephone afterward. “And in a moment of intemperance, he called his wife the most despicable name a person can call a woman."

Yeah, that's a crowd-pleaser of a word if there ever was one. Either way, it takes a titanium pair to get up in front of mixed company and say that word, never mind in a question to a candidate for the highest office in this cursed land.

MCCAIN: Now, now. You don’t want to … Um, you know that’s the great thing about town hall meetings, sir, but we really don’t, there’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language. So I’ll move on to the next questioner in the back.

Credit where credit is due: That's the one of the classiest non-denial denials I've heard in a long time considering the setting and the question posed to Mr. McCain.

Mr. Parrish, by the way, is a Baptist minister. Make whatever you want of that.

Of course, in our current police security state, Mr. Parrish was briefly detained and questioned by the Secret Service. I'll bet if he had used one of those cute illusory phrases or metaphors, only the tackiness would have been noticed and the Secret Service would not have even cared.




* For the love of Christ, do you think people could actually spell-out the explicative when it relates to the story? Nobody's mother is going to die a thousands deaths because you used (and correctly represented) the word "cunt" in your newspaper article or blog post. Highlighting a specific word that was uttered by someone is not the same as invoking that word in a pejorative fashion. Especially when said word is the whole fuckin' reason you wrote the Goddamn article/post in the first place. Nine out of ten times we're gonna know what you are talking about and actually seeing the letters in the proper sequence is not going to significantly change that fact.

Although, if you want to use the word "cunt" as an invective noun directed at a woman? Well, you're on your own with that.

With that in mind and somewhat without context: