TPM Muckraker April 20, 2006 08:28 AM (Printable Format):
The truth hurts. Missourian Bill Jones opened a letter from his congresswoman, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO), in which the lawmaker wrote, “I think you’re an” followed by “a profane, seven-letter insult,” the AP reports, which our New York Times crossword dictionary tells us is “asshole.”
If you check out the original[pdf], it looks like the offending bit was stripped in after it was signed: it’s not like the text appears in the middle of a paragraph.
Stop me if you’ve heard this, but when I was at a college paper, our cross-state rival’s paper had a piece in which the reporter punted on a response from a source and just dropped in that [someone] “was an asshole and wouldn’t return phone calls.”
A clip of it stayed up on the office bulletin board for months.