Tag Archives: Washington Post

  

The Washington Post on ‘Fuck’

From WaPo TV critic Lisa de Moraes’s column about “The View” and Michaele Salahi, who is best known for…oh, who gives a [have sex]? Just notice how the WaPo editors handle the big F:

Washington Post's word for "Fuck"

Text:

In theory, Michaele was there, with the show’s other cast mates to plug the new “Housewives” debut. But Michaele wanted to talk about how Whoopi had been “berating” her backstage on “The View.” In fairness, Michaele did explain that Whoopi also told her, “You know me, I say, ‘[have sex] this,’…but I don’t mean that. You understand that.'”

“I don’t know her personality,” Michaele emoted. “I know her from the movie ‘Sister Act’ so I don’t expect a sister to be saying [have sex with] you. ‘”

Maybe it’s a new auto-censor they’re using? But I’m guessing a human would’ve had to add the preposition ‘with’ to the second use of the ‘fuck’-substitute…but then, what human would think that “[have sex with]” is better usage there than “[have sex]”, and also think that ‘[have sex’] is a better substitution than “F***” or “*bleep*” or “screw” or good ol’ “eff”, as MSNBC puts it? Fuck, the ‘have sex’ doesn’t even make any sense in the first usage. Is this in the style book…or maybe de Moraes is thumbing her nose at the Post’s usual way of censoring ‘fuck’?

A Google search doesn’t turn up any other obvious uses of ‘[have sex]’.

Just in case the WaPo copy desk needs a quick reference for other fill-ins to censor ‘fuck’ with, here’s a short primer (attributed, wrongly?, to Monty Python), which notes “It’s meaning is not always sexual”:

Perhaps one of the most interesting words in the English language today, is the word fuck. Of all the English words beginning with f, fuck is the single one referred to as the “f-word”. It’s the one magical word. Just by it’s sound it can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. Fuck, as most of the other words in English, has arrived from Germany. Fuck from German’s “fliechen” which mean to strike. In English, fuck folds into many grammatical categories. As a transital verb for instance, “John fucked Shirley”. As an intransitive verb; “Shirley fucks”. It’s meaning is not always sexual, it can be used as an adjective such as; John’s doing all the fucking work. As part of an adverb; “Shirley talks too fucking much”, as an adverb enhancing an adjective; Shirley is fucking beautiful. As a noun; “I don’t give a fuck”. As part of a word: “abso-fucking-lutely” or “in-fucking-credible”. Or as almost every word in a sentence: “fuck the fucking fuckers!”. As you must realize, there aren’t many words with the versitility such as the word fuck,as in these examples used as the following words;
– fraud: “I got fucked”
– trouble: “I guess I’m really fucked now”
– dismay: “Oh, fuck it!”
– aggresion: “don’t fuck with me, buddy!”
– difficulty: “I don’t understand this fucking question”
– inquery: “who the fuck was that?”
– dissatisfaction: “I don’t like what the fuck is going on here”
– incompetence: “he’s a fuck-off!”
– dismissal: “why don’t you go outside and fuck yourself?

h/t @mariancw

  

There are 854,000 people with “Top Secret” Clearance. Who the hell are they? (WaPo’s Top Secret America series)

So the Washington Post’s 2-years-in-the-making series on the crazy house that is our intelligence operations was launched yesterday. Lots of interesting facts, including the estimate that there are 854,000 people with Top Secret clearance, the highest of the three standard categories of classified intelligence:

Every day across the United States, 854,000 [nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C.] civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

A standard definition of Top Secret: “Top Secret” shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.

Sounds like a pretty exclusive club, or should be right? If you were to take all of the government employees who might be within a football’s field distance from a piece of “Top Secret” paper…including everyone who works at the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, all active duty military officers, etc. from lowest ranking clerk to top chief, that’d equal to about that 800K number, right (*see footnote)?

Here’s some numbers, taken from Wikipedia and other similarly take-with-a-grain-of-salt sources (some agencies have their payrolls classified):

Total 854,000
Central Intelligence Agency 20,000
National Security Agency 30,000
Defense Intelligence Agency 16,500
Army Military Intelligence 31,800
Office of the Director of National Intelligence 1,500
Every active military officers 224,144
All Pentagon personnel 26,000
All State Dept. personnel 20,000
All of Congress, White House, WH Office ~1000
Department of Homeland Security 216,000
WTF 267,056

So, if Excel is correct, subtracting the usual suspects and then some, there are still more than 260,000 people out there with access to secrets that could cause “grave damage” to our country. But I guess if we’ve got solid security standards applied across all the bureaucracies, it’s not like some barely-old-enough-to-legally-drink-maybe-emotionally-insecure-kid, who happened to be given top secret clearance, could waltz into a classified network system by pretending to listen to Lady Gaga and download anything critical, right?

* Footnote: My count doesn’t include private contractors, some of which do legitimately need top secret clearance. But I believe that’s the point of the WaPo piece, that our intelligence infrastructure has become so bloated and convulutedthat even if you were to wildly overestimate the number of government employees who need top secret clearance, you’d still have hundreds of thousands of other people, including contractors, if the WaPo estimate is on the mark. Read their Top Secret America series for even more disturbing implications.