Sunday, February 04, 2007

Bestest Congress Ever!

I just about spit coffee all over the keyboard when I read this little ditty:
Rep. Loretta Sanchez has quit the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, accusing the chairman, Rep. Joe Baca, of telling people she’s a “whore.”
How about that? Rational discourse on the floor of the House.

Representative Baca denies it, of course.
Reached for comment, a spokesman for Rep. Baca's office denied that the congressman had ever referred to Rep. Sanchez as a whore, claiming instead that he had called her a "puta" which is completely different because it's in Spanish.
Oh, okay. He didn't call her a whore. I know very little Spanish, so I googled for a Spanish-English dictionary and found that Whore translates to prostituta. Okay, then. Let's be accurate! What did he call her?

According to this dictionary, he called her a tramp. Which ain't necessarily a flattering term.

I am reminded of an apocryphal tale from the early days of the Texas Republic, wherein Sam Houston referred to another representative as a Bastard. When queried later, Houston said that he wasn't slandering the man, but was merely referring to the circumstances of his birth.

If the Congress can't get anything done, (and I'm beginning to doubt that anything rational or useful comes from Congress, regardless of who is in charge), then they can at least entertain us.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From my time in Mexico I can state that puta [pronounced: poo-ta, not poon-ta as most 'Mericans say] can be used to describe a woman as a whore. Puto, aimed at a male, means that person is a bitch or as a slang usage for faggot.

Another possible alternative is bruja [brew-ha] which is Spanish for 'witch'.

He's ducking the issue by saying it means something else in Spanish. He knows that its common usage is whore and that there is no other way around it. It's as if I walked up to ex-mayoral candidate Joe Fuller and said, "You're nothing but a low-life schwartze." Schwartze, in German stands for black (the color), but in German slang and Yiddish it is used to denote someone as being a n-word. Can't skirt around the context there.

Remember that hassle years ago with the D.C. council and the use of niggardly?