One downside of becoming president after eight years of White House control by the other party is that you get stuck having to defend an awful lot of "shit" left behind by your predecessor. Pardon our language, but in President Barack Obama's case, this applies rather literally to a move by the Bush administration years ago to crack down on profanity on broadcast TV. Now the Obama administration faces the decision of continuing the Bush team's indecency crusade—or saying, well, screw it. And social conservative groups are ramping up a campaign declaring that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder don't care about F-bombing the nation's children.
Most Americans have long recovered from their inadvertent exposure to Nichole Richie's utterance of the word "shit" during the Billboard Music awards in 2003 and Cher's 2002 diss of her many critics on the same show, "So fuck 'em. I still have a job and they don't." The Federal Communications Commission is not so lucky.
In 2003, after Bono accepted an award at the Golden Globes, saying on live TV that "this is really, really fucking brilliant," the Parents Television Council, a religious-right watchdog group, demanded that the FCC clean up the broadcast airwaves. In what became known as the "Golden Globes" order, the FCC ruled that a single utterance of the "F" or "S" word could violate the law prohibiting the broadcasting of obscenity. The FCC went ahead and fined major broadcasters $8 million for various indecency infractions, ranging from indiscriminate F-bombs to Janet Jackson's nip slip during that infamous Superbowl half-time show.
justin bieber kesha wiz khalifa nicki minaj christina hendricks
