Bush's Fart-Joke Legacy

[El Supremo]

Bob Woodward reports in his new book, State of Denial, that President Bush loves to swap fart jokes with Karl Rove. Before a morning senior staff meeting in 2005, Woodward reports, Bush schemed to have Rove sit in a chair that triggered some sort of high-tech whoopee cushion activated by remote control. The prank was postponed in deference to news of the al-Qaida bombings in London. When the gag was carried out two weeks later, the room erupted in riotous laughter while Rove hunted down the culprit.

Perhaps you are puzzled that the president of the United States would embrace so eagerly a genre of humor that the typical male Homo sapiens stops finding irresistible around the age of 12. But Woodward is not the first to report on Bush's fondness for fart jokes, and Bush is not the first member of his family to display this particular affliction....

http://www.slate.com/id/2150806/?nav=tap3

[gratuitous]

1. Bush is gassing his own people?

Looks like we'll need another UN resolution!

[MADem]

3. He will be hoisted, aptly, on his own "PETARD" soon enough

Origin

A petard is or rather was, as they have long since fallen out of use, a small engine of war used to blow breaches in gates or walls. They were originally metallic and bell-shaped but later cubical wooden boxes. Whatever the shape, the significant feature was that they were full of gunpowder - basically what we would now call a bomb.

The device was used by the military forces of all the major European fighting nations by the 16th century. In French and English - petar or petard, and in Spanish and Italian - petardo.

The dictionary maker John Florio defined them like this in 1598:

"Petardo - a squib or petard of gun powder vsed to burst vp gates or doores with."

The French have the word 'péter' - to fart, which it's hard to imagine is unrelated.

.... http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/hoist%20by%20your%20own%20petard.html

[Kire]

2. Fart jokes are funny.

[Geoff R. Casavant]

4. Well I'm nearly 40

and there's nothing like a good fart joke to send me into torrents of laughter. I hope I never outgrow it.

Now, that being said, there's a time and place for everything, and a cabinet meeting is neither.