{"id":12934,"date":"2010-03-23T17:29:12","date_gmt":"2010-03-23T21:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2010\/03\/23\/12934.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:55:54","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:55:54","slug":"bee-eff-dee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2010\/03\/23\/bee-eff-dee\/","title":{"rendered":"Bee Eff Dee"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>My first response will not surprise Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zazzle.com\/hcr_big_fing_deal_tshirt-235071564353624757\">Joe Biden was right<\/a>. This is a big fucking deal.\n<p>Nor will my second response surprise GRs, I think: it&#8217;s more complicated than that. I mean, yes, it <I>is<\/i> a big fucking deal, but it&#8217;s not like it is done, particularly. There&#8217;s an awful lot of work left to be done with it, not just with the Senate patch but successively, from year to year. The main thing is that there will now be a perennial battle about <I>how<\/i> we fulfill with the national responsibility to ensure (or insure) access to health care, or how well we fulfill it, rather than if we fulfill it, or if that responsibility exists at all. But, like early childhood education, the perennial battle may be answered with <i>cheaply and shoddily<\/i>, which ain&#8217;t much of a legacy. So, yes, a big fucking deal, but the deal ain&#8217;t done.\n<P>I don&#8217;t know if y&#8217;all will have predicted my third response, although it is pretty predictable: Where Theodore Roosevelt promised a <I>Square Deal<\/i>, and Franklin Roosevelt promised a <I>New Deal<\/i>, and Harry Truman promised a <I>Fair Deal<\/i>, the new social contract is the <I>Big Fucking Deal<\/i>. I am totally liking that, and totally using it. I am hoping that it fulfills its promise: a sequence of programs aimed at fundamentally changing the protections that the federal government can offer individuals against the vagaries of illness, unemployment, homelessness, and natural disaster. That would be a Big Fucking Deal indeed.\n<P>And fourth&#8212;does it seem odd to have anyone use the phrase <I>big fucking deal<\/i> in a positive sense? I mean, yes, Joe Biden is a dialect unto himself, really, but in my experience, the phrase is always, always, always used negatively. When you say that something is a Big Fucking Deal, you are saying that it is <I>not<\/i> important. Even more so, of course, with the initialism version, which I have used more frequently, but still: if we are going to use the phrase to describe things that are important, I&#8217;m going to need to recalibrate my profanity meter.\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger feels it necessary, for some reason, to chime in on the important issues of the day, despite y&#8217;all already knowing what note I&#8217;m chiming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19052,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12934\/revisions\/19052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}