Just Another Day in Fucknutsville

Earlier today, Politico published a story under the headline “Just Another Day in Fucknutsville.”

The story, by founding editor John F. Harris, is a long treatise about days gone by, in which a presidential impeachment inquiry would have landed with more weight. Because Trump is such a shitshow and because the modern 24-hour, digital media cycle facilitates shitshows, Harris writes (using other words that aren’t shitshow), there has been a “death of solemnity” in media coverage. Sure.

Fortunately this blog is not about Harris’s take, but instead about the headline, “Just Another Day in Fucknutsville.”

“Just Another Day in Fucknutsville,” in almost any context, is an objectively good and funny headline. It’s so good that I’m making it the headline of my post, just so at least one website will have a living article under the headline, “Just Another Day in Fucknutsville.” Because unfortunately Politico no longer does. The headline has now been replaced with “Trump Killed the Seriousness of Impeachment,” which is perhaps a more fitting headline for the piece but is also boring, and sucks.

A spokesperson for Politico told Splinter that “headlines are routinely changed for a variety of reasons,” but noted that the “Fucknutsville” headline was a callback to a Rahm Emanuel quote referenced further down in the piece in regard to Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that she would begin impeachment proceedings:

But the reaction, underway even before she started speaking, made clear that for much of the country, it was just another day in what Rahm Emanuel, when he was Barack Obama’s chief of staff, called the metropolis of “Fucknutsville.” The news may be important, it may be swerving wildly in surprising ways, but never these days is it something that commands reverent attention.

It’s also doubly funny that Harris, the author of the piece, is also on record as a “no swears guy,” or at least a guy who ruminates on Beto O’Rourke’s maverick pivot to doing swears on the campaign trail.

Fortunately for all of us, “Just Another Day in Fucknutsville” existed online, flying close to the too-bright sun, for a few hours, before it fell victim to the forces of solemnity.