Not content to merely cheat on their wives with prostitutes, flirt online with hardbodied pages, send thousands of young Americans to their deaths and offer undercover cops in public washrooms twenty bucks for blowjobs, U.S. lawmakers are now seeking to close a loophole in recent legislation which allows for “fleeting” obscenities to fly on broadcast television. That means an accidental “this is fucking great” (Bono) or the f-bomb visible in some background graffiti would elicit fines for the broadcaster.

Ars Technica reports that the bill will not only give the FCC the power to regulate even fleeting uses of indecent words and images, but that this power will be extended to cable as well as broadcast television.

All this because children must be protected from even a fleeting obscene word or image on television. The hypocrisy and uselessness of this move is staggering but I suppose that in some fucked-up households — the households which have no internet, books, magazines or any desire to prepare their children for the real world — this would be seen as a bold and much-needed move.

What will news broadcasters do when Vice President Dick Cheney decides to again tell critics of his corrupt and malevolent administration to go “fuck yourself”?

(Two hundred American families were destroyed by you reading the swears in this post.)