Last week, a terrible, terrible thing happened in Washington, D.C. A woman said a swear word.

I know, quelle horreur!

"When your son looks at you and says, 'Mama look, you won. Bullies don't win.' I said, 'Baby, they don't,' because we're gonna go in there and we're going to impeach the motherfucker," Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.), the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress, told an uproarious crowd at a MoveOn event.

This scandalized misogynists across the political spectrum. The Republican establishment, which fell over itself describing Donald Trump's grab-’em-by-the-pussy comments as "locker-room talk," cranked up the phony outrage machine. Speaking to a press scrum, House minority whip Kevin McCarthy (R–CA) condemned the "foul language," before storming away from reporters when they started asking him about Trump's own long history of crude commentary. Radio host Dan Bongino, who once subjected a Politico reporter to a profanity-laced tirade, told Democrats to "try to have some dignity in your lives." Matthew Dowd—a 2004 campaign strategist for Dick Cheney, who famously told Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to "go fuck yourself"—wrote an entire ABC News op-ed calling on Tlaib to apologize for cursing, arguing that she was lowering the bar for public discourse. And, of course, Trump himself, who has described the Chinese as "mutherfuckers" and who, right after his third wife had given birth, cheated on her with a porn star, weighed in, asserting that her comments were "disgraceful" and that she had "dishonored herself and dishonored her family."

It wasn't just bad-faith Republicans; some Democrats joined in, too. House Judiciary chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) groused that "I don't really like that kind of language" and questioned Tlaib's intelligence on calling for impeachment. And on Fox News, Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) called Tlaib's use of a single curse word "horrible," "disgusting," "awful," and "deplorable," and then took the absurd step of personally apologizing to "all Americans." At least new House majority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had her back, shrugging off questions about it and calling the kerfuffle "not a big deal" and "nothing worse than the president has said."

Yet members of the media, never ones to let a frivolous occasion of Republican outrage go by, also jumped into the fray, with cable news harping on the non-story all weekend. In Tlaib's hometown paper, Detroit Free Press, Mitch Albom claimed that her "profanity started the year on a low note." New York magazine's Jonathan Chait called it "a gift to Trump," claiming in a recent op-ed that it would undercut the case that Tlaib laid out for impeachment. And Elaine Godfrey, in The Atlantic, argued that Tlaib was participating in the "Trumpification of political discourse."

This was, in a word, ridiculous. It takes a degree of historical denialism to believe that cursing was ushered in by Trump. Even before our vulgarian in chief entered office, plenty of politicians swore on occasion. The late and famously prickly Senator John McCain (R–Ariz.) snarled "fuck you" at Senator John Cornyn (R-Tex.) without inspiring any op-eds on the coarsening of public dialogue. Cheney chuckled over his profane retort to Leahy, later telling Dennis Miller that it was "the best thing I've ever done." Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel used the f-word like salt, while Republican president Richard Nixon favored "son of a bitch."

In 2011, CNN ranked the "top 16 foul-mouthed politicians," citing Lyndon B. Johnson telling a Greek ambassador, "Fuck your parliament and your constitution," and George W. Bush calling a reporter a "major-league asshole." McCarthy's predecessor, former House minority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), swore so much that The Washington Post published "Boehner's cursing, graphed" and The Hill rounded up his "best swears." When asked to comment on Boehner's prolific cussing, then Republican Party spokesman Michael Steel said: "Boehner talks like regular people talk. Occasionally, that includes four-letter words."