12 Classic Political Insults

Think partisan name-calling has reached new lows? Actually, mudslinging is a tradition as old as the republic, right up there with baseball and apple pie. The Founding Fathers were no strangers to the well-aimed political slur.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Think partisan name-calling has reached new lows? Actually, mudslinging is a tradition as old as the republic, right up there with baseball and apple pie. The Founding Fathers were no strangers to the well-aimed political slur. What's more, style and content have held remarkably steady through the centuries.

While researching "Slinging Mud: Rude Nicknames, Scurrilous Slogans, and Insulting Slang from Two Centuries of American Politics," I discovered that although the details change with each election cycle, the overall themes-corruption, incompetence, extremism, warmongering, ignorance, wasting taxpayer money-tend to stay the same.

Here are a dozen mudslinging classics from earlier American eras. With a little tweaking, most could still work today.

Franco-maniac

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot