Goldman’s bleepity deal

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin had the Washington Beltway abuzz on Tuesday with questioning of Goldman Sachs bigshots that was punctuated with some salty verbiage. Now, Washington lost its “G” rating some time ago. Yet public cussing still makes some blush in shock, even if it’s feigned shock — like when people acted horrified to hear President Richard Nixon on his secret tapes using language that would peel paint off a wall.

Levin cornered the Goldman execs on an internal memo in which some mid-level whatever used a barnyard term to describe the execrable quality of a security the firm was selling. Levin reportedly used the same term 10 or 11 times as he bore in with questions. For those keeping score at home, Levin was quoting the Goldman memo a number of those times; only a few of his barnyard references actually constituted gratuitous profanity. Even so, Levin no doubt was making a point about the ethics of people in expensive dark suits sitting before him. In a word, (bleep).

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