The New Yorker's Judith Thurman chronicled some of Heinz Kerry's more well-known verbal gaffes before noting the videotaped vulgarity:

"She dismissed voters skeptical of her husband’s health-care proposals as 'idiots,' and, in a television interview with a Pittsburgh anchorwoman, employed the word 'scumbags' to describe some of her detractors," Thurman said.

"There are these bizarre moments that make you shudder," one Kerry adviser told Thurman. "Like calling herself African-American to black audiences."

In an effort to put Heinz Kerry's vulgar verbiage in context, The New Yorker writer explained, "I doubt that she knows the literal meaning of 'scumbag,' but perhaps, after forty years in America, nearly thirty of them as a political wife, observing how the flaws and contradictions of a personality as complex as hers are melted down for ammunition by the other side, she should have learned it."

Editor's note: