He's our bastard (or S.O.B.?)

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:54 PM -0400 5/23/02, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>
>HE'S OUR BASTARD--A few days ago, I was in Gori, Georgia.  I saw the
>Stalin Museum, the Stalin statue in the town square, and the Stalin
>statue and portrait in the train station.  My tour guide said: "He
>may be a bastard, but he's our bastard."  A quick web check shows
>that most hits attribute this quote to Harry S Truman, speaking
>about Anastasio Somoza.
>
curious.  I have it as FDR, also on Somoza (Anastasio Somoza García,
1896-1956), but with a slightly different form:

He may be an S.O.B., but he's *our* S.O.B.

(euphemistic initialism in the original)

True, I don't have a precise locus for it, and no, I wasn't dere,
Charley.  Still, several web sites have the same version, mutatis
mutandis, and if they're both apocryphal, the FDR " S.O.B." would
antedate the HST  "bastard".

Larry