YA NEVER KNOW. I've been "fist bumping" for more than a decade and I never knew what it was called until Michelle Obama shared kuncks with her husband and it became a terrorist act according to Fox News, which has become so full of shit it would be merely comical if it weren't so stupid. Imagine grown men and women in America telling other Americans that a knuckle to knuckle salute is equivalent to a Taliban manifesto. "Yes, we will BURY the infidel in his own entrails and those of his children."

As I said, I've been a sleeper cell fist bumper since the early '90's when fist bumping replaced the high five as a congratulatory gesture among members of an English darts team after a teammate scored a ton in 301 or closed crucial numbers in Cricket. For the longest time I thought a fist bump was a darts thing.

Years later it has become the gold standard of hip salutes for a job well done by everyone from golf to tennis to baseball to pool to a joke well told. There's a photo on the internet of President George Bush the Better giving a fist bump to a Russian tennis player, just like that Commie-loving Rocky Balboa bumping gloves with that Russkie Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.

But in the Year of Our Lord 2008, the nimrods at Fox pull out the word "terrorism" to describe what the House UnAmerican Activities Commiteee would have described the new dance called "the twist."

My anger at this has nothing to do with loyalty toward Michelle or Barack Obama. It has to do with how dumb do the people at Fox think the American people are? What idiot at Fox thought a fist bump was a terrorist signal, and what other idiots at Fox allowed it to be reported as such.

It reminds me of 1976, the American Bicentennial celebration, when the Queen of England, on behalf of the British people, presented the United States with a much larger Liberty Bell cast in the same Whitechapel Foundry in London as the original in 1752. In a pre-9/11 world where right-wing fundamentalist morons had not taken over the airwaves, there was a right-wing Christian fundamentalist preacher named Carl McIntire who had a pirate radio station at sea broadcasting a warning that Britain's Liberty Bell gift contained a Communist slogan in raised letters on the bell. The Communist slogan was, "Let Freedom Ring."

The fact that "Let freedom ring" happens to be the final words of the patriotic American song, "My County 'Tis of Thee." failed to disuade McIntire from his relentless campaign against the bell, which still stands in the bell tower atop the original Independence National Historical Park Visitors Center at 3rd and Chestnut. I guess the difference between then and now is that everyone knew Carl McIntire was a fringe-level crackpot. Whereas Fox News is a mainstream daily reality.

So I'll do what Fox does, present both sides and let you the reader decide:

Michelle Obama's fist bump: Secret Terrorist Code or Desperate Dumbass Right Wing Attack?

And, yes, I trust the judgement of a fully informed American people.