On throwing the cliche "throwing someone under the bus" under the bus

Not Very Bright (who's really big in Belgium), proposes a new drinking game:

'Take a drink every time some simpleton person tosses out the cliche “____ threw _____ under the bus.”

'Can we please retire that one? Now??'

That got Waldo to thinking as he loaded another sheet of paper into his bathtub typewriter. "Every campaign for president," he opined, seems to generate a catch phrase or two like that. I remember in 1972, among the Democratic candidates, the word was 'viable.' "Is Senator Bloof's campaign viable?" I suspect it reflected the nascent interest in abortion rights that exploded with Roe v. Wade in 1973." He sent me packing for a volume of the OED.

"There were other such phrases for subsequent campaigns," he intoned, honking loudly enough that I could hear him down the hall in the library, "but they took up too much mental space. I have forgotten them all, quite forgotten." Where did this "under the bus" bidness start?

Noddling around in what Senator Stevens calls "that series of tubes", we came across a wonderful wordsmithing site, Double Tongued Dictionary, which has the earliest appearance of the term:

Catchword: throw under the bus

Filed Under: English, Slang

Part of Speech: v. phr.

The part of speech reflects that used in the full entry, and not necessarily the part of speech as it is used in the quotation below.

Quotation: Dees said he talked to Hood after he bonded out of the El Paso County Criminal Justice Center on Sept. 26, 1990, and warned him “that he was being thrown under the bus by Jennifer Reali.” But he said Hood believed Reali “was going to tell the truth.”

Article or Document Title:
“Hood talks without thinking, friends testify at murder trial”

Author:
Erin Emery

Article, Document, Publication, Web Site:
Gazette Telegraph

Publishing Location:
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Dateline:
Fort Morgan

Date of Publication:
Dec. 12, 1991

Page Number: B1

People seem to get thrown under the bus a lot these days, which either makes for a very bumpy ride for environmentally-conscious passengers or it leads to very long commutes as the cops have to stop the bus every little bit to investigate another fatality. Ann Coulter, for example, accused Senator Obama of throwing his grandmother under the bus in his Philadelphia speech, which comment prompted Jeff Koopersmith of American Politics Journal to ask if someone would do the same to her.

Senator Larry Craig, who got dumped as a co-chair of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign after his wide stance adventure in Minneapolis, complained that Romney not only threw him under the bus but backed up and drove over him again.

Waldo scowled more than a bit when we did some research and found he has used the term ten times (including here)- quoting Pundit/rocker Melissa Etheridge's miasmic questions in the Logo candidate forum last August; twice in the Craig affair; once to describe former Iraqi viceroy Paul Bremmer's revenge memoir; once to rap John McCain for throwing gay Republicans...well, you know the rest, in 2000; once to predict The Clintons would do the same to black voters in Pennsylvania's primary; and once to quote a John Arovosis blog entry (so that, like the Etheridge quote, doesn't count); for a total of eight. Still, that's enough to run a regional trunk line in most states, and Waldo decreed, before disappearing into his bubbles, that the term will never appear here again. So there.

Anyway, now that Hulu.com has Bob Newhart reruns, we're going back to our college "Hi Bob" drinking game. They same that all the time on that show. You can get completely faced in 22 minutes.