It was an insult so lurid that the New York Times primly edited it out, referring only to "a vulgar reference".
But you're made of sterner stuff: so yes, Jesse Jackson did say Barack Obama had been talking down to black people and he wanted to "cut his nuts out" - though many reports have gone with the incorrect original transcription by Fox News of "off".
The question is, why? Do we accept that Jackson genuinely believed he was having a private, un-eavesdropped chat in the Fox News studios on Sunday?
Jackson has since shown nothing but remorse, issuing an apology even before the substance of his derogatory remarks had been published - and before his own son, Jesse Jackson Jr, issued a stiff filial rebuke for the "ugly rhetoric".
The New York Times and others see Jackson Sr's comments as an apparent riposte to a speech made by Obama on Father's Day in which he blamed absent fathers for many of the problems suffered by black communities in the US, something at which Jackson took umbrage.
The incident has echoes of an episode of the US TV drama The West Wing, in which the president - the liberal Democrat Jed Bartlet - lets slip a withering put-down of a folksy Republican opponent (seen as something of a Dubya figure) without realising the TV cameras were on. Though it turns out not to be an accident after all, but a political ploy.
Over on the Chicago Tribune's The Swamp political blog, which gave early details of the story, readers were sceptical at Jackson's insistence he had not intended the comment to be overheard.
Jackson's kidding, right? Makes a statement, regardless of whether a microphone is hot or not, and then says he really supports Obama. I hope there aren't any bridges built with that kind of support
Another wrote:
Let me see, Jesse is at FOX NEWS, in front TV CAMERAS and TV MICROPHONES. And Jess has only been around the block about 975,000 times, and he suddenly decides - at FOX NEWS, in front of TV cameras and TV microphones - to diss Obama?
Meanwhile on US liberal politics' uber-blog the Huffington Post, a number of the 1,000-plus comments took a line summed up by one reader:
It's called jealousy. Barack Obama is everything Jesse wanted to be to America, but somehow came up short. Now, he has to watch a younger, far more talented, man of color take the reins
