Rodrigo Duterte's string of outrageous and offensive statements
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has become known as much for his recent populist political campaign as for his murderous crime policies and vulgar mouth.
Duterte loves the phrase "son of a bitch," though his most infamous insult is far from the only vulgarity that's come out of his mouth since he began his presidential campaign.
We listed several of Duterte's most insulting, disturbing and outrageous comments, below.
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'Forget the laws on human rights'
At the last campaign rally before Duterte went on to take office, the president issued a declaration that foreshadowed his violent "war on drugs."
"Forget the laws on human rights," Duterte said. "If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because I'd kill you."
Duterte also said he'd "dump" so-called drug pushers into Manila Bay "and fatten all the fish there."
The president, who promised to wipe out the illegal drug trade before his election, has since launched a brutal crackdown on drug pushers and users. An estimated 2,400 people have died in the violence in just the two months since he took office, with at least 900 people killed in police operations.
He has instituted curfews and checkpoints while nations such as the United States have grown increasingly concerned about extrajudicial killings.
'I was mad she was raped, but she was so beautiful.'
During a campaign event on April 12, Duterte was asked about the rape of an Australian woman that had occurred at a jail in Davao in 1989, during his first term as mayor of the city.
"I was angry because she was raped, that’s one thing," Duterte said. "But she was so beautiful, the mayor should have been first."
'Pope, son of a bitch, go home.'
Duterte, like all of us, is no fan of traffic.
He complained that, during the Pope's recent visit to the Philippines, traffic in the capital city of Manila was so awful it took five hours for him to get from his hotel to the airport.
"I wanted to call him, 'Pope, son of a bitch, go home. Do not visit us again'," Duterte said.
He later wrote an apologetic letter to Pope Francis and said he was only angry about the government's inability to do anything about the traffic.
Insulting Obama
Duterte took a preemptive dislike to a possible meeting with Obama on Monday.
The president said he would call Obama a "son of a b*tch" if he mentioned Duterte's "war on drugs."
This, too, he regrets.
He doesn't think he's like Donald Trump
Despite being relentlessly compared with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump -- for the womanizing, willingness to insult seemingly everyone, and more -- Duterte has not grown fond of the comparison.
"He's a bigot and I am not," Duterte has said when asked about Trump.
In a way, he has a point.
Trump has ginned up a raucous base of racist voters with talk of banning Muslims from the country and building a wall along the southern border of the United States.
Duterte has said that any peace talks between Muslim rebels in the Philippines and the government should consider government attacks on those rebels.
But, as is evidenced below, Duterte is not above homophobic slurs.
'Your ambassador is a gay son of a bitch.'
Duterte's Obama insult wasn't the first time he's insulted an American official.
The Philippines president was recounting a conversation with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Aug. 5 when he went off on a small tangent.
He said he'd been fighting with U.S. Ambassador Phillip Goldberg, and referred to Goldberg as a "gay son of a bitch."
Journalists aren't exempt from assassination
Following his election victory in May but before he assumed office, Duterte made his opinion of journalists clear.
"Just because you're a journalist, you're not exempted from assassination, if you're a son of a bitch," he said.
Duterte was responding to a question about what he would do about the the country's high rate of murder for journalists.
The Philippines ranked fourth on the Committee to Protect Journalism's impunity list in 2015. The list measures how often journalists are killed in countries around the globe, and the rate at which their killers are punished.
The Philippines sat behind only Somalia, Iraq and Syria, and was the only nation among the top five "not in a state of large-scale armed conflict."
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Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.
