Newsweek Editorial: A Foul Mouth and Manhood

[KareBear]

Great read. She really sticks it to Cheney :D Hope this isn't a dupe!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5352287/site/newsweek?site=newsweek

[papau]

1. a great read!

A Foul Mouth And Manhood
In recent years the Republican hard guys have surely taken over the Y-chromosome territory from the feel-your-pain Democrats

By Anna Quindlen

NewsweekJuly 12 issue - In 1962, when the New York Times quoted President John F. Kennedy during a dispute with the steel industry as saying, "My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now," the White House went ballistic. The press office complained, the publisher of the Times apologized and the AP noted that other newspapers had found the quote unfit to print.<snip>

Or the F word. Or expletive deleted. Or what have you: the powers of expurgated invention fail me. What does it mean that today it means nothing when the vice president unrepentantly uses a word in public that this magazine won't use in print? It means that standards have changed since 1962. Not just standards of obscenity—standards of masculinity.

Dick Cheney's decision to advise Sen. Patrick Leahy to perform an anatomically impossible sex act (thereby creating a journalistically impossible quotation situation) has been discussed in terms of the rise of the potty mouth. After all, the F word is still considered so beyond the pale that when Bono used it at the Golden Globes, the chair of the FCC called it "abhorrent," and when John Kerry paired it with "up" to describe Iraq policy in a interview, the president's chief of staff described himself as "disappointed."

The Cheney flap triggers the hypocrisy meter, since neither of those (Republican) officials has described the vice president's language as abhorrent or disappointing. And it raises the trickle-down question, too. If the vice president of the country feels comfortable—nay, exultant—about using the word on the Senate floor, can the vice president of the student council be far behind? I can't wait for the principal's reaction the first time a smart teenager offers the Cheney defense verbatim:

"He had challenged my integrity. And I didn't like that. But most of all I didn't like the fact that after he had done so, then he wanted to act like everything's peaches and cream. And I informed him of my view of his conduct in no uncertain terms. And, as I say, I felt better afterwards."<snip>

[NewYorkerfromMass]

3. My personal "abhorrent" meter is off the scale

these scum have ruined it forever.

[wtmusic]

2. Cheney says telling Leahy to fuck himself was informing him

"of my view of his conduct".

What an asshole.