It seems the F-bomb isn't only a problem here...

[Gab]

Originally posted by John D Harris: quote: Originally posted by Gab: Well, I think that Cheney was just as big an arsehole as Senator Leahy. If the Vice President was getting no bide contracts from Halliburton, that's a pretty big thing. The senator was accussing the VP of unexceptable behaviour that Cheney may well have done.

OR NOT HAVE DONE! [/QUOTE]Yeah and there's a high posiblity that he did. My whole point is that Cheney overreacted.

Originally posted by skywalker: quote: Originally posted by promethius9594: I understand Cheney has said he said it and he isn't taking it back i guess the old man has a backbone after all... thats good. like i said though, i would have kicked that insolent piece of s*!t to the curb for pulling that B.S.

Thank you for insulting my Senator.

Mark [/QUOTE]
Don't take it so personally Mark, he wasn't dissed just to get to you.
Hell people here are insulting My President and my Vice President all the time...and I don't take it personally.

As for Cheney having over reacted? I think not. Theres no law stating he isn't allowed to dislike someone who has been actively accusing him of illegal activities. And I am VERY sure Mr. Leahy has heard the F-word before and could not possibly have been shocked at it's utterance....and if he was...he is too naive to be in politics at this level.


[ 06-25-2004, 10:35 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

[Ziroc]

Originally posted by skywalker: quote: Originally posted by promethius9594: I understand Cheney has said he said it and he isn't taking it back i guess the old man has a backbone after all... thats good. like i said though, i would have kicked that insolent piece of s*!t to the curb for pulling that B.S.

Thank you for insulting my Senator.

Mark [/QUOTE]Thank you for insulting my Vice President. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Chewbacca]

Originally posted by Ziroc: quote: Originally posted by skywalker: quote: Originally posted by promethius9594: I understand Cheney has said he said it and he isn't taking it back i guess the old man has a backbone after all... thats good. like i said though, i would have kicked that insolent piece of s*!t to the curb for pulling that B.S.

Thank you for insulting my Senator.

Mark [/QUOTE]Thank you for insulting my Vice President. [img]tongue.gif[/img] [/QUOTE]He's is skywalker's VP too so I would think he has the same grounds to insult him as you do to defend him.

Where as, only a Vermonter -like skywalker would technically qualify to call Senator Leahy there own and non-Vermonter would be casting the insult as an outsider.

Oh and in my opinion, Cheney (who is my Vice-President as well) has no class, is an offensive warmonger, is a liar,and maybe a crook to boot.

[Chewbacca]

This article has some historical perspective and made me chuckle....
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Link

Curses! The days of calumny and bellicosity remain a cherished tradition in the United States Senate.



By historical standards, Vice President Cheney's grunted command this week on the floor of the Senate for Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to contort himself into an impossible sexual position was most economical. And, he told Fox News yesterday, "I felt better after I said it." (He's a man of few words, and "sorry" isn't one of them.)

History reveals senators have discovered many ingenious ways to express Cheney's sentiment without resorting to short, pungent Anglo-Saxonisms. Most have involved florid paragraphs of rebuke. But pistols and blood have been drawn. Canes have been used.

Way back, Thomas Jefferson knew it would come to this. In his classic Manual of Parliamentary Practice, Jefferson, then vice president of the fledgling republic, warned: "No one is to disturb another in his speech by hissing, coughing, spitting, speaking or whispering to another; nor to stand up or interrupt him" and so on. From its beginning, the United States Senate was so preoccupied with decorum that 10 of its first 20 rules detailed proper behavior.

But for the longest time, senators resisted adopting Rule 19 -- "No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator," certainly a subjective and imprecise standard.

That changed after 1902, when jockeying between the distinguished gentlemen from South Carolina resulted in their censure. The junior senator, John McLaurin, proclaimed the senior senator, Ben Tillman, guilty of "a willful, malicious and deliberate lie." Tillman promptly responded with a square punch in the jaw. The ensuing Senate-floor brawl looked like a modern bench-clearing fracas in major league baseball.

Nearly 50 years before, a Massachusetts senator had been beaten unconscious, three days after he took to the floor to denounce two Democratic senators he believed to be pro-slavery. Illinois's Stephen Douglas, Charles Sumner had said, was a "noise-some, squat and nameless animal." He then accused South Carolina's Andrew Butler of taking "a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean," he added, "the harlot, Slavery." That brought House member Preston Brooks in to defend Butler, striking Sumner about the head so furiously with a cane that the senator was carried bloody and unconscious from the chamber.

Cheney's remark this week -- he serves as president of the Senate -- arrived with such explosiveness because anger in the Senate is always to be deeply masked.

"Part of the much vaunted civility is -- how shall I say this? -- that gentlemen speak to gentlemen in terms that are gentlemanly," says Senate historian Richard Baker. "That there should be no barriers to understanding and communication that might happen with profane language."

One of Baker's personal favorite examples of this verbal legerdemain dates to 1925. Sen. Richard Ernst (R-Ky.) went after Sen. James Couzens (R-Mich.) with this: "I wish to know if there be any way under the rules of the Senate whereby I can, without breaking those rules, and without offending senators about me, call a member a willful, malicious, wicked liar? Is there any way of doing that?" Ernst was forced to take his seat, which he could do smugly, point well made.

And this from the legendary Huey Long of Louisiana, referring to Sen. Pat Harrison (D-Miss.) in 1934: "We all have our way of working. One is just as honest as the other. One is, catch your friend in trouble, stab him in the back and drink his blood. The other is, stand by your friend and try to heal his wounds." Down went Long, forced to sit for "imputing the motive of Harrison drinking the blood of his friend."

In "Dark Horse," his book about President Garfield, Washington lawyer Ken Ackerman writes that one "can search the Congressional Record and Globe through two hundred years of debate and never see a member of Congress insult a colleague so directly, brutally and articulately, on the record, in public, looking directly at him across the room" as Maine Republican James Blaine did in the 1880s to New York Republican Roscoe Conkling, his longtime nemesis. The eruption was caused by something utterly trivial. It still rings.

"As for the gentleman's cruel sarcasm," Blaine said, an eye to the galleries, waving dismissively at his opponent, "I hope he will not be too severe. The contempt of that large-minded gentleman is so wilting; his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkeygobbler strut has been so crushing to myself and all members of this House that I know it was an act of the greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him."

He was just warming up. Seizing on a newspaper story that had compared Conkling to a deceased great statesman, Blaine used it for ridicule. "The gentleman [Conkling] took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion. Shade of the mighty [Henry Winder] Davis? Forgive the almost profanation of that jocose satire!"

Ah, those days are no more. In the politics of the past few decades, senators excoriate each other with some pith.



John Tower once saw Strom Thurmond, the notorious womanizer, and mentioned that when he died, they would need a baseball bat to properly press all of him into the coffin. But Thurmond did not even perceive this as an insult. During a Democratic senatorial retreat in 1999, Robert Torricelli told fellow New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg that he would dismember a manly portion of his fellow member. When Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) suggested that Oregon's Mark Hatfield be removed from a committee chairmanship, Bob Kerrey quipped, "Santorum. Is that Latin for [vulgar term for rectum]?"

Earlier this week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) blasted a Leahy proposal to subpoena Justice Department memos on Abu Ghraib prison interrogations as a "dumb-ass idea." But that reference paled beside Hatch's indignation during the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Angry at charges against Thomas brought by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Hatch sputtered, "If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you in Massachusetts." That left Hatch backpedaling later, insisting he had not meant to refer to the Chappaquiddick controversy.

For the most part, says CNN correspondent Ed Henry, who broke the Cheney story, "What you have seen all the time is senators couching it in 'the distinguished senator' form, but they are trying to tear each other's eyes out."

Cheney's directive "will go down as one of the all-time greats," says Henry, "because Mr. Cheney dropped all the pleasantries altogether and got to the point." And although the incident has provoked much hand-wringing over a new nadir in congressional civility, Cheney's choice words have a bipartisan ring to them.

"It goes without saying that people use these words all the time," says Jesse Sheidlower, head of the Oxford English Dictionary's North American unit and author of "The F Word."

"And this is supposed to be shocking? The idea that this is the first time anybody has used it in a political context is just ludicrous."

So perhaps Americans need not mourn the days of the heated, obsolete exchange. In Sheidlower's view, perhaps we're actually growing closer, healing the divide, bound by a common, shared language.

[promethius9594]

Where as, only a Vermonter -like skywalker would technically qualify to call Senator Leahy there own and non-Vermonter would be casting the insult as an outsider.

oh bugger off, chewie. you dont have to be from vermont to know that leahy was being an arse. i know i dont need to be from iraq to know that terrorism is wrong. and i dont need to be from afghanistan to insult bin laden. the simple fact remains that leahy was acting like a snake, and he got it from the mongoose this time around. good, maybe he'll at least behave in an honest and forward manner in the future.

Oh and in my opinion, Cheney (who is my Vice-President as well) has no class, is an offensive warmonger, is a liar,and maybe a crook to boot.

well, at least he isnt a snake in the grass. what i do find funny, however:Vice President Cheney's grunted command this week on the floor of the Senate for Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to contort himself into an impossible sexual position was most economical

[Aerich]

LOL on the article Chewbacca. You have to love it when the politicos actually say something worth reporting [img]smile.gif[/img] That's a good list.

My all time favourite politician's retort was said by former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (I think it was to an annoying journalist). It was, and I quote, "Mangez la merde"; which translates to "eat sh*t". Yes, Trudeau was the most shifty, twisty Canadian politician *ever*, but at least he had style.

[Grojlach]

Originally posted by Ziroc: quote: Originally posted by skywalker: quote: Originally posted by promethius9594: I understand Cheney has said he said it and he isn't taking it back i guess the old man has a backbone after all... thats good. like i said though, i would have kicked that insolent piece of s*!t to the curb for pulling that B.S.

Thank you for insulting my Senator.

Mark [/QUOTE]Thank you for insulting my Vice President. [img]tongue.gif[/img] [/QUOTE]Well, I suppose there's still a fundamental difference between stating that someone has no class and calling someone a "insolent piece of s*!t".

[skywalker]

Originally posted by MagiK: Don't take it so personally Mark, he wasn't dissed just to get to you. Hell people here are insulting My President and my Vice President all the time...and I don't take it personally.

Well, it was not always that way for you MagiK. I try not to insult Bush, because we made a deal ages ago not to. Of course you aren't at fault here, it's just a response concerning my "thin skin".

The F bomb would have been barely acceptable in private - not on the floor of the Senate. I guess Mr. Cheney could not come up with something more creative. He sets agood role model for future VPs.

Mark

[ 06-26-2004, 02:59 PM: Message edited by: skywalker ]

Mark the floor of the senate has NEVER been as prim and proper as you seem to think it is...well not inthe last 100 years or so. These are men we are talking about, they belch and fart and swear, ON the senate floor...they were NOT in a session they were posing for pictures and Leahy had no business acting all buddy buddy with Cheney period...either he was trying to goad the man or he is extremely naive about how people take it whenyou try to accuse them of criminal intent. The F-word was a nothing story it was total bullshit to even bother making it "news" Just as it was total bullshit to make it news that Kery used the F-word about his opponents on MTV.

You are right that I some times let people's comment about "My Guy" (whoever it may have been at the time) get me riled...hopefully I have moved past that. Personal insults still piss me off...but insults to others just makes me want to try and find out the root cause if it's an issue I care about.