The Vice President is going around saying things like he's not sure if he really swore at a Senator, but he felt better afterwards (huh?), and Yes, that's not the kind of language I ordinarily use.
Consider the following to be totally unsupported hearsay: Yesterday I received an email from a reader of this blog who said he used to be in and out of Cheney's office before he was the Veep (the email was specific, I'm being vague), and that Cheney regularly used language that was not just salty but downright radioactive.
Not that swearing matters much in my book, but lying does.
If said reader wishes to say more s/he knows how to do so, although I can understand why one view of professional obligations might counsel against it.
It seems a lot continues to be made on Cheney’s “frank discussion” with Pat Leahy, as it came up again on the television news today. Personally, I wouldn’t care if Cheney liked wearing dresses on Sunday, so long as he was an honorable and able public servant. I wouldn’t want someone of talent to be flogged in the media for boorishness, which is true for all of us once in a while, but rather because that person harmed the country or abused their trust.
By the way, an editor of the NYT (I can’t recall his name, alas) opined on FOX that Bush, because of the challenges he faced with war and a struggling economy, would be ranked in the “near-great” or “above-average” range for presidents–ultimately depending, of course, on how the war in Iraq goes. When, years from now, our tax dollars are paying off principal and interest on the national debt Bush created and not on services for the direct benefit of the public, I’m not so sure that people in later years will be as charitable.