The storm of indignation and media coverage of Cheney dropping he "F-Bomb", as the media so coyly put it, on Senator Leahy grows sillier by the day. According to Rollcall :
"The remark, whatever it was, left some Members scandalized. “I was kind of shocked to hear that kind of language on the floor,” Leahy said afterward. "
Shocked?! Scandalized!!! However they had no problem with the President dropping trou, groping or using a nubile young intern as a cigar humidor in the Oval Office or Senator Kennedy's lack of driving skills and decades of public humping and insobriety, but G*d forbid the Veep should use a curse word in a private exchange between himself and another adult?
Our delicate shell-like ears and sensibilities wouldn't be offended but that Leahy's people leaked it to the media. What a pack of crybabies...the Dems have become the bratty kid who doesn't share or play fair, and rats you out when he is peeved. They would do well to remember Americans do not admire or reward finks, as Linda Tripp and John Dean can attest.
Rollcall continues with amusing anecdotes on the historical civility or lack thereof in the Senate:
Curses! A Brief Senate HistoryBeing the world’s greatest deliberative body means occasionally having a vice president drop the F-bomb in your chamber.
It also means, over the course of 200-plus years, that you’ll host the occasional fistfight, a few threats of pistol play, alleged poisoning and one vicious caning — to say nothing of volumes of wild personal insults.
[...]Stewards of the Senate, keenly aware that the chamber is an arena of passions as much as politics, have been engaged in an uphill struggle to preserve its dignity — and the debate within it — since the dawn of the Republic.
“No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the first manual of parliamentary procedure for the Senate, in 1801.
Yet it was perhaps a measure of low expectations that Jefferson felt compelled to add, “No one is to disturb another in his speech by hissing, coughing, spitting.”
[...]
And by historical standards, Leahy got off easy.
In 1856, a perceived attack on the honor of South Carolina Sen. Andrew Butler (D) prompted the vicious beating of Sen. Charles Sumner as he sat at his desk in the chamber. The attacker was actually Butler’s nephew, Rep. Preston Brooks (D-S.C.), who called the Massachusetts Senator’s famous “Crime on Kansas” speech, delivered only days earlier, “a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.”
In what was to presage later eras of stubborn partisanship, the ensuing efforts to censure and expel Brooks — by then regarded as a hero in the South — failed in the House on party-line votes.
The tumultuous weeks-long Senate debate over the Missouri Compromise of 1850 also produced its share of calumny and personal attack. One particular agitator, Sen. Henry Foote (D-Miss.), repeatedly baited his colleagues, among them Sen. Thomas Hart Benton (R-Mo.), whom he challenged to “patch up his reputation for courage, now greatly on the wane.”
When, weeks later, the two Senators grappled again over the legacy of Sen. John C. Calhoun (D-S.C.), Benton finally leapt up and charged at Foote, prompting the Mississippian to draw his pistol.
A special Senate committee convened to investigate the incident later absolved Foote of “premeditated use of his weapons,” but scolded the two lawmakers for bringing their personal feud into the chamber.
Democrat Senators have excoriated the administration in very personal, vulgar terms on the floor repeatedly. Senators Byrd and Kennedy have crossed the very boundaries that Byrd previously claimed shameful.
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the chamber’s guardian of tradition and occasional scold, took a stab at defining the limits of acceptable dialogue in 1995 during proceedings that led to a government shutdown.Among other things, Byrd was disturbed by one GOP Senator’s reference to President Bill Clinton as “this guy,” and by the frequently deployed charge that Clinton and the Democrats were “lying” about the true nature of the continuing resolution that was up for debate.
“The bandying about of such words as liar, or lie, can only come from a contumelious lip,” Byrd said. (“Contumelious” means “abusive.”) “And for one, who has been honored by the electorate to serve in the high office of the United States Senator, to engage in such rude language arising from haughtiness and contempt, is to lower himself in the eyes of his peers, and of the American people generally, to the status of a street brawler.”
Byrd added, “Statesmen do not call each other liars or engage in such execrations as fly from pillar to post in this chamber.”
Except when it suits the good Senator's purposes. I personally am rather fond of the English custom and wouldn't mind hissing, booing and catcalling from the back benches...in the least one knows they are present and reasonably sober.