“Fuck yourself.” OK, it’s two words. This unoriginal and weak insult by VP Dick Cheney is quoted in this morning’s Washington Post page A4 story by Helen Dewar and Dana Milbank. Cheney’s office doesn’t deny it. No Democrats expressed outrage. Even A4 is probably giving too much attention to the remark, which seems to be the writers’ attitude.
First, there is the inscrutable lead: “A brief argument between Vice President Cheney and a senior Democratic senator led Cheney to utter a big-time obscenity on the Senate floor this week.” What makes “fuck yourself” “big time”? If anything, it pretty small time and lame as far as insults go. Perhaps it’s because it’s Cheney’s nickname, but given and used by whom we don’t know.
And there’s the curious blend of the four letter word I’ve never seen before in the Post and this later in the story:
This was not the first foray into French by Cheney and his boss. During the 2000 campaign, Bush pointed out a New York Times reporter to Cheney and said, without knowing the microphone was picking it up, “major-league [expletive].” Cheney’s response — “Big Time” — has become his official presidential nickname.
Then there was that famous Talk magazine interview of Bush by Tucker Carlson in 1999, in which the future president repeatedly used the F-word.
Saying this is a “foray into French” either revels the writers’ attempt to further demonize the French or a playfulness suggesting that they had a hard time writing this story with a straight face.
But why do they replace what I assume is “asshole” or the more passe “jerk-off” with “expletive deleted”? Is asshole or jerkoff more offending than fuck? Or is it all right to reveal the VP’s crudeness but not the president’s? And why refer to the president’s use of fuck as “the F-word”? Maybe one of the two reporters is salty and the other prim and proper and the compromise was using the word only once. Who knows?
The reporters, however, are quick to mention Republican hypocrisy.
Gleeful Democrats pointed out that the White House has not always been so forgiving of obscenity. In December, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry was quoted using the same word in describing Bush’s Iraq policy as botched. The president’s chief of staff reacted with indignation.
“That’s beneath John Kerry,” Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said. “I’m very disappointed that he would use that kind of language. I’m hoping that he’s apologizing at least to himself, because that’s not the John Kerry that I know.”
My view is that this point was unnecessary. After all, with the Republicans that control this White House, finding hypocrisy isn’t all that difficult, and certainly we’ve learned by now that there’s not much that’s beneath them.