Personally, I can’t get too worked-up about Cheney’s use of the F-word, though I think it was undignified. Then again, he didn’t do it in front of a camera so he had some reasonable expectation that it wouldn’t be public and that it wouldn’t therefore make him a bad role model etc. After all, we know that politicians curse all of the time, like most any other group of people. But they know they aren’t supposed to do it in front of live microphones etc. So the question here is why did the press find it necessary to publicize this instance? I’m sure Clinton’s famous “purple rages,” for example, were overheard by plenty of people but we didn’t get the profanity unfiltered in the press.
I distinctly remember the scene from “All the President’s Men” where Ben Bradlee says that he can’t publish the word “tit” because the Post is a “family newspaper.” So why was tit no good then, but it’s okay to drop the f-bomb on kids reading the paper now?