Cheney's insult not worst.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Dick Cheney's words aren't likely to be immortalized in Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," but most Americans could quote him all the same. A few weeks ago the vice president hurled an all-too-common vulgarity, sometimes called "the F-bomb," at Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Roll Call, a daily newspaper serving Capitol Hill, delved into the history of senatorial invective and found that Cheney's insult can't be counted among the worst.

Actually, worse than Cheney's brief outburst was his self-justification afterwards. Cheney told a Fox News interviewer that he "felt better" for having unloaded on Leahy and that "I said what needed to be said." Therapeutic benefits and cable TV standards notwithstanding, what the vice president said on the Senate floor that day never needs to be said.

Still, Roll Call found that Leahy "got off easy." In 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks, D-S.C., physically attacked Sen. Charles Sumner, R-Mass., as he sat at his Senate desk. Brooks' assault was provoked by a speech by Sumner that Brooks found insulting to his uncle, Sen. Andrew Butler, R-S.C. And in 1850, Sen. Henry Foote, R-Miss., drew a pistol on Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, R-Mo., after Benton leaped up during debate and charged at him.

Cheney was not only less violent than some previous political figures, he was also considerably less inventive. When Sen. Roscoe Conkling, R-N.Y., was invited to campaign for Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine in 1884, the lawyer replied, "No, thank you, I don't engage in criminal practice." Rep. John Randolph, R-Va., called Rep. Edward Livingston "a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight." Sen. Sam Houston, D-Texas, said that a colleague "has all the characteristics of a dog - except loyalty."

Foreseeing that political debates could grow heated, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, in his capacity as president of the Senate, wrote a manual for parliamentary procedure in the chamber. "No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluously or tediously," Jefferson wrote. Then he got specific: "No one is to disturb another in speech by hissing, coughing or spitting."

Roll Call quoted scholars as saying that attacks on senators' integrity, or accusations of bad faith, are more corrosive than ordinary insults, and the word "liar" is heard far more often on the Senate floor than the word Cheney used. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., was disturbed by this in 1995, when Republican colleagues accused President Clinton and Senate Democrats of "lying" in the course of the confrontation that led to a government shutdown. "The bandying about of such words as liar, or lie, can only come from a contumelious lip," said Byrd, lowering those who use such language "to the status of a street brawler."

Street brawlers employ the word that Cheney used. The vice president would have been better off accusing Leahy of having a contumelious lip. The Senate has been a stage for insults and worse throughout the history of the republic, but each generation has an obligation to keep the standard of invective high.