Not Your Sweetie

The Emperor Goes by His Own Rules, Heil the Emperor

From David Frum's interview with Terry Gross - courtesy of Atrios:


Terry Gross: You said that there's like no cursing in the White House and that when
you once said "Damn Sure" the temperature in the room dropped several degrees.
On the other hand, one of the big famous Bush administration gaffes is when the
president didn't realize he was in front of a live microphone and he said "that's
Adam Clymer, major league a-hole from the New York Times" and Dick Cheney
answered "yeah, big time." So, how do you reconcile that?

Frum: The president is the president. He's got his own rules. I wouldn't want to say
that there was no cursing in the White House. I wasn't in everyone room at every
meeting. What I did notice was that there was a kind of soft manner that is
absorbed from the culture of modern evangelicals that really sets the tone. And as
you say, I have this incident where I let slip a pretty mild curse by my standards and
realized I'd done something wrong. The tone of that administration is not all set by
the president. It's a bureaucracy and the bureaucracy in many ways sets its own
standards which is sometimes very different from the behavior of people at the top