Eschaton

Fresh air interview between Terry Gross and David Frum (audio):

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.