The string of U.S. vice presidents caught saying the F-word on Capitol Hill now stands at two:
Joe Biden dropped a big F-bomb into a live mic at an event on Friday afternoon.
“Gimme a f–ing break,” the vice president said after a former Senate colleague referred to him as “Mr. Vice President.”
Biden was at Union Station in Washington, D.C. to announce $1.3 billion in stimulus money to expand passenger rail capacity.
The obvious comparison is Dick Cheney’s “frank exchange of views” with Pat Leahy in June 2004. It’s not quite the same, of course, in that Cheney’s utterance was angry and insulting while Biden’s was good humored and self-deprecating. And Union Station is one-minute Metro ride or five minute walk from the Capitol building.
In addition to quite a bit of outrage from the likely suspects, the Cheney incident spurred an eloquent defense of the F-word from, of all people, Charles Krauthammer that included a handy dandy guide to the variations and formulations and the occasions to which they’re most suited. Interestingly, the Army’s first successful F-bomb test happened three years later.
