F bombs on the Senate floor

There seem to be an increasing number of deal breakers with respect to McCain's presidential bid. Dennis Prager considers the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill a deal breaker. Lots of people are going to be very unhappy about the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill. Beldar has decided, based on what he's heard about McCain's "F bomb" on the Senate floor, that McCain is no longer an acceptable candidate for President.

I do not want an American president who cannot restrain himself from shouting "F*** you!" at his peers. Losing one's temper to the point of shouting profanity in the workplace is not something to encourage or trivialize in general. But doing so when one is in a job or profession or position that's supposed to involve dignity and sound judgment demonstrates a lack of dignity and a lack of judgment. I don't know Prof. Althouse personally, but it would surprise me if she shouts "F*** you!" at faculty colleagues, or would think "it's nothing" if they regularly did so at her. .... I now formally announce my opposition to John McCain's candidacy for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. I would still probably hold my nose and vote for him in November 2008 if he became the GOP's nominee, because I don't believe in self-immolatory politics and the Democratic alternative will inevitably be worse on the issues most important to me. But I definitely do not want to see John McCain become the GOP nominee, and in the unlikely event that my vote still matters by the time of the Texas presidential primary elections, I'll definitely vote against him.

We also have this from the comments:

Beldar, what is your opinion of Cheney's use of the same word?

with the response of:

Although Cheney's conversation with Leahy was on the Senate floor, it was a private conversation between the two men that was apparently overheard. It wasn't during the course of a committee meeting, and it wasn't shouted to everyone in the room. It was indeed rude talk; it wasn't intended, however, to be public talk. The latter can't be said of McCain's outbursts.

A pretty good case could also be made that there were different levels of provocation: Cornyn wasn't exactly accusing McCain of corruption, which is indeed exactly what Leahy had accused Cheney of.

But the main difference was the setting. Someone who can't tell the difference ought not be a senator, much less president. And as astute as you are, I'm pretty sure you'd already recognized this distinction, Mr. Shearer, before you asked my opinion about it.

Let me be very clear: I'm not disturbed about this episode because I'm offended, in the abstract, by the F-word, or because I think politicians ought not cuss. I choose, somewhat arbitrarily, to keep this blog at a mostly PG-13 level, but my personal language can be quite salty. If McCain had pulled Cornyn off to one side and delivered the same salvo privately, it wouldn't fire off my alarm bells in the same way. It would still have raised some doubts in my mind about his political judgment, because it would still have been a stupid way to treat someone McCain badly needs as a political ally on this bill. But it wouldn't make me think him fundamentally unfit to be the GOP presidential nominee, which is pretty much what I'm thinking now.

It's that McCain shouted "F*** you!" across the room — that he seemed to have lost his sense of who he was, who he was addressing, where they both were, and who was listening. If he can't restrain himself from shouting "F*** you!" at John Cornyn in a Senate meeting room, why should I not expect him to also shout "F*** you!" at heads of state in the White House? If he lacks the capacity to govern himself, how can he govern the nation? If he is an embarrassment to himself because of his lack of self-control — and he ought to be embarrassed about this! — how can he not be expected to regularly embarrass the United States?