Senate Thug Life - The Reality Show
 
Paul Simms' New Yorker piece gives a blow-by-blow account of the recent inflammatory interaction between Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator Patrick Leahy.
 
Non-contiguous exerpts:
 
After Mr. Cheney successfully delivered the epithet and started to walk away, Mr. Leahy sotto voce referred to the Vice-President using a term more often heard in taverns and locker rooms than in the august Senate chamber, a term that refers to a sexual act commonly acknowledged as taboo among all cultures that proscribe incestuous contact between a mother and a son.
 
At this point, according to observers, both statesmen decided - by seemingly unspoken mutual consent - to abandon the gutter patois of the common carnival worker and to resort instead to an eminently more quotable (but, to those not versed in the vagaries of hip-hop idiom, more confusing) exchange of viewpoints.

"Oh, it's like that?" Mr. Cheney queried.

"Whut? Whut?" Mr. Leahy shot back.

"Once again," Mr. Cheney replied (quite obviously quoting a lyric from Ice Cube's 1990 album, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted), "it's on."

As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate's public-address system and cued up the infamous "Seven Minutes of Funk" break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a "take no prisoners" freestyle rap battle.
 
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