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In the Crossfire

Rude behavior on the road

(CNN) -- Are Americans rude? According to a recent survey, the answer is yes. Radio talk show host Steve Malzberg and Peter Post, Emily Post's great-grandson, jump into the "Crossfire" with hosts Robert Novak and Paul Begala over what is and what isn't boorish behavior.

BEGALA: I want to ask you about a related topic, say, road rage. What if, hypothetically speaking, a multimillionaire conservative pundit with a hot new black Corvette was tooling around town and cutting everybody off in Washington, D.C.? That's rude, isn't it?

MALZBERG: You're darn right it's rude.

NOVAK: Who are you talking about?

BEGALA: Oh, maybe you, Novak. That's a heck of a Corvette you've got.

MALZBERG: You know what? That's another part of the survey that just puzzles me. I drive every single day from New Jersey to Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel. And I'm amazed at how non-rude people are. How, when you merge from 10 tollbooths into two tunnels -- two tubes, people aren't cutting each other off and banging on each other's cars.

I mean, there's always an exception, but it is an exception to the rule. The concept of, oh, my gosh, it's such a serious problem, rudeness. I agree so much with Bob. It's just a class kind of thing, to keep people down.

POST: You know, I've got to disagree with Steve. If you look at the survey, you've got 35 percent of the people who tell you that they have committed that kind of a road-rage type of a thing at various points in their lives. It's not that it's going on all the time.

But even it if it goes on just a little bit of the time, the danger that it causes out on the road isn't worth it. And we need to be working against it.

NOVAK: Wait a minute. My pet peeve is pedestrians. I think -- and when they -- when a jaywalker comes in front of my car and I yell at them, is that rude?

POST: Oh, absolutely. Yelling at them will always be rude.

BEGALA: And particularly the epithets that we can't use on a family show, that he in fact yells at...

POST: Absolutely.