I could have gone on with the list but I hope the point is clear. We can all list many high-profile people who are rude. We know about them because we are always hearing about them. Well, most of them. If we stop and look around, we can probably find daily occurrences where we have been rude. Perhaps we were not intentionally rude whereas most others seem to be.
I have a favorite saying - Why is it okay for you to be rude, but it is not okay for me to tell you about it?
Confronting bad behavior 
is a tough choice. We run the real risk these days of being attacked for speaking up. We risk being seen as the bad-guy and not the voice of reason. Rudeness in the workplace can have extreme effects on morale and productivity.
I once hired a very talented programmer to join the group of talented but a bit younger programmers working in "the bullpen" with me at a dot-com I started. Perhaps we did not annotate our code quite up to standards she had. Maybe we were just a bit too casual in our approach to the architecture or database design. Maybe she was just looking for people to carp at.
It did not take long before she was on everyone's nerves. She would turn to someone in the bullpen and let loose something like this, "What moron wrote this code?" My personal favorite was the stealth attack. She would ask someone to look at a line of code, that she knew they wrote, and then ask them if they were stupid or just an idiot trying to prove it.
When I called her in to let her go she said, "You can't fire me. I'm the best programmer you've got." She may have known how to write code well but she was no team player. Her rudeness was intolerable. (I suppose the time the code she disliked was mine didn't help my attitude. I admit I am the worst at annotating my code. It was a good day if I indented!) Less work was being done and things were not improving. I told her why she needed to leave, presented her final check plus a bit for her troubles, and then showed her out.
Lynn Truss, author of "Eats Shoots & Leaves", wrote an interesting rant on the nature and prevalence of rudeness in today's society, "Talk to the Hand". While "Eats" will help you with your punctuation, "Hand" is not much help with rudeness. To me, she has identified the issue; I just did not sense any solutions in her writing. Not that every book has to have answers, I just expected some given how helpful "Eats" was. (Now, if she could do something about spelling...)
So what is my point.....
My point is that I find it interesting that rude people often go after people they feel have no power to come back after them. The rudites also seek to afflict people in powerful places who have more to lose if their image is attacked. Powerful people also have more enemies and perhaps the rudites feel they can muster these enemies into a new social movement. As I am new to the blogosphere I found myself at the tail-end of the Nikon Freebie Program.
It appears that Nikon, for their reasons, offered a free $1000 camera for 12 months to bloggers who wanted one to test. Certain individuals, but one in particular, felt that any review and reviewer would be tainted by accepting such a generous gift. A brief but lively exchange occurred and now it seems to be quieting down. What I find interesting is that Seth Godin gives out free time (valued at $1000/hr, he is Seth Godin after all.) in exchange for people hustling up a crowd to buy his book and no one says anything about it or all of the post-appearance euphoria. I thought he did a great job getting people to work for him but I also see no difference with that and the camera. My son observed that perhaps the best way to show how easy a high-end camera is to use, is to give it to people who are not familiar with higher-end cameras. If they can use it then there is hope for the rest of us. Is Seth too powerful to go after? Perhaps he has no enemies? Perhaps there is nothing wrong with either situation but one provided a better opportunity or excuse to be rude.
In situations where we have a certain amount of authority it is easier to deal with rudeness. This is one reason I try not to let any one person be the gatekeeper of critical information of functionality in a company. That has the potential to put a person in a situation they will try to use as leverage.
When we don't have authority or leverage what are our choices? Stand our ground and call them on it, or feed their power and let them say what they want. In front of a room full of people many of whom had worked for a very domineering man, I thought I heard him say that I, or the idea I was presenting, was stupid. I stopped, turned to him, and asked, very politely, "Did you just call me stupid?" People were a bit shocked that I would speak back to him. He was too. I wanted to make sure that he knew that I was not going to play that way or be spoken to in that manner. I'm not sure he ever did that again or if I grew accustomed to it like everybody else. I just don't remember him doing that again. I didn't stay there too long.
As a leader, we have a responsibility to help in the personal and professional development of those who help us accomplish our tasks. We also have a responsibility to protect the sheep from the wolves. We don't really help either if we allow bullies to be bullies on or off company time.
As for the Nikon cameras: as long as I know how you got it, I know how much salt to add to the message. For Rosie, Don, Lindsey, and Amanda: We hear you and yet we are not able to get your message over your method.
I am being rude to say that? Maybe someone will let me know. 
Rudeness, from slights to outright hostility, how do you handle it?
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