2/15/06
Oh, Bush Administration. Why are you full of such crappy people? Lord knows the blogosphere doesn't need another leftist stooge like me to comment on the Cheney shooting, but does anyone really realize that the vice president of our country just shot another American in the face? And before the poor old victim had his heart attack, the White House was joking about wearing orange, and joking about hunting, and joking and joking and hardy har HAR HAR HAR!
It doesn't matter that Cheney took 18 hours to report it to his superiors, or that he might have been drinking (there's no way he wasn't drinking, if you know these kind of hunting trips), or that he didn't have a license, or that he was "hunting" quail that had been pen-fed, clipped and thrown into the wild like fat bastards at Fashion Week. What does matter is that Cheney just seems like a really twisted dude.
Bill Clinton may have lied about having sex with an intern, but he never filled his best friend's aorta with buckshot, whether it was a mistake or not. And don't fall for the "he only got peppered" line - if you've been hunting, you know that kind of shot can fucking kill you in an instant. What kind of compensation issues do you have if you're killing canned birds released for your pleasure, and just shoot at anything that moves?
Maybe this whole incident will play up Cheney's "tough guy" image, although when you see his arteriosclerotic, wobbly mass of a body, it taxes the imagination. Maybe it's the kind of thing that red-meat Republicans love. I don't know. I absolutely loathe guns, and hunting makes me sick to my stomach, but there's something more about this event that strikes me as pathetic, sad and nauseating.
Of course, our "press corps" went into overdrive, with headlines like "Cheney Prays For Victim," "'The Worst Day of My Life'," and "Silence Broken, Cheney Points Only to Himself," as though it were an unusual sacrifice (and like there would be someone else to blame).
This Administration went from "doing no wrong and thus having no dissent" to "doing everything wrong and thus benefiting from scandal fatigue" without the middle part, where Americans were supposed to be "outraged." How they pulled off that act of transubstantiation I'll never understand, and like everything else we've seen over the last three years, Cheney will shoot a 78-year-old man with a shotgun and somehow come away with more gravitas. The irony of shooting first and letting God sort them out will be lost on almost everybody.
Posted by Ian Williams at February 15, 2006 9:32 PM