When I saw the story about Cheney's hunting accident pop up in my e-mail, the first thing I thought was, "when did they start sending Saturday Night Live skits via e-mail?"
Thank goodness everyone is doing fine.
News reports say the hunter injured crept up on Cheney and another hunter without announcing himself, and the reaction from the property owner is casual enough to convince me the injury is very, very minor.
"The vice president didn't see him," she said. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."Armstrong said the shotgun pellets broke the skin.
"It knocked him silly. But he was fine. He was talking. His eyes were open. It didn't get in his eyes or anything like that," she said.
James Brady uses the incident to make some very classy comments:
"Now I understand why Dick Cheney keeps asking me to go hunting with him," said Jim Brady. "I had a friend once who accidentally shot pellets into his dog - and I thought he was an idiot."
Right. Because if the dark mastermind of the Bush administration wanted to eliminate a formidable anti-gun adversary like Jim Brady, his strategy would be to ask the anti-gun activist to go shootin'. Some mastermind. Do we have some kind of Mastermind Warranty?
I've always noticed that for being anti-gun, the gun-control crowd can get awfully nasty when talking about gun violence. Brady makes jokes about how Cheney would like to shoot him. I overheard a liberal blogger at CPAC Saturday talking about how he wished he could come from behind the curtains on the stage where NRA VP Wayne LaPierre was speaking and "cap him in the back of the head."
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Actually, overheard isn't the right word at all. He described the little scene loudly and in great detail, maybe four times, adding little touches like where exactly he would place the gun. To be fair, I don't know his exact position on gun control, but assuming he's on the left side of the matter and doesn't love the guns, talking about shooting a pro-gun political adversary in the head because he is anti-gun seems an odd rhetorical strategy.
It reminded me of the time John Kerry accepted the gift of a shotgun on the campaign trail and remarked that he wished he'd had one at the debates. Huh?
It also reminded me of the time, Saturday morning, when Ann Coulter said she "once had a shot at Bill Clinton," but didn't take it.
All right, I know they're jokes, but if we could all stop talking about how we'd like to shoot each other because of political differences, things could go a little more smoothly, I think.
UPDATE: RedState points me to Good Morning America's discussion of the birdshot cover-up. Seriously.
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