2006-02-21 - 5:51 a.m.
I think we’re all waiting with baited breath for each and every revelation about the Vice President’s hunting trip. What is this I hear? Our own dear Vice President, Richard Milhaus Cheney, took a rifle and shot his best friend THROUGH THE HEART? Well, well: How extraordinary. I don’t think a Vice President has shot anyone since, oh, Burr and Hamilton, I suppose.
It makes you think, though: One suspects that Going On A Hunting Trip With The Vice President is going to become a euphemism for summary execution. You don’t like the Democratic Leader? Well, send him on a Hunting Trip With the Vice President, then. That’ll fix him. Bang, bang! Oops, sorry Senator Feinstein, I mistook you for a big, fat pink quail. It’s an understandable mistake: The sun was in my eyes and the coney had been rustling the bushes behind you. I think the nation must heave a sigh of relief that the Vice President’s hunting companion that day was Mr. Old Goat and not Justice Scalia, who often accompanies His Honor when he is not ruling on cases involving his authority.
But seriously, doesn’t part of you secretly feel sorry that this wasn’t the hunting trip that Scalia was on? If Scalia had been peppered with birdshot, that would have been a different situation entirely, I assure you. I wonder if the President would have been allowed to appoint Scalia’s successor, if Scalia had been killed by the Vice President. Really, the mind reels at the possibilities.
They are trying to tell us that this could have happened to anyone. Sure. Anyone could have accidentally shot their best friend during a hunting trip. Anyone could have done it – anyone who was drunk on Night Train, maybe, or a crazed and psychotic ghoul with a thirst for human blood. I am less concerned about the fact that Chaney took a while to alert the mainstream media to the accident. Who gives a rat’s ass about that? I do not detect any overt attempt to mislead the press about the incident: Even if the cow-like ABC reporter wasn’t in the loop, there were reporters in Texas who apparently knew about it almost immediately.
No, for me, the entire ridiculousness of the story turns on the idea that Cheney is such a hateful creature that during his holiday time, he’s out there killing animals and friends in the most bloodthirsty brutal manner possible. What’s wrong with going to Disneyland instead? Or having a nice hiking holiday somewhere.
The final word on the subject, of course, comes from Jingles, the delightful chap who runs the Meat is Murder table on the Venice Boardwalk and who seems to think of me as a special friend. He only just whisked into the Novel, “Burger Shit” sweatshirt and cow-bell bedecked blue jeans and all, to roar this at me about Mr. Cheney: “He and his friends – they’ve been hunting for decades. It’s part of a Good Old Boy network. They drop bombs on people and kill animals. So we know what they re all about!”
