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WORD COUNT
662
FEBRUARY 22, 2006
HUNTING ALONE – by
Donald Kaul
I do not believe in
telling jokes at the expense of Vice President Dick Cheney, or Deadeye
Dick as we like to call him. For example:
“There is bad news and good news about Vice President Cheney.”
“Oh?
What’s the bad news?”
“He
shot someone while quail hunting.”
“That’s terrible. What’s the good news?”
“It
was a lawyer.”
That not really a
Dick Cheney joke anyway; it’s a lawyer joke and I don’t do lawyer jokes
either (I have my standards). I might have made a Dick Cheney joke had
it not turned out that the lawyer’s wounds were more serious than
originally reported. That took some of the fun out of it. And, in
any case, the incident itself is so replete with irony that it hardly
needs the heavy hand of a jokemeister.
The shooting victim
was Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas lawyer who was appointed
chairman of the Texas Funeral Service Commission in 1999 by the
then-governor of Texas---George W. Bush, the very same George W. Bush
who later made Dick Cheney the vice president of the United States.
I can’t exactly point
out where the joke is in all of that but it’s in there somewhere, trust
me. Or don’t. Perhaps humor like that is an acquired taste, like Danish
cartoons.
Before we go further,
however, let me point out something about those early reports. They
weren’t that early. It was 14 hours after the shooting that word of the
incident was first released to the press, and then not by the Vice
Presidentor or his staff but by Katherine Armstrong, an owner of the
south Texas ranch on which the shooting occurred.
In short, the
handling of the incident was a typical Cheney operation, based on the
premise that the public has no right to know anything about anything.
Fortunately for posterity, Ms. Armstrong talked a lot.
What happened, she
said, was that Mr. Whittington, for reasons of his own, broke away
briefly from the line of quail hunters stalking the mighty birds. Then,
when he came back to the line: “He did not announce---which would be
protocol--- “Hey, it’s me, I’m coming up,” she told the New York Times.
“So when a bird
flushed and the vice president swung in to shoot it, Harry was where the
bird was.” The result was a spray of pellets taken by Whittington in the
face, neck, shoulder and ribcage. And heart.
So once again, the
vice president is involved in a shooting incident that turns out to be
the shootee’s fault, just like Iraq.
I suppose Whittington
should consider himself lucky that the vice-president’s office didn’t
say that Cheney had classified information indicating that Mr.
Whittington carried a concealed weapon of mass destruction. (It’s
beginning to look as though, in Mr. Cheney’s hands, a small-bore shotgun
is a weapon of mass destruction.)
I don’t think Mr.
Cheney should allow this unfortunate accident to dim his enthusiasm for
bird hunting, however. It’s important for important people to get
outdoors and relax. I think he should continue to go on hunting trips
whenever possible.
I understand Antonin
Scalia has weekends available.
Things have not been
going well in the House of Bush recently---his agenda isn’t doing well
in Congress, investigations keep turning up embarrassing facts, foreign
elections are being won by people who hate us---but there have been some
happy developments too.
For instance, the
National Guard Association of the United States unveiled a life-size
bronze bust of the young Lt. George Bush, memorializing his time in the
Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. One can only hope that
someday it will grace the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
It’s an important
monument because it’s almost the only record we have of Mr. Bush’s Guard
service, during which he went Missing In Alabama for a year and finally
just stopped going to meetings.
Maybe this year on
Veterans’ Day he’ll lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Deserter.
--
Don Kaul is a
two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own
account, is right more than he's wrong. Email:
donald.kaul2@verizon.net -- A photo of Donald Kaul's available
CLICK HERE
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