perfidy

I hear the hotel vistor registers record one V. Foster as the last person Whittington saw just before this incident.

God... can't resist.

I thought they were out for quail, not long pig!

And what's with quail hunting anyway? When you hunt you track down something in the wild. What Cheney and company were doing was the far more aristocratic and poncy pastime of killing quail.

You hunt deer. You hunt quail on your own with a dog. You and your group wait for the bush-beaters to flush a mess of quail into the air so you can kill them. Different sport. Much more of a dauphin air about it.

Johno, hunting particulars depend on where you're at. In Northern California, we hunted quail by walking around alone or in pairs and flushing them into flight. No dogs, and those leetle beasties were smart enough to stay on the ground and try to circle behind you.

Likewise, we hunted deer with dogs and bush-beaters. No stinking shotguns either, a good brush gun like the Winchester 30-30 was the ticket. Deer were deer-sized too, not like these east coast underdeveloped poodles with antlers.

I thought it was funny when the upgraded le target's condition from "stable" to "very stable".

Ted, fair enough. I'm not much of a hunter personally (I tend to klutziness in the early morning and know enough not to be holding a Winchester when that happens), but my sensibilities on that front are pure Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. Where I'm from, you eat what you shoot and you don't screw around with hoity toity cigar-brandy-&-quail parties.

I have to say, hunting birds alone would be one hell of a challenge. Wild animals have this funny way of not wanting to die.

And as for "Very Stable," that's just a hoot. Besides, if Dick Cheney had wanted to kill the guy he'd have just reached into his ribcage and torn out his heart.

Dick Cheney doesn't go hunting. He goes killing.

Dick Cheney doesn't sleep. He waits.

There is no evolution. Every living thing is only here because Dick Cheney has chosen to let them live.

Dick Cheney doesn't know where you live. But he knows where you'll die.

If you see Dick Cheney, he will grant you a wish. As long as that wish is dying.

Dick Cheney died eight years ago, but The Grim Reaper is too afraid to tell him.

Dick Cheney can create a rock so heavy that even he can't lift it. And then he lifts it anyways, just to show you who the fuck Dick Cheney is.

I went hunting with Dick Cheny once. So, here I am in the back of a pickup with Dick Cheney and a live deer! Well, Cheney, he grabs the deer by the antlers, looks at it and says, "I'm Dick Cheney!! Say it!!" Then he squeezes the deer in such a way that a sound comes out of its mouth - "dickcheney!" It wasn't exactly it, but it was pretty good for a deer!

Dick Cheney once breastfed an injured flamingo back to health.

We once had a bachelor party for Dick Cheney. He ate the entire cake before we could tell him there was a stripper in it.

Cheney once hosted the Grammys, and gave every award to Corey Hart!

Dick Cheney was once in a production of The King and I. On opening night, Cheney chloroforms the entire cast and slowly eats them in front of the audience for two hours! The production got pretty good reviews.

If you drop a phonograph needle on Dick Cheney's nipple, it plays the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.

They use Dick Cheney's foreskin as a tarp when it rains at Yankee Stadium.

Dick Cheney once took part in a Civil War reenactment. It was the bloodiest day in American history.

If I didn't know better, I'd think you sissyboys were jealous of Mr. Cheney. But that couldn't be.

I agree, Johno - poncy.

Apropos Ted's comments - I've been quail hunting precisely one time, at a friend of mine's "bird hunting club" out east of Columbus.

It was nothing like Ted's experience. If we were fishing, it would have been like chumming. They "seeded" the area with birds, fercripesake, and sent us out with a guide and his dog, both of whom were presumed to know where the chum had been laid. Hell, for all I know, they may have fractured some wings as they seeded the fields.

As we were taking off, I vividly remember the guide looking at us (well, me, for some reason) and say/asking, "You're not going to shoot my dog, are you?". I assured him that of course I wasn't going to shoot his dog. And as I followed one bird in flight, getting ready to take the shot, it dove to the ground. With no effort at all, I was able to not-ground-shoot either it or his dog. Mr. Cheney may not have had my cat-like reflexes and fully functional heart muscle.

Two other bits of periphery: After "very stable", I was waiting for Whittington to be ugraded to "superdy-duperdy stable", followed by "so stable, we can't keep him off the nursing staff".

And finally, Johno: Your list of Cheneyisms looks like it would surely have won a prize a month or so ago in Ace's contest about True Dick Cheney Facts.

You should be jealous of Dick Cheney:

http://waste-bin.blogspot.com/2004/11/packing-meat.html

Don-o, of course I'm jealous of Dick Cheney! Haven't you read the list of facts about him?

I personally have never killed a man with my stare, but I wish I were Dick Cheney so I could.

Patton, unfortunately most of those facts were stolen from the more famous Chuck Norris Facts page, and from an old SNL skit with Alec Baldwin about the superhuman exploits of a man named Bill Brasky. I just don't have the time to be that creative during the week.

If I could have found my copy of Drew Carey's book, I could have added dozens of big dick jokes.

Not as far into the future as you might have thought, Ross:

NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal
Feb. 14, 2006

The hunting companion accidentally shot and wounded by Vice President Dick Cheney had a minor heart attack after birdshot moved into his heart, hospital officials said, and was readmitted to the intensive care unit.

I'm waiting for clarification, but I'd bet nervous stomach, followed by tongue ingestion, has been misdiagnosed as a heart attack more than once't.

Yikes. Didn't want to be right about this one. :( I can't help but think there's a serious reason there was a 20 hour gap between the shooting and the news release about it. We know that Karl Rove was on the phone with the owner and the hunting party less than 90 minutes are the shooting took place, so the line about "the owner talked to the press on her own" is just pure BS. The cynic in me thinks that the delay happened because they were waiting to see if Whittington was going to die, and if he did, we weren't ever going to hear a damn thing about it. He would have dropped off the face of the earth, and you can believe that there would have been a claim something like "VP's hunting partner has heart attack on hunting trip, dies". There's just no rational explanation for the way this all happened, and I'd say that Occam's razor applies.

Anybody notice that nobody bothered to tell the President for at least four hours the day of the shooting? What's that about? Need to know basis?

Check out the weird pile-on in the white house briefing.

Shades of New Orleans, batman. Just can't seem to keep the information flowing!

Ross, I gotta say that assessment is a bit more paranoid than mine. It just sounds to me like the usual stunts and hijinks of a group of people who reflexively try to control the flow of information. It's not so much that they were waiting for the man to die (god... I hope not! That's so... callous) but that they either didn't think it was really that big a deal or they were really trying hard to come up with the best story they could.

Which means, the story they came up with was terrible.

As the gentleman was coding, The">http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060214/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cheney_hunting_accid… White House was playing the "funny mishap" card.

Timing is everything, and this white house has none of it.

I'm with J on this one: This WH has "issues" with timing, clarity, and forthcomingness.

Also like J, in my preferred corollary to Occam's Razor, I never attribute to evil or perfidy that which can be explained by rank stupidity and cack-handedness.

Cheney accidentally shooting Whittington was quite a fuck-up, so much so that "Whoops!" doesn't even begin to suffice. The fact it wasn't on the news instantly thereafter was another. Information vertigo has now set in, and it should be fun watching additional questions get answered while the players try to avoid vomiting. But in the end, it looks like a comedy of errors to me, nothing more.