You know, I hate to even waste a diary on this shooting story. It was funny on Monday's Daily Show. Tuesday, less funny. By now, its about run.
But throughout this whole week, the babbling idiots on TV - who I now like to think of as "The Vultures" -- have framed this as a "process story" about dealing with the press corp. This misses the point.
In the la-la-land that is the Beltway press corp, I'm sure Cheney's delay in announcing this event is a big priority. After all, the Vultures like to think they are in control of the news. (Unfortunately, they usually are)
And here at Scandal Tracker Central, parsing every statement for breaks in the time-line is good sport. And calculating the spray-radius of a 28 guage shotgun is sure to be the clincher that brings down the Cheney White House.
But the real story here is not that Cheney is too secretive or that he has too much power or that his beer was mixed with heart medicine. The real story is that Cheney is a fucking idiot.
Big media lie #1: accidents happen.
Hunting accidents do happen. Quite frequently. When idiots go hunting.
I am from the South. And while I no longer prey on defenseless animals, I used to quite often. I grew up in that whole hunting culture. And I can testify first hand that hunting accidents do occur. But I can also tell you that when they do occur, an idiot was involved. (Sorry to all you other idiots who accidentally shot somebody.) And even if alcohol was involved, the accident was a result of some idiot thinking it would be OK to get drunk and go hunting.
Fact is, when real hunters - the non-idiot kind - pick up a gun, a heightened sense of awareness kicks in. It is a respect for what the gun can do, and a responsibility to keep it safe. It's almost a feeling really, except there are deliberate steps that go along with that feeling.
One of these steps is that you always know where everyone in your party is before you shoot. Much less at ground level. So when you hear about hunting accidents, keep in mind that when a hunting accident occurs, an idiot was holding a gun. This statistic is 100% accurate.
Now, I suspect that on some level people are already thinking that idiocy is at play here -- which may explain the obsession over the beer. I mean, he had to be drunk, right? No ones that much of an idiot. Right?
Even if he was drunk, which I see no compelling evidence that he was, he was still an idiot. Only idiots hunt drunk.
But until we here in the so-called reality based community have empirical evidence that Cheney was a drunk idiot, we must therefore confine ourselves to the conclusion that he is just a plain old idiot.
And that's the point. Any comfort you derive from the assumption that even though George Bush is an idiot, at least Cheney is really running things, well, scrap it.
We now have empirical proof that two idiots are running the White House. Not just one.
Of course, this will come as no surprise to many here. The same kind of idiocy on display at the Armstrong ranch last Friday has been on grand display for the last 5 years if one is willing to see it. But this does provide a good opportunity for illustration: just substitute Harry for Saddam and Osama for a quayle.