if Cheney shoots his friends
what do you think he does to his enemies? Something to think about...
posted by Bird at 1:00 PM
A Big Block of Cheese
It is in the spirit of Andrew Jackson that I, from time to time, ask senior staff to have face-to-face meetings with those people representing organizations who have a difficult time getting our attention. I know the more jaded among you see this as something rather beneath you. But I assure you that listening to the voices of passionate Americans is beneath no one, and surely not the people's servants.
Monday, February 13, 2006
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9 Comments:
and he didn't have a damn duck stamp and only got off with a warning. i don't care if you are second in sucession, when you break the rules, mr. vice president, you pay the penalty
What did he do????
um, i think the answer to that one is that he tortures his enemies on secret flights over international waters...
Ah Ok, thx.
We shouldn't really be joking about this... I mean, the poor man had a heartache and still has 200+ bullets lodged in him... but, disregarding that, these are damn funny:
Below, a sampling of jokes from the monologues from Monday episodes of various late-night programs.
"The Late Show With David Letterman" (CBS)
"Good news ladies and gentleman, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction … It's Dick Cheney."
* * *
"We can't get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney."
* * *
"Honestly, I don't know what all of the fuss is about. What's more American than shooting your hunting buddy in the ass?"
* * *
"The guy who got gunned down is a Republican lawyer and a big Republican donor and fortunately the buck shot was deflected by wads of laundered cash. So he's fine. He took a little in the wallet."
* * *
From "Cheney's Excuses," Monday night's Top 10 list: "I thought the guy was trying to go gay cowboy on me."
"The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" (Comedy Central)
A partial transcript:
Jon Stewart: "Yes, as you've just heard, a near-tragedy over the weekend in south Texas. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt at a political supporter's ranch. Making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting VP since Alexander Hamilton.
"Hamilton, of course, shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.
* * *
The other player in the drama? Ranch owner and eyewitness Katharine Armstrong.
Katharine Armstrong: "We were shooting a covey of quail. The vice president and two others got out of the car to walk up the covey."
Jon Stewart: "What kind of hunting story begins with getting out of your car? As I sighted the great beast before us, my shaking hands could barely engage the parking brake. Slowly, I turned off the A/C and silenced my sub-woofers…"
* * *
Katharine Armstrong: "A bird flushed. The vice president took aim at the bird and shot and unfortunately, Mr. Whittington was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty well."
Jon Stewart: "Peppered. There you have it. Harry Whittington, seasoned to within an inch of his life.
* * *
Jon Stewart: "I'm joined now by our own vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst, Rob Corddry. Rob, obviously a very unfortunate situation. How is the vice president handling it?
Rob Corddry: "Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Wittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush.
"And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington's face."
Jon Stewart: "But why, Rob? If he had known Mr. Whittington was not a bird, why would he still have shot him?"
Rob Corddry: "Jon, in a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak."
Jon Stewart: "That's horrible."
Rob Corddry: "Look, the mere fact that we're even talking about how the vice president drives up with his rich friends in cars to shoot farm-raised wingless quail-tards is letting the quail know 'how' we're hunting them. I'm sure right now those birds are laughing at us in that little 'covey' of theirs.
Jon Stewart: "I'm not sure birds can laugh, Rob."
Rob Corddry: "Well, whatever it is they do … coo .. they're cooing at us right now, Jon, because here we are talking openly about our plans to hunt them. Jig is up. Quails one, America zero.
Jon Stewart: "Okay, well, on a purely human level, is the vice president at least sorry?"
Rob Corddry: "Jon, what difference does it make? The bullets are already in this man's face. Let's move forward across party lines as a people … to get him some sort of mask."
"Jimmy Kimmel Live" (ABC)
Among the jokes in consideration for Monday's telecast:
"It's part of the president's new Social Security plan. Once you hit 78, kablamo."
* * *
"Luckily, the guy he shot was wearing the body armor that never got shipped to the troops."
* * *
"You know what they say, if Dick Cheney comes out of his hole and shoots an old man in the face, 6 more weeks of winter."
"The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" (NBC)
"Although it is beautiful here in California, the weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C. Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear."
* * *
"When people found out he shot a lawyer his popularity is now at 92%"
* * *
"After he shot the guy, he screamed, 'Anyone else want to call domestic wire tapping illegal?' "
* * *
"Something I just found out today about the incident. Do you know that Dick Cheney tortured the guy for a half hour before he shot him?"
* * *
"Cheney's defense is that he was aiming at a quail when he shot the guy. Which means that Cheney now has the worst aim of anyone in the White House since Bill Clinton."
Bird, I will respect you so much more if you tell me that you compiled that entire list yourself
Sorry, Jason-- I cut and pasted a forward. Any respect you might had had-- lost. A forward. ew.
But I digress; I love the following column from David Brooks on this subject (really, I just love David Brooks). Unlike his collegue Bob Herbert-- who called for Cheney's resigniation in his column which ran the same day as Brooks'-- good ol' Dave has taken this moment to remind everyone that we've gotten to the point that the "news" is no longer about facts, but spin. I completely agree. It was a hunting accident. an ACCIDENT. I may not love Dick Cheney, but this incident has nothing to do with his (lack of ) prowess as a policymaker.
February 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Places, Everyone. Action!
By DAVID BROOKS
One of the most impressive things about us in Washington, you must admit, is our ability to unfailingly play our assigned roles. History throws unusual circumstances before our gaze, but no matter how strange they may at first appear, we are always able to squeeze them into one of our preapproved boxes so we may utter our usual clichés.
The Battle of Corpus Christi is but the latest example of our capacity to transform fact into stereotype.
On a personal level, the Cheney-Whittington accident was a sad but unremarkable event. Two men go hunting. Both are sloppy, and one friend shoots another. The victim is suffering but gracious. The shooter is anguished in his guilt.
"The image of him falling is something I will never be able to get out of my mind," Dick Cheney told Brit Hume yesterday, adding, "It was ... one of the worst days of my life."
Afterward, he looked back, relived the moment and took responsibility. "It was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else," Cheney said. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."
In normal life, people would look at this event and see two decent men caught in a twist of fate. They would feel concern for the victim and sympathy for the man who fired the gun.
But we in Washington are able to rise above the normal human reaction. We have our jobs. We have our roles.
So in the days following the Cheney-Whittington accident, liberal pundits had to live up to their responsibility to manufacture a series of unsubstantiated allegations while turning the episode into a Clifford Odets-style tale of plutocrats gone wild. "Was he drunk? I mean, these are ultrarich Republicans, at a weekend, fun-time hunting," the pundit Lawrence O'Donnell wondered on MSNBC.
Meanwhile over at the blogosphere, the keyboard jockeys had a responsibility to sniff up vast conspiracies and get lost in creepy minutiae. "The 50,000 acre Armstrong Ranch is in Kenedy County. So I figure the Armstrongs probably have a lot of pull in county government. So, just a question: how thorough was the investigation of what happened?" the influential blogger Josh Marshall queried darkly. Earlier, he veered off, as he must, into picayune and skin-crawling theorizing about the path the pellets took through Whittington's body:
"Would the weapon and ammunition Dick Cheney shot have the force to imbed pellets near Whittington's heart at 30 yards? ... These pellets would have to have pierced his clothing, his skin and then lodged inside the body cavity, somewhere near or around his heart. The shot came from the right and the heart is on the left so that might add to the amount of tissue needing to be traversed."
Meanwhile we in the regular media have our own stereotypes to guide us. We are assigned by the Fates to turn every bad thing into Watergate, to fill the air with dark lamentations about cover-ups and appearances of impropriety and the arrogance of power. We have to follow the money. (So was born the stories of the potentially missing $7 hunting license.) We are impelled to elevate horse race over substance and write tales in which the quality of the message management takes precedence over the importance or unimportance of what's being said.
Then, rushing to the footlights, come the politicians, with their alchemist's ability to turn reality into spin. It would have been natural, and probably smart, for some politician to put politics aside and say simply that Cheney and his friend were to be sympathized with at this moment. But life is a campaign, and they are merely players.
"The refusal of this administration to level with the American people in matters large and small is very disturbing," Hillary Clinton declared. Nancy Pelosi added, "Open government would demand that the vice president come clean on what happened there."
Finally there is the Office of the Vice President, inevitably failing to surpass expectations. The vice president's role, on this as on all days, is to treat the press and the Washington community in general as a plague-ridden horde, from whom it is possible, upon the merest conversation or contact, to catch some soul-destroying disease. So, of course, the vice president was compelled to recreate his role as Voldemort, Keeper of the Secrets.
We have, when you put it all together, created a political climate impeccably sterilized of spontaneity and normal human response. We have our roles, dear audience. Ours is not to feel and think. Ours is but to spin or die.
wait, bird, did you take the penalty yet for such a long post?
I'll take my penalty right after you take your for so willfully illiterate!
("illiterate", in this context, meaning "does not read" rather than "cannot read").
Additionally, it seems my long posts are quite popular! :)
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