Dick Cheney Shoots

What the f**k? Today we are told that Vice President Dick Cheney was hunting for quail in Texas and accidentallly shot another hunter, Harry Whittington. The shooting took place yesterday but was not reported until today.

The news did not come from the Vice President's office. The story was first broken by the Corpus Christi Caller Times (registration required) and the first confirmation came from Katharine Armstrong, owner of the ranch where the hunt took place.

My first take on this story is that Cheney hoped the incident could be covered up. He had good reason to believe he could get away with it. On June 28, 2005, I posted that Cheney showed up at the hospital in Vail, Colorado under the name Dr. Hoffman. Arrianna Huffington, thank God she hangs out with the swells, happened to be in Vail at the same time and noticed that the Veep's plane had landed. If it were not for Arianna we wouldn't know anything about this hospital visit.

Huffington heard that Cheney had an EKG, Cheney claimed to be visiting his orthopedic surgeon, that surgeon's staff denied he was even working that day. The corporate media laid low, as they always do, and Cheney got away with lying about an illness that sent him to the hospital.

I am not expecting anything better from the media this time around. There are grounds to impeach Cheney for his obvious conflicts of interest with Halliburton and for ordering Lewis Libby to leak classified information to the press. The media haven't gotten around to saying much about those issues either.

Let's hope the stress doesn't give Cheney a heart attack. Of course, if it does no one will tell us about it.