The Party (Hunting) that Couldn't Shoot Straight or "Stop: Is that a Bird or a Barrister?"

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to press we go... The black print includes excerpts from this morning's newspaper article (2/16/06) with Vice President Dick Cheney about the hunting incident with my responses in red. As I point out with the Will Rogers quote below, we really do get a lot of fodder from our elected officials!

-2Truthy
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"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."

- Will Rogers (1879 - 1935)

"We really didn't know until Sunday morning that Harry was probably going to be OK, that it looked like there hadn't been any serious damage to any vital organ," he said in an interview with Brit Hume. "And that's when we began the process of notifying the press." "There is no smoking gun. I already ditched it. We of course had to wait and see whether or not I was looking at a homicide charge in which case it would have been my own business and I would have proceeded to deal with the situation accordingly -- but once again the media sniffed this one out like a beagle running a swamp full of canaries."

Cheney said he still believes it was the right decision to allow ranch owner Katharine Armstrong to disclose the accident to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times rather than make an official national announcement. He said President Bush's media advisers urged him to get the information out quickly, but that he made the ultimate decision. "Basically, I am still trying to hide the bodies of the Enron scandal and needed to know whether or not I had another one to throw into the bog. The decision to keep this information to myself was a shot in the dark, but I had to take it. This is a highly sensitive situation which demands my complete attention."

Cheney said he was concerned that if the story broke Saturday night when information was still coming in, some reports may have been inaccurate since it was a complicated story that most journalists had never dealt with before. "Look, I am already a sitting duck. Other members of the hunting party witnessed my sorry ass pump Harry's neck and chest full of buckshot and there is nobody else to blame but me. GODDAMIT! I never should have invited those bigmouth STOOL PIGEONS out to shoot some skeet but hey, they pony up the big bucks to support our administration. The least I can do is respect their privacy and I must insist that you respect mine at this difficult time when covering ones tracks is critical."

"I've been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this," Cheney said. "We've had experiences where the president has been shot. We've never had a situation where the vice president shot somebody." "That's right, you heard me, I did say "I NEVER SEEN a situation quite like this" -- "instead of the grammatically correct way to say it but I am sticking to my guns on this one -- as vice president I defend my right to use grammatically incorrect verb tense agreement even if I don't know the difference. That's my swansong."

-2 Truthy

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