Duck and Cover

Yesterday I just wanted to poke a little fun at Mr. Vice shooting Mr. Nice. Then, wouldn’t you know it, the White House, as only they can, managed to turn a minor Elmer Fudd moment into a semi-serious story. An honest-to-goodness, it-can-happen-to-anyone hunting accident morphed into Quailgate, because no one whose day job is in the White House can step up and say, “My bad”, “I’m sorry”, “Oops”, “I messed up”, or have some other form of … what’s the word … oh, yeah … normal reaction to an incident involving one of them. Conclusion: these people aren’t normal.

First, neither Mr. Vice’s staff nor the White House said anything about this incident until they were flushed out 24 hours after the fact. Ah, the facts – that’s the problem. The White House claims that they didn’t come forward because they were “gathering the facts so [we could] provide that information to the public. Those facts were coming back to us throughout the evening and into the morning." What we learn here is that no one at the White House was willing or able to just pick up the goddamn phone and call the Vice President of the United States! What’s that about; was he in a location where his Verizon cell phone showed no bars; no one in that crowd carries a BlackBerry? Wasn’t it obvious that Mr. Vice was, is and always will be the best source of the facts; why did the fact gatherers have to look elsewhere? Maybe they thought that Mr. Vice and Miss Facts are still having problems in their on-again, off-again relationship. We also learn that shooting a guy in the face with a shotgun isn’t enough to get Mr. Vice to phone home on his own. Amazing.

By the way, what if the president actually needed this guy when he’s out trying to kill two birds in a bush because the one in the palm of his hand isn’t enough?

Then we learned that fact gathering wasn’t the first priority in the White House this weekend. As always, their first concern was humanitarian. The White House claims that their “very first priority” was making sure that Mr. Whittington was getting the medical care he needed. That almost sounds like the White House staff was providing the medical care and was just too busy in triage to saying anything to anyone not dressed in scrubs. Again, after 24 hours they had not received enough assurance on this point to finally breathe a sigh of relief and surface with a statement. There’s just a bunch of stuff wrong on this count.

First, what is Harry’s condition? We’re told by the doctors at the hospital that his wounds are “superficial”, and according to his visitors he’s doing fine and cracking jokes – he’s just an old salty dog that got “peppered” a little. Then why was he in the intensive care unit for more than a day, and then moved to the trauma unit, and still isn’t out of the hospital? Isn’t this the first time in medical history that an ICU has been used to care for superficial peppering? There’s more to this part of the story, and I’m sure it will be duly reported by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Heaven knows, no one else is going to tell us anything.

Even after being flushed out, the Bush gang still flies as low to the ground as possible, just like south Texas quail. Standby folks, here comes the backward, inside-out spin that makes Washington, DC such a special warp in the space-time continuum. Time magazine is reporting that White House aides are “expected to say that the Vice President did not shoot Whittington, which suggests a bullet, but rather sprayed him with birdshot, a type of ammunition made up of tiny pieces of lead or steel.”

Did not shoot him – sprayed him. That’s the Barney Fife defense – no bullets; no shooting. As I’ve said before, you can’t make this stuff up. Here we go: Mr. Vice was not using a shotgun; he was using a spray gun. At the start of the day, Mr. Vice asked his host, “Where are we going to spray today, Kathy?” When someone in the spraying party brought down a bird, I guess the others would say, “Nice spray there, Dick!” When people see Mr. Whittington, will they ask, “Hey, Harry, how are those spray stains and pepper marks healing up?”

The only thing that sprays quail in south Texas is a skunk. Can you imagine the reaction among Texans when they learn that they’ve never shot a quail, dove, duck, goose, chucker, pheasant, turkey or any other form of feathered target with a shotgun – because it has no bullets? It’s a gun, and you load it with shells, and then you kill things with it – but buckshot or birdshot does not a bullet make. So, no bullets; no shots; no shooting – just another case of Tom, Dick and Harry out for a little Saturday spraying. Every bar in Texas will be aflutter with this hunting vocabulary lesson for months to come.

Please, can we back up and agree that Harry got shot; no one “sprayed” him. Of course it’s entirely possible that Harry sprayed himself when he saw the business end of Dick’s weapon.

I’m truly amazed that with the best comedic minds in America running at full speed reacting to this story none of them has mentioned America’s favorite “quail” – J. Danforth Quayle, himself a vice president with a gun that couldn’t hit any target other than himself. Hasn’t anyone thought to ask the question, “Where was Cheney when the country needed him to hunt down Quayle, back when that birdbrain was terrorizing Murphy Brown and little kids who didn’t know how to spell “potatoe”?

The most amazing part of this story is that there didn’t need to be a story. All the vice president needed to do was come forward and make the kind of statement that the rest of us would have made – “I made a bad mistake today and I’m genuinely sorry about it. I’ve been hunting for 40 years and I’ve never had something like this happen. I apologize to my friend and his family and I hope and pray that he’ll be fine as soon as possible.”

But, we can rest assured in one fact. We’re told that Mr. Vice immediately sent off a $7 check to pay for his missing bird stamp, because that’s what you do right after you shoot your friend in the face; right after you make sure your friend is getting the medical care he needs; right after you’ve helped gather all the fact. After all, what if someone else wants to go spray some quail next weekend? Need to be legal next time.