Maybe He's Best Kept In the Underground Bunker

In news that will spawn 1,001 late-night jokes, Dick Cheney shot a guy today while hunting. (I guess it's a bit harder when the animals aren't tossed right to him.) Say what you will about gun control -- and I've said a lot -- but what amuses me most about this special Normal Rockwellian scene is the image of ol' Dick going out for a small round of hunting surrounded by highly trained medical personnel.

"Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him...," (Armstrong, the property owner) said. "The vice president has got an ambulance on call."

That must be a fun job -- the Dick Cheney Heart Attack Look-Out
Squad! I wonder if they have t-shirts.

Anyway, if you think whatever discussions come out of this moment of ironic allegory will lead to a damn bit of change on gun control, I'd think again. The image above shows Cheney accepting a rifle from NRA leaders, after concluding his keynote address to the annual NRA convention in April 2004. This administration will go against the NRA the same time the Sierra Club endorses animal cruelty and smokestacks. (In his first election, the NRA gave George W. Bush $91,932, compared to Al Gore’s $5,500, for what it's worth, and 92 percent of their money that year went to the GOP.) It's no surprise that not too long ago Bill Clinton once said: “The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House.”