loose shotgun

well, darth cheney, vater figure of the bush legions, is doing what he most intensely despises: making news.

the w house tried to hush it up by delaying the report a day till after the sunday morning news shows, but of course it got out that the master of the dark side of the force apparently thought he heard a wild quail sneaking up behind him saturday, wheeled, and blasted his "friend" (not tom, definitely not dick, but) harry "no mouse" whittington, 78, a prominent texas lawyer who had slipped off into the bushes and returned without announcing his presence.

birdshot has a fairly short range, and quite a few folk say they've been "peppered" by it without their skin getting broken, but cheney was so close that a pellet penetrated whittington's chest wall and lodged near his heart. at that range you like to think you'd know a medicare-eligible chest from a ground-dwelling game bird.

the "minor heart attack" whittington experienced yesterday was major enough to put him in intensive care and is no fun.

for a wyoming "inhabitant," the vp sure spends a lot of time birding in other places. the first time it made news, antonin scalia was his hunting partner. el niño subsequently refused to recuse himself from judging a lawsuit against the sith lord. knowing which side his bird was bettered on, he avoided a snootful of birdshot.

now darth denies he's the source of scooter libby's leak of official secrets.

looks like he's feeling pressure. is he anxious the media will figure out texas (near corpus christi?) is his "undisclosed location"? or did he find out it's a felony to reveal classified info to somebody with no "need-to-know"?

or maybe he's just taking a page out of the reagan coverup notebook, calling libby a liar like the gipper did ollie north.

you can embellish this stuff, but you can't make it up.