Tuesday, February 14, 2006

 
     Richard Cheney is the Aaron Burr of the Twenty-first century.  It’s been almost 202 years since a sitting vice president of the United States has shot someone.  Vice President Aaron Burr did it in July of 1804 when, defending his honor and recovering from just having lost the gubernatorial election in 1804 through the machinations of Alexander Hamilton, challenged Hamilton  to a duel. They fought the duel and Hamilton died the next day of his wounds.  The Nation continued on through periods of slavery, genocide, war, and manifest destiny and exercised hegemony over the Caribbean and Central America and then finally won the quiet struggle with the USSR and became the sole remaining super power.  And through all that and the service of many vice presidents not a single one on them, until Saturday, has managed to shoot a citizen since Mr. Burr did it to Mr. Hamilton.
     A couple of things bother me about this. Actually a lot of things bother me about that.  Initially I wondered why it took 3 hours to get this man to a hospital in Corpus Christi.  That seems like a rather long time for a guy who has (1) been shot in the face and (2) was probably resembling so much ground beef fresh from the butcher.  Remember poor Mr. Whittington was hanging out with the vice president of the United States.  Now the vice president in the constitutional scheme of things has very little to do. He presides over the Senate and calls the White House now and again to inquire as to the health of the President.  That’s pretty much it.  What’s really interesting about that is that while the Constitution gives the veep the right to preside over the Senate, the senators pretty much only let him actually do it on ceremonial occasions.  Most of the time one of their own presides.  So you see the veep has a lot of time on his hands.  He fills the time by scheming on the world stage and by hunting both ducks and quail.  He entertains a lot. He enrolls in classes like gun safety.  You can’t get a hunting license in most ‘civilized’ parts of the planet with out taking and getting a passing grade in a gun safety course.  He pretty much has his own retinue.  Part of his road gang is staff from the White House physician’s office and a big red ambulance or at least a small one on call.  I suppose Whittington got emergency care at the scene from the White House staff people.  But still sitting down to dinner and waiting for someone to come and haul poor Mr. Whittington away seems rather beneath decent human beings.   That attitude exhibited by our public officials and their roadies kind of shows a rather Darwinian outlook in which only the fittest (like Mr. Cheney and his built in defibrillator) survive.  Poor Mr. Whittington.
     “All the vice president did was fire a gun—he did nothing wrong!” is one of those things that bother me.  They say it was all Whittington’s fault. He didn’t yell at the vice president and the others when he approached them from the rear after having held back to find his kill so he deserved what happened to him.  He was sort of collateral damage in a war on birds. One also wonders what the secret service would say about and to a man with a gun coming up on the rear of the vice president and yelling at him.  Do you think the hunters were wearing earplugs to protect their hearing?  I bet they were.
     Then it turns out the vice president didn’t have the appropriate bird stamp on his non-resident hunting license. I am really glad someone on his staff had the foresight to get him to shell out the extra bucks for a non-resident hunting license since he and the President put on this song and dance show in 2000 that Cheney was a citizen of Wyoming and not of Texas in order to preserve the electoral votes of Texas. We wouldn’t want to catch those guys in yet another lie would we?    Mr. Cheney is reputed to be a ‘good hunter’ so certainly he would know the rules don’t you think? Even I know that many environmental programs are funded at least in part by the sale of hunting licenses and various stamps and endorsements allowing a hunter to take certain creatures.  The stamp apparently only costs $7.  Perhaps his failure to purchase one is due to his good faith belief that it was a tax and not a user-fee.  Republicans really hate taxes.  They hate taxes more than they hate terrorists. They hate terrorists only slightly more than they hate homosexuals.  In fact as proof of that Mr. Frist, the head republican in the Senate has a set a vote for June 5th on the odious save marriage constitutional amendment.  When the going gets tough the republicans start diverting the public to other ‘more serious’ issues than say…. gun control?  Or perhaps climate change…or health care…. or prescription drugs for our elders?  Not on your life!  We have to protect America and our Flag from married homosexuals and, as mentioned in the State of the Union speech to Congress, from human-animal hybrids.