Can you say "Chap-pa-quid-DICK"? Sure, I knew you could. Bush Says Cheney Handled Issue 'Just Fine'

from the Associated Press

"I thought the vice president handled the issue just fine," the president said in his first public comments on Saturday's accident. "I thought his explanation yesterday was a powerful explanation."

Well, considering his own performance after 9/11, and his declarations of support for FEMA and Brown during the Katrina crisis, of course he would.

And considering that Cheney still has his hand up Bush's bottom, moving his lips so he says the right things.

Q: How can you tell if Bush is lieing?
A: Cheney's lips aren't moving.

Our Beloved President seems to be a man whose initial reaction to crisis is to deny that there is a real problem, then to blame it on others and then to do his damndest to shift all of the real work to others and take all the credit for anything good that follows for himself.

(political cartoon from a few months ago -- Bush as Pinocchio with Very Long nose:
Gepetto: "How can you deny you're lieing about Iraq -- your nose is growing longer all the time."

Bush: "No it's not and if you say it is you dishonor our brave troops!")

(I remember reports of workers at Ground Zero being disgusted by his photo ops interfering with people who wer tring to get Real Work done. And, as i recall, when he did his serve-Thanksgiving-dinner stunt Over There, it was necessary to yank the troops out of bed in the middle of the night in order to be able to show live prime-time feeds of the veent over here.)

(And, of course, leave us not forget the "Mission Accomplished" banner -- claimed at first to be a spontaneous action of the sailors but actually supplied by Bush's advance men [two more lies in one banner] -- on the carrier that was held out of port extra days, delaying the sailors' reunions with their families, so that Georgie could look like the airman he might have been if he hadn'r deserted the Guard.)

Bush said it was "a deeply traumatic moment for him and obviously it was a tragic moment for Harry Whittington." He said that the shooting "profoundly affected the vice president."

Personally, i'd say it was tragic moment for our country when a Vice President who is hunting illegally to start with (granted, just a $7 stamp, but how hard is it to get one if you don't think you're above the law?) violates a number of hunting safety rules, and shoots a friend right in the middle of his International Orange (very very very bright fluorescent dayglow orange, if you didn't know) hunting vest... and then ducks and dodges around the details of the incident and tries to spin it to make himself look less culpable.

And i'd say it was a hell of a lot more traumatic for Whittington than for Cheney, and that it left Whittington a hell of a lot more "profoundly affected" -- a load of #7 shot in the chest and face would certainly have a "profound" effect on me -- not to mention the heart attack afterward.

(If one were inclined to be the sort of nasty smartass who asks such things, one might ask if Whittington knew anything as important as Vince Foster allegedly did...)

Continuing:

While some White House officials were unhappy about the vice president's handling of the accident, Bush did not publicly object to Cheney's decision not to make the shooting public until Sunday, the day after it happened. The president also did not express concern about the fact that Cheney did not speak to him about the accident until they saw each other on Monday.

Hmmm. Some of the more benign possible explanations that the Right produced as to why Ted Kennedy didn't call the cops immediately after the Chappaquiddick Bridge incident tended to assume that he had been driving drunk and didn't want to get caught.

Notoriously, part of the rituals observed by macho fellows who go out into the woods to slaughter tiny little birds with shotguns in order to make their own little dinkies feel bigger is to drink lots of beer.

Bush recounted Cheney's explanation of the accident. "He heard a bird flush and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get wounded," the president said.

Cheeze. If i was out hunting with a nimno who acted like that, i think i wouldn't be out there.

(I have often thought that, if i ever should go hunting, and some fool takes a shot at me while i'm standing there with rifle or shotgun in my hands, how high over his head i fire the first round depends on how closely he missed me...)

Tom Lehrer, the great musical satirist, mused on this sort of thing forty or so years ago, and his Hunting Song, sums it up nicely:

Almost every day during the hunting season you see at least one item in the newspapers about somebody who has shot somebody else, under the impression that he was a deer with a red hat, perhaps. Maybe a large flesh-colored squirrel. At any rate, it seems to me that this marks an encouraging new trend in the field of blood sports, and deserves a new type of hunting song which I present herewith.

...People ask me how I do it,
And I say "There's nothin' to it,
You just stand there lookin' cute,
And when something moves, you shoot!"
And there's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now:
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a pure-bred Guernsey cow.

  ¶ 5:07 PM