Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Peppering

One thing we’ve learned from Vice President Cheney’s unfortunate hunting accident is that there’s lots of ways to introduce high-velocity metal projectiles into a person’s body, some of them not so serious. Generally, when I think of the chain of events that begins with someone pulling a trigger and ends with a bullet penetrating another person’s epidermis, I think that person was “shot”. Not so.

Cheney’s hunting companion, for example, didn’t get shot. According to many reports, he was peppered with birdshot. This is an entirely different class of getting shot, one that’s far less serious than your normal assault with a deadly weapon. Sure, it put the guy in the ICU for several days and gave him a heart attack and left as many as two hundred little pellets embedded in his body, but, really, it’s not that big a deal. I mean the guy was only peppered.

My guess is that Karl Rove carries around a little satchel of descriptive phrases to release into the wild whenever a Cheney Incident occurs. You don’t have to be on the other end of the Terrifying Vice Presidential Sneer more than once to know that a peppering could occur at any moment, and one of the functions of political operatives like Rove is to assign the right terminology to such events. I picture him at his desk in the wee hours of Sunday night, with his steaming minions arrayed around him, sorting through the list of possibilities. Was the guy sprinkled with pellets? Stippled with slugs? Dusted with dots? Showered with shavings? Spattered with stipples? Rove probably settled on “peppered” because pepper makes food taste better, and it also makes you sneeze. Tasting better is good, and sneezing is funny. Crisis averted!

As yesterday’s hard-hitting interview with Brit Hume demonstrated, Vice President Cheney is just a regular guy who happened to pepper an acquaintance with birdshot and then not tell anyone about it for 24 hours. What’s the big deal? I mean, the local sheriff was even granted an audience with him, eventually, after the standard 14-hour cooling off and evidence-sorting period.

So, really, I don’t understand why the media are so intent on wasting their time on a simple peppering. I mean, there’s people actually getting shot out there. You need to get your priorities straight, guys.

i felt really, really sorry for the guy who got shot by the way. how come no one is writing about the victim!

marshamallow – Actually, the Daily Show did address the plight of the victim here. After he had his heart attack, they downgraded the story’s Funny Meter status from “Pants-Wettingly Hilarious” to “Still Funny, But, Hmmm, A Little Sad Too.”

But you’re right. I am kind of ignoring the fact that an actual human being got shot here. It’s just that this incident is such a perfect illustration of this administration’s ethos, in microcosm, that it’s kind of impossible not to make fun of it.