By now I'm sure you've all heard that Dick Cheney shot a lawyer over the weekend.
While I was watching the ABC news this morning on they were interviewing a local TV reporter from the area around the ranch. She was quite young and very cute ... just getting started in broadcast news.
She said that she was working the weekend shift when the news hit the local station and the person who would normally be handling this sort of reporting was off for the weekend ... so she rose to the challenge and began the search for details.
This included calling the White House and asking for a statement, which was well beyond the scope of her normal daily responsibilities in her local small-market news job. She managed to find the phone number for the White House and called. She was told there was "no one there" and to call back on Monday.
This prompted a response from the young reporter to the effect that "the VP just shot a lawyer...you better get somebody on the line to make a statement ... now!" They managed to scrounge up a PR person who made a typical sort of "non-statement" you might expect from any political type these days.
In one of the few comments on the accident, Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the 5000 acre ranch where the incident occurred, said that Cheney's victim "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself".
As you might expect, the New York-based ABC news anchors know very little about hunting, so they asked to ask the plucky young news reporter about "hunting protocol". "Is it normal to 'announce yourself?", they asked.
She said that, like them, she'd never been hunting and knew absolutely nothing about hunting protocol. Then she quickly added that she assumes that one of the first rules would be "look at what you're shooting at". I've never been hunting either, but this seems reasonable to me.
I did a quick search via Google of how many lawyers there are in the US. In 1995 the estimate was about 900,000. Today there must be close to a million....let's see, if Cheney can shoot one per weekend it would only take 19,230 years to get rid of them all. He's not going to live that long, so we need another solution.
Mike Novack
c141heaven@gmail.com