Them boys! They go a huntin’ and look at what happens!
Armstrong said she was watching from a car while Cheney, Whittington and another hunter got out of the vehicle to shot at a covey of quail late afternoon on Saturday.
Whittington shot a bird and went to look for it in the tall grass, while Cheney and the third hunter walked to another spot and found a second covey.
Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn’t signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," Armstrong told the Associated Press in an interview.
See, it’s the responsibility of hunters to constantly yell, "I’m a human being! Don’t shoot me!" and stay out of the way. It’s just standard hunter’s etiquette…
"The vice president didn’t see him," she continued. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."
By God, that old Dick Cheney went and shot himself a lawyer. Pretty good hit too!
The shooting was first reported by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
She said Whittington was bleeding but not very seriously injured, and Cheney was very apologetic.
"It broke the skin," she said. "It knocked him silly. But he was fine. He was talking. His eyes were open. It didn’t get in his eyes or anything like that."
No big deal. Why that lawyer could still see out of both eyes!
She said emergency personnel traveling with Cheney tended to Whittington, holding his face and cleaning up the blood.
"Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been," she said. "The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came."
The Vice President alway has a medical team along on a hunt, in case he shoots somebody – standard operating procedure.
Armstrong said Cheney is a longtime friend who comes to the ranch to hunt about once a year. She said Whittington is a regular, too, but she thought it was the first time the two men hunted together.
"This is something that happens from time to time. You now, I’ve been peppered pretty well myself," said Armstrong.
Happens all the time. Them boys go out huntin’ and shoot each other up. You’d think they’d save the Bourbon for after the shoot, but it just wouldn’t be the same.
Cheney is a shooter, not a hunter. Hunters don’t make that kind of mistake.
It’s people like Cheney that have forced the farmers in my family to spend the money on orange blankets with COW on the sides to put on their Holsteins during deer season in upstate New York and post their land.
If you’re hunting in a party, you don’t pull a trigger unless you know where the rest of the party are located.
Isn’t this just the most amazing of stories? Here in the mountains, during deer season, it sounds like Iraq, but noone gets shot. As my wife said, it’s the same reckless irresponsibility that sent us off to war. Just amazing…
[…] sends off his piece to his editor and gives it to a friend who tells the White House. And three years ago today, who could ever forget? Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other […]