I had my fun with Cheney in the previous post, but I see that there are questions being raised about the delay in reporting his hunting accident -- and so I'm counting the minutes until the story becomes "Unhinged Liberals (Who Are So Wussy and Un-American They Don't Even Like Guns) Look for Wild Conspiracy in Unfortunate Cheney Hunting Incident." Believe me, right-wingers are just itching to work that riff. And when they do, the mainstream press will nod sadly in agreement. So until I know more, I won't speculate on the incident, because I'm a city boy -- I can win a game of pedestrian/car chicken with a moving New York taxicab, but I don't know a damn thing about hunting.

Of course, if our side had as efficient a sleaze machine as the other guys, I'd think all of us should say whatever the hell we please. I'm thinking back to a vaguely similar incident -- when Bill Clinton spent some leisure time with Greg Norman, the pro golfer, and injured his knee. The rumors that emerged were:

(a) Clinton was drunk;
(b) Clinton was accompanied by Monica Lewinsky.

If lefties talk this way, the story is "Lefties are crazy"; when the right does it, a special prosecutor investigates or, at the very least, the rumor winds up in the pages of a New York Times bestseller.

It would be quite amusing if our side had that kind of message-amplifying power -- but it doesn't, so I'm er, holding my fire.

(By the way, among lefties with hunting experience, Reddhedd at firedoglake thinks "Something is weird about this," while TBogg thinks "peppering" a fellow hunter is not all that unusual. Bet you'll see that first quote show up somewhere as an example of crazed speculation by libs who don't know anything about hunting, even though Reddhedd grew up hunting.)