The Daily Show had a segment where Ed Helms basically just repeated the above sentence over and over, while discussing the recent event. Rather than making it sound harmless, or trivial, they made it clear that exactly what happened is that Dick Cheney shot a 78 year old man in the face. With a shotgun. A couple things struck me: 1.) It’s a phrase worth repeating, just to push back against the media’s tendency towards Orwellian NewSpeak, and 2.) That’s pretty indicative of how careless and moronic the VP really is.

You know, it’s pretty easy to avoid shooting someone in the face. It may be somewhat more difficult to avoid actually *being* shot in the face, but I think we can all agree that it’s quite trivial to go an entire lifetime without accidentally shooting someone in the face.

I mean, how does a man accidentally shoot his friend, a 78-year old man, in the face? Maybe he’s drunk? High?

This isn’t the kind of thing that happens, you know, on a regular basis. I don’t wake up in the morning, and think, “I might shoot my friend, a 78-year old man, in the face, like the Vice President of the US, Dick Cheney.” Mostly, because I avoid such obviously risky behaviour. I don’t wave a shotgun around near my friends. Or at all, in fact. In large part because I understand the risks of gun use – that I might, like the Vice President, shoot a 78-year old man in the face.

So, you’ve really got to say, that this is quite irresponsible behaviour, on Dick Cheney’s part. He didn’t have to pick up the gun, or go out hunting with it. So he assumes some measure of risk, there. He also could have taken the time to assess the situation – to have spent the resources to make an accurate assessment of whether what he saw was a quail, or his 78 year old friend, who he had not yet shot in the face.

Of course, this isn’t really inconsistent with his previous actions. As the Daily Show segment pointed out, there are obvious and quite hilarious (sad) comparisons between the way Cheney ran us into Iraq, and how he shot his 78 year old fundraising companion in the face. It’s just so strange, that this man is still basically second-in-command of our country, if not first-in-command, really.

Here’s a guy who can’t even take enough precautions, or have sound enough judgement to avoid shooting a 78 year old man in the face. Something I’ve managed to avoid, barely thinking about it, every day of my god damned life.

I dunno – no point, really, other than if you engage in obviously risky and stupid behaviour, your day is likely to end in obviously idiotic tragedy. And, frankly, I hope that the sentence, “Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States of America, shot a 78 year old man in the face,” really becomes widely understood to be an accurate description of what happened. He didn’t “pepper” him with “pellets,” he shot him in the god damned face becuase he was a careless fucking idiot.