Dead-Eye Dick Cheney Rides Again - Late Night!

Media Frenzy and a Gift to Late Night Television

As Fox News' Brit Hume gets to have a sit-down with the VP over the now-famous hunting incident, CNN, NBC and ABC affiliates rushed about today to collect the scraps of this exclusive interview - much to their self-important chagrin (hmmm...kinda' reminds one of the White House Press Corps' incredulous reaction to the small-town newspaper scoop on the incident itself!).

"They (Fox News) are the house organ for the Republican Party," chirped CNN political analyst and former Clintonite Paul Begala. "It's like Khrushchev giving an interview to Pravda." (waaaaahhhhh!)

So Cheney didn't have one of those all-important PRESS CONFERENCES. How dare he not include the fourth pillar of government!? The great thing about this story has nothing to do with Harry Reid's psychotic salivating rattle about "This secretive administration yada yada yada."

No, my friends, the best thing about all this was that it gave us something to laugh about, and it was a gold-encrusted lapis-lazuli-paneled treasure chest hand-delivered to the Purveyors of Late Night Bombast.

Jay Leno:

"I guess the guy is going to be Okay. When the ambulance got there, out of force of habit they put Cheney on the stretcher. When people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent."

"Although it is beautiful here in California, the weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear. "

David Letterman:

"Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction, and it’s Dick Cheney!”

"But here is the sad part — before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy's request for body armor."

"We can't get bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney."

Craig Ferguson:

"He is a lawyer and he got shot in the face. But he's a lawyer, he can use his other face. He'll be all right."

"You can understand why this lawyer fellow let his guard down because if you're out hunting with a politician, you think, "If I'm going to get it, it's going to be in the back.' "

"The big scandal apparently is that they didn't release the news for 18 hours. I don't think that's a scandal at all. I'm quite pleased about that. Finally, there's a secret the vice president's office can keep."

Maybe it's the hidden Liberal-Libertarian in me (according to certain dubious online quizzes!), but you just gotta' laugh at this one. Dick more-or-less handled this like a, um, DICK. But given that this was, at the end of the day, a HUNTING ACCIDENT, the carrion-stalking American Media showed its own ass to the world as well.

Thanks the Gods for Comedy!