American Samizdat

Tuesday, February 14, 2006. *
If one were to read the title ("Cheney's Shot Was Not the First") and not the article, one would get the impression that Cheney had exchanged shots with the other hunter. In fact, it was this odd suggestion of a twist on the story which inspired me to read the article.

As the article progresses, the more bizarre and irrelevant it becomes.
Vice President Dick Cheney can add his name to a list of politicians who have misfired mistakenly, or not, on another person.
What an odd contortion of language--"misfired mistakenly, or not"--a double-negative followed by a possible triple-negative. Actually, "misfire" doesn't mean shooting the wrong thing. It refers to a failure of a firearm to fire at all. Alternately, it can mean to a failure to follow through on one's intentions. Thus, to "misfire...on another person" is a construction which has little sense to it. I'm assuming what the author meant by "misfired" was "accidently fired." If this is the case, "misfired mistakenly" either means he really intended to shoot the man ("I meant to do it on purpose, but I accidently did it by accident"), or it's simply redundant.

Or not.

The author could simply have written--
Vice President Dick Cheney can add his name to a list of politicians who have shot, mistakenly or not, another person.
Straightforward, it gets to the point and doesn't pass judgement on the incident. I think this is the most charitable interpretation of the sentence. But apparently the author was falling all over himself not to offend the sensibilities of the administration or any of its supporters which might come across the article--which seems to me to be the whole point for which this article was written. "Hey, look over here! Look at how much we're not rocking the boat!"

The rest of the article offers up anecdotes which are meant to illustrate to the reader, "See, Cheney isn't the first politician to shoot anybody." But none of them involve hunting accidents where a politician shoots another man. In the first, a politician shoots another politician in a duel. In the second, a 12-year-old child who one day went on to become a politician shoots and kills another child. In the third, a politician's gun goes off while he cleans it in his office, the bullet hitting a bulletproof vest which no one is wearing.

In nonfiction writing, it is traditional to consider three examples of one's thesis to be constitutive of a pattern. And damn it all if they aren't trying to convince us of something, except for the fact that none of the three examples illustrates the thesis.

The concluding paragraph points us to a page at Political Graveyard which contains a list of politicians who have died in hunting accidents. As if to underscore the fact that there's no case to be made by the ABC News piece, the list of 15 accidents include only four accidental shootings, one of which involves a man shooting himself in the foot.

The overall sense is that this article was thrown together hastily based on a quick Google search of the keywords accidental, shooting, and politician.

Historical trivia isn't news. It isn't even context. So why was this article written? To reassure people that it is normal for Dick Cheney to shoot people.
posted by Anonymous at 11:29 AM
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