It appears that our dear Great Vice-Leader is as careless with a shotgun while birdhunting as he is with the facts while selling a war of aggression.

There is a lot wrong with this of course. I don’t know which bothers me most, the fact that it took 24 hours before anyone mentioned what happened or that the story about what happened seems to be centered on blaming the entire incident on the poor 78 year-old guy who almost got his head blown off. If they’d been hunting for something bigger than quail it might have been a fatal blast but they were probably pretty lightly loaded for such small birds. The guy is lucky it wasn’t much, much worse.

Of course, we’ll get a couple of days of mild stories about this, no one will ask any hard questions and no one will dare look into it in any serious way.

Imagine if this had been Al Gore and his office had waited 24 hours to release the news. It would have generated a tsunami of spittle from the meatheads at Fox News.

What’s also interesting about this is how it may very well be a piece of the puzzle of how they will justify getting rid of Uncle Dick before the Libby testimony identifying him as requesting a violation of national security in the release of Valerie Plame’s undercover status causes too much damage to Junior’s administration.

But I wonder if there will really be any damage that can bring down this modern American dictator. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent analysis of the nature of our current political situation and how the folks in charge are not in any way conservatives. It is long but worth the time to read. You can find the whole thing here

Here’s an excerpt:

People who self-identify as “conservatives” and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because “conservatism” is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as “liberal” is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

That “conservatism” has come to mean “loyalty to George Bush” is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. It is not only the obvious (though significant) explosion of deficit spending under this Administration – and that explosion has occurred far beyond military or 9/11-related spending and extends into almost all arenas of domestic programs as well. Far beyond that is the fact that the core, defining attributes of political conservatism could not be any more foreign to the world view of the Bush follower.
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The blind faith placed in the Federal Government, and particularly in our Commander-in-Chief, by the contemporary “conservative” is the very opposite of all that which conservatism has stood for for the last four decades. The anti-government ethos espoused by Barry Goldwater and even Ronald Reagan is wholly unrecognizable in Bush followers, who – at least thus far – have discovered no limits on the powers that ought to be vested in George Bush to enable him to do good on behalf of all of us.

And in that regard, people like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

It has all the hallmarks of a cult. No wonder Sun Myung Moon is now a favorite of this administration. He’s been giving them pointers.