BUSH COMMENTS ON VP SPRAYING FELLOW QUAIL HUNTER WITH SHOTGUN PELLETS: "HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANYONE BRING THE MUSTY OLD SECOND AMENDMENT TO LIFE AS WELL AS DICK JUST DID?"WASHINGTON - Minutes after President Bush learned that Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally peppered a fellow quail hunter with shotgun pellets on Saturday, the President was on the phone to Paris trying to arrange a weekend quail hunting outing between Cheney and French President Chirac. "I think it's time we mended some fences," Bush told the French President, trying his suppress a belly-laugh. When Chirac accepted the invitation, Bush said, "Good, I'll call Aaron Burr and tell him." Bush's reference to Burr, the Vice President to Thomas Jefferson who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was an unconscious slip. "It certainly was," said one White House staffer speaking on condition of anonymity, "because if you asked him, Bush couldn't tell you who Aaron Burr was." Bush denied with a straight face that he wants Cheney to shoot Chirac.
Meanwhile, Harry Whittington, the man Cheney shot, issued a short statement from the intensive care unit of a Corpus Christi hospital where he is being treated, noting that while he "still believes in the Second Amendment" he "no longer believes that the Constitution necessarily applies to Dick Cheney in any respect."
