Grouse!

Because I wasn’t the guy who got shot, I think the Cheney hunting accident is pretty funny. Maybe not as funny as Bobby Knight plugging a buddy while grouse hunting in 1999, nor beating up his son on another hunting trip (broken nose, dislocated shoulder), but still pretty good.

What I like is that it brings us to a bygone era, when the post of vice president was treated as a national joke. Chevy Chase built a career on stumbling over stuff as Gerald Ford. Bush Sr. was regarded as an imbecile (until he turned out to be a lot craftier than anyone expected from a former head of the CIA). And Dan Quayle . . . well, I’m not even going to venture there.

What I’m saying is, since I was a kid, the vice president was either a joke or an afterthought. It was only with Clinton-Gore that we got the “Team USA” treatment from the Pres/VP tandem. With the 2000 election, that morphed into the “America, Inc.” campaign, where Bush’s strength was supposed to be in his ability to assemble a great “upper management” for the country. Of course, when his HR director named himself as the best guy to be chief operating officer, a light-bulb should’ve turned on.

Still, after all the mistakes, I hope this accident is a sign that the role of VP is heading back to irrelevance. After all, it’s not like it helped Gore in 2000.