The Shootist

It's hard not to be utterly engrossed by the recent story of Dick Cheney shooting his quail-hunting partner in Texas over the weekend. The obvious story is the cover-up, the possible scandal (after scandal after scandal) of who knew what when and just why the story took so long to surface.

But I think there's more. The story is stirring because it is believable, just believable, that Dick Cheney would shoot a man. Cheney is the sort of character who, in the movie version, would invite an old friend on a hunting trip in order to eliminate him in a "hunting accident." The actual accident gets us just a little too close to the simmering brutality that we all always sense as we look at him.