Dick Cheney's tribute to Aaron Burr

I'm having some trouble confirming this, but I am fairly sure that Dick Cheney has just become the first Vice President of the United States to shoot a man whilst in office since Aaron Burr. And that's saying a lot, considering Mr. Burr served his country so long ago that he was a member of the Senate during the 18th century.

As the Associated Press notes:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Of course, with Mr. Cheney the whole thing sounds like a rather innocuous hunting accident, rather unlikely to spur rumors of a secret hair trigger. But you also have to wonder if the Vice President's camp couldn't have spun this matter a touch better. According to the same article, Mr. Cheney's spokesman made the following comment:

Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been... The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came.

How this doesn't play into all of the late night jokes about Mr. Cheney being artificially kept alive on secretive machines, is simply beyond me.

Then again, he shot a man.