In case too much time is passed, he's drawing an analogy with Iraq War talking points, after no WMDs were found.

Nobody else is expected to love this as much as I do, but to me this isn't comedy. It's LITERATURE! It's MUSIC! The perfect opportunity for satire, exploited perfectly. I've watched this hundreds of times in the past eight years, and at least a dozen times just since last night.

Harry Whittington is still with us. And it so happens that, after Cheney was out of power, Whittington became more forthcoming and actually talked to the media:

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Following the incident, Whittington returned to private life and refused many media offers for interviews. In an October 2010 issue of the Washington Post, he broke his silence about the shooting. Whittington told the paper that although many media outlets had described Cheney and him as "good friends", the pair had only met one another three times in 30 years, and had never been hunting before. The Washington Post article also claimed that Cheney had violated "two basic rules of hunting safety": he failed to ensure that he had a clear shot before firing, and fired without being able to see blue sky beneath his target. The paper also reported that Cheney has still neither publicly nor privately apologized to Whittington for the shooting.

I'm glad Cheney was somewhat embarrassed by this incident, but I'm also kind of glad it happened to that guy. Everyone who engages in quail "hunts" deserves to get non-fatally injured.

It's really the same thing as throwing a bunch of tame clipped-wing cockatiels into a field and shooting them. I had an old boss who was a member of a "hunting" club that did this a few times a year. He was EXACTLY the sort of asshole you would expect to find pleasure in that kind of activity. He used to laughingly tell stories about how the released birds would often run towards them because they equated humans with food and safety and the "hunters" had to stomp the ground and yell to get the birds to run away.