Ya Bum!

Yeah, this has been cycling all around the blogosphere today, but I wanted to make sure that Mrs. F, the Velvet Bulldog, and others (who don't necessarily get to other blogs) heard about this one.

Seems that Vice President Dick Cheney was wheeled out of his bunker of undisclosed location and brought to the Washington Nationals stadium to throw out the first pitch to their first home baseball game of the season. But it was like Alex Rodriguez coming back to SafeCo Field here in Seattle for his first game after running to the Texas Rangers a couple years back--a chorus of boos and catcalls. Check out the video over at ThinkProgress (you can hear them better with headphones, but they're definitely distinctive as he walks off the field). Also note the FoxNews announcer's "nothing-to-see-here-folks" demeanor when it was fairly audibly obvious what was going on.



I told Mrs. F about the incident and she actually felt sorry for the guy. "Everyone has feelings, you know." Well... yes that's true... but Cheney's a cyborg (hat tip to ThisCenturySucks for the image).

[UPDATE] And there's this anecdote from Salon's War Room:

The audio on the video isn't terribly clear, the Associated Press is going out of its way to say that there were some "loud cheers" amid all the booing, and the Washington Post suggests that the boo birds came out only after Cheney's first pitch bounced before home plate. But Salon's Walter Shapiro was at the game, and he reports that it wasn't like that. A veteran of many opening days over the years-- hey, Walter, some of us have day jobs -- Shapiro says the vice president was "booed more raucously and lustily than any other public figure I can recall derided while throwing out the first ball at a ballpark." And the booing started, Shapiro says, long before Cheney fired off -- would that be a bad choice of words? -- his errant pitch.

Perhaps the White House thought it could avoid the catcalls by sending Cheney out to the mound accompanied by a couple of Iraq war vets. That sort of boo-protection policy may have limited the damage when Bush threw out the first pitch in Cincinnati last week -- and, to be fair, Ohio isn't the District of Columbia -- but it apparently wasn't enough to save the man who's hitting .190.

Which, I believe, is definitely below the Mendoza Line.