David Gregory, who claims to be a jounalist, proved his incompetancy when Dick Cheney's unfortunate shot at a quail hit his friend, who stood up at the wrong time and had his cheek peppered with bird shot. Now, all intelligent grown-ups know that shotgun pellets come in various sizes, depending on what sort of animal you are hunting. But David Gregory, who leaps to unsubstantiated conclusions like a bloody gazelle, had a hissy about Cheney's friend being hit by *buckshot*. As your readers all know, if Cheney had been foolish enough to load his shotgun with buckshot to hunt quail, any incautious quail would have ended up a pile of bloody shreds and feathers. Buckshot, after all, is hefty stuff, designed to bring down and kill a large animal, not a little bitty bird.

Just as an experiment, since at my age I don't go hunting much, I hit the Internet with some questions about shotguns, shotgun loads, and what the appropriate loads for shells would be to hunt quail. The answer, of course, was shells loaded with pellets the size of a peppercorn or smaller.

If Gregory hadn't been so lazy, he could found out this widely available information in no more than a minute or two,before he shot his mouth off. But no. That didn't fit the meme or the prejudices of the mainstream media. So he ends up looking like a fool, and giving his more knowledgeable readers the giggles.

Marianne Matthews