It's not a goddamn garden hose

The administration's amanuenisi at the New York Times have once again swallowed whole Scott McClellan's warm, sticky rhetorical spermatazoa. To wit this quotation from Time yesterday (and I swear to god I saw it somewhere else as well):

White House aides can be expected to say that the Vice President did not shoot Whittington, which suggests a bullet, but rather sprayed him with birdshot, a type of ammunition made up of tiny pieces of lead or steel.

Okay. Fine. Whittington wasn't so much "shot," which suggests "bullets" as he was delicately "sprayed," which calls to mind lazy summer afternoons and daffodils. Got it.

Then this from the New York Times:

[Whittington] was listed as stable, with wounds to his face, neck, chest and rib cage from the pellets sprayed at him from 30 yards away by Mr. Cheney's shotgun.

Motherfucker was straight shot, not "sprayed." Cars can be sprayed with water, rose bushes with insecticide, and meth-addicted prostitutes with semen, but people who get shot in the face at close range by someone wielding a shotgun aren't fucking "sprayed."

Seriously - "pellets sprayed at him from 30 yards away by Mr. Cheney's shotgun"? Was this some sort of bad-ass DARPA type animatronic cyborg shotgun? Was it like some fucking "Short-Circuit" shotgun, but without a conscience? Did it go rogue? There are still questions to be answered here, hopefully those dedicated journalists at the Times will get to the bottom of the menacing anthrapomorphic shotgun question before anyone else gets sprayed.