Can you feel the love?

No, we're not talking about the Al Capone-ordered massacre of seven men in a Chicago garage in 1929 or the death sentence passed down by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 against novelist Salman Rushdie for his supposedly blasphemous portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad (sound familiar?) in "The Satanic Verses."

We're talking about another day of a feeding frenzy by the White House press corps about who knew what and when did they know it in the weekend shooting accident in Texas.

While there was a ferocious confrontation between White House news people and press secretary Scott McClellan yesterday over Vice President Dick Cheney weekend hunting trip, a tidal wave of wisecracks rolled through the blogosphere and the late-night talk shows.

The wisecrackers seemed to put the whole event in better perspective than the press corps in search of a "gotcha" moment -- that Dick Cheney was probably acting more like Elmer Fudd than Aaron Burr, the disgraced vice president who shot bitter rival Alexander Hamilton in a duel back in 1804.

Meanwhile, the U.S. media paid far less attention yesterday to some remarks made in Saudi Arabia Sunday by another noted vice president -- the almost-president Al Gore. Gore told an audience at the Jiddah Economic Forum that the U.S. government had committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia). Gore told the audience that Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up" and held in "unforgivable conditions," according to an account by The Associated Press.

Now, which vice president is more like Aaron Burr -- the man who came within a hair of being president and some say was robbed of his rightful place as chief executive. An embittered, proud Burr -- after the disgrace of the fatal duel with Hamilton -- mounted an adventure on what was then the frontier in the infant republic aimed at wresting vast territories from the Kingdom of Spain. For this "conspiracy" Burr was tried for treason in 1807. He was acquitted, essentially on a technicality.

Burr lived long enough to see the beginnings of westward expansion he so prematurely championed, telling friends after Texas won its independence from Mexico, "What was treason in me thirty years ago, is patriotism now."

8:55am UPDATE: Here's a blow-by-blow account from the Washington Post of some of the antics by comedians and news people -- including those of our old friend David Gregory, who used to be a reporter for Channel 13 in Albuquerque back in the early `90s.

1:15pm UPDATE: We're sorry, but we neglected to link earlier to Journal Staff Writer Paul Logan's fascinating background story on St. Valentine's Day that appeared in the Albuquerque Journal on Monday.

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