Gag items take aim at vice president

WASHINGTON – It isn’t over for Dick Cheney just yet. Now come the bumper stickers and T-shirts.

Try typing “Cheney shooting” into a few search engines. You’ll see everything from coffee mugs to sweatshirts taking a swipe at the VP’s unfortunate quail hunt.

There’s the popular “I’d rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy” bumper sticker, yours for $3.49. Or the “Deadeye Dick’s Gun Club” T-shirt, complete with fake bulletholes, for $18.99.

Amateur artists, aided by illustration software and the Internet, are hitting eBay and CafePress.com, the biggest online instant T-shirt company, with scores of punch line products keyed to the vice president. They’re trying to catch the wave of interest in “Quailgate,” as one tee dubs it, before it expires.

Entrants try to:

•Grab laughs: “I went hunting with the veep, and I all got was shot.”

•Make a political jab: “Cheney can’t find Bin Laden, but it’s open season for elderly lawyers.”

•Coin a catchphrase: “Duck, it’s Dick!” and “Ready, Fire, Aim!”

•Earn a quick buck off of a popular joke: “Cheney’s got a (gun).”

“It’s pretty amazing, actually,” said Marc Cowlin, spokesman for CafePress.com, which makes shirts and other products from designs created and sold by their clients. He predicted hot sales for Cheney items for another week to 10 days.

Cowlin’s firm’s sales of politically themed goods are up 72 percent since last Sunday, when the White House acknowledged that Cheney had accidentally hit a fellow quail hunter on a ranch in southeastern Texas. Currently, CafePress has more than 800 Cheney-themed items in production.

News stories often spark shirt and sticker sales. The biggest was Sept. 11, 2001, which begat slogans, shirts and stickers for six months.