Cheaper Than Dirt

A sad moment today: our cat caught and killed a little creature. Not sure what it was since the cat hid in the shadows to enjoy his kill, but a bunny sat just outside the shadows and watched with nervous stance and wide eyes. Perhaps our cat was killing the bunny's child. It's all in the game, but I felt awful for the bunny.
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I had a disagreement with a stranger the other day about the taking of cheap shots (we were discussing Ted Kennedy's passing and he brought up Mary Jo Kopeckne's death in a way that I thought was below the belt). I'm formulating some provisional rules for cheap shots:

1. If you make cheap shots, you must be sporting about getting as good as you give. Take it if you dish it.

2. Own your cheap shots. Stand behind them. No Al Jolson routines about how your cheap shot wasn't a cheap shot. No confabulating your rudeness and indecency away. Be proudly, flamboyantly horrible, or don't be horrible at all.

3. And it wouldn't have occurred to me to point this out before yesterday's discussion, but don't bling your Jesus Decoder Ring and think that gives you such a wealth of moral credibility that accusations of cheap-shottery against your person are absurd. Here in the Southeast everyone gets a fistful of Jesus Decoder Rings complements of the house; they're not hard won.

All that said, there was a deeply awful cheap shot in the original version of this post; all that business with the bunny and the cat was a setup for a swat at a vivisection extremist I've hated on in these virtual pages before, and after some remorseful rethinking I snipped it. Not sure if that's a violation of my stated rules or not.