The V word

If you’re like me, you made the blunder last night of letting the television rest on one of those cable news pundit segments. Apparently McCain impregnated someone?  So hard to sort out what they are talking about. It went something like this:

Gasbag:    "blah blah VET   VETTING blah VET blah"
Blowhard: " VETTING? Blah blah blah VET double-VET"
Gasbag:     "Oh VET yourself"

[etc, ad nauseum]

It turns out this vetting racket is the domain of some of BigLaw’s biggest guns, including
former Clinton Secretary of State (and O’Melveny & Myers partner) Warren Christopher, who is described in today’s New York Law Journalas having helped Clinton “find” his future running mate, Al Gore. (How hard could that have been?  Wasn’t Gore standing there at the same debates and so forth?)  Anyway, the

 NYLJ piece has some interesting detail on the vetting process of Sarah Palin conducted by Arthur Culvahouse, the current O’Melveny chairman, who “spent three to four hours interviewing the Alaska governor, who also completed a 40-page questionnaire submitted by lawyers for the McCain campaign.”

All of the Beltway insiders quoted in the article did so anonymously, including one with “a few vetting notches on his belt,” who asked “How do you miss this stuff? Ask Bob Kimmitt, the deputy secretary of the Treasury and a Vietnam veteran, how he forgot to ask Dan Quayle what he did during the war! These things happen.”  

                                                -posted by brian

 UPDATE:  Slate  runs an "Explainer" on the V word:

It's a figurative contraction of veterinarian. The fancy word for animal doctor originated in the mid-17^th century. The colloquial abbreviation dates to the 1860s; the verb form of the word, meaning "to treat an animal," came a few decades later—according to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest known usage is 1891—and was applied primarily in a horse-racing context. ("He vetted the stallion before the race," "you should vet that horse before he races," etc.)