Speaking of Dick Cheney (see below), I noticed that the vice president gave his first detailed interview with a major newspaper in over two years yesterday, answering questions from the LA Times and USA Today. There were a couple of interesting exchanges, but on the whole, I’d say the papers missed several huge issues.
According to the transcript USA Today made available, the papers quizzed the VP on several political issues — the upcoming campaign, the Democratic field, his reactions to Paul O’Neill’s recent revelations — and some discussion of Iraq and the war, but going through the transcript, I found more than a few questions that could have been asked but weren’t.
For example, the Supreme Court is about to take up a case on Cheney’s secretive energy task force. The papers asked about a half-dozen campaign-related questions, but couldn’t even bring up a significant legal challenge that will affect Cheney directly?
In fact, it seems the interviewers ignored a whole bunch of obvious controversies that I would have loved to have seen Cheney’s reactions to. There were zero questions about Cheney possibly facing a subpoena to testify about a bribery scandal in Nigeria, no questions about having gone hunting with a Supreme Court justice three weeks before his task force case reached the high court, no questions about Cheney’s ongoing ties to Halliburton, and indeed, no questions about Halliburton’s questionable business deals with the administration at all. I suspect Cheney left the interview relieved.
I know many of us are interested in the horse-race angle of the 2004 campaign, but Cheney doesn’t do a lot of interviews. The LAT and USAT asked about Howard Dean, about Cheney’s campaign “style,” about the administration keeping the GOP “base” happy as a campaign strategy, etc.
Would it have killed them to ask a couple of substantive questions about Cheney’s lingering scandals/controversies?