Piquing the nation’s interest

February 13, 2006

I should probably admit something: when I first heard that Dick Cheney had accidentally shot someone while hunting, I thought, as long as no one was seriously hurt, it’d be an amusing little story for The Daily Show, we’d all have a little fun at the Vice President’s expense, and we’d move to more important matters fairly quickly.

But the way the White House has handled this has been so inept, and the Bush gang’s attempt to conceal the incident has been so clumsy, that I’m left to assume that there must be more to it than just a random hunting accident. Honestly, the way events have unfolded over the last 48 hours, you’d almost think White House officials wanted to make this a big deal by acting as if they have something to hide.

For example, it’s apparently routine for local law enforcement officials to review incidents in which someone is shot in a hunting accident. This should be pretty straightforward in Cheney’s case — no one seriously believes Cheney was trying to hurt 78-year-old Harry Whittington. But CBS News is reporting that “Texas authorities are complaining that the Secret Service barred them from speaking to Cheney after the incident.” All this does is raise more suspicions; why the White House doesn’t understand that is just bizarre.

Moreover, if you have a few minutes, watch today’s White House press briefing. It was breathtaking. Scott McClellan couldn’t (or wouldn’t) respond to pretty basic questions about when Bush learned what had happened, why there was a delay, why the Vice President’s team relied on a private citizen to inform the public the day after the incident, why the private citizen says the VP’s office didn’t know she was going to the press while the VP’s office says the opposite, etc. McClellan repeatedly said, “The vice president’s office was working to get information out,” despite the fact that this clearly does not appear to be the case.

I’m hardly the type to give these guys the benefit of the doubt, but I wasn’t the least bit suspicious about the incident until the White House started dissembling. Leave it to the Bush gang to take a story in which the Vice President shot a guy and make it look worse.

One must wonder even more when number 2 can’t hold off from firing a rifle long enough to check the target. But then he doesn’t really need to tell the truth about this “accident” any more than he has about the Iraq accidents that occur daily. One also might wonder if he will be open with the investigators or will he hide behind his legal teams? This will be the first wounding he is responsible for that is not directly connected to Haliburton oil.

  • Just hypothetically, do you think if the case of Whittington v Cheney for civil damages from an accident on a friendly hunting trip came before the US Supreme Court that Justice Scalia would recuse himself?

  • Let’s see – think Cheney knocked a few back before he went out there? That would be a great reason not keep anyone from speaking to him. But really, I think they wanted to bury this because it shows you what a cruel and sick bastard the guy is. This type of “hunting” is so skeevy. Someone who gets their kicks from it has some serious sociopathic tendencies no doubt.

  • raoul has it right.

    The most satisfactory explanation of all the details we have heard so far is that the VP had been drinking.

    Why didn’t the press ask McClelland how much Cheney had had to drink? Why didn’t they ask if he had been tested for alcohol consumption? After all, 29 hunting accidents in a year across a million Texas hunters means this is a very, very rare event… something needs some explaining.

    The sad part is that we are left depending on this man to make good decisions to protect our country.

  • This has been another mystery to me about this administration. This White House approaches everything as if they are doing something nefarious and have something to hide. In the Clinton days, it was common for the media to say Clinton deserved some blame for the fabrication-of-the-week due to how he handled it. “It’s the cover up, not the crime!”

    But Bush is in full cover-up mode 24/7, over even the most inane details. It always seemed to me to make small matters into major embarassments. Going after Letterman, for instance. Or, I would think the fact that Bush went to such lengths to clamp down any photos of him with Abramoff would become the story, and give the Abramoff connection legs because he’s acting as though he had something to hide.

    The only explaination I can come up with is that people like the authoritarian nature of the administration. It somehow makes them feel safe and secure.

  • I agree with you.

    I do think this is an indication of the strain the WH is under. I doubt this would have gone the same earlier in the presidency.

  • The sheriff should subpoena the Secret Service agents on duty during the hunt and asked if Dick was drinking. The beauty is that the precedent for this was set during the Lewinsky scandal.

  • I don’t think it was drinking. Ceratin accounts indicate it was Cheney, Whittington and two females who were hunting–if that’s what one calls stopping your car and shooting at birds. This was not an official admin trip or activity. Where was Mrs. Cheney? Personally it is my opinion that the other half of our “values” administration have been practicing another set of values.

    Chappaquidick revisited?

  • There are 2 things that might explain both the accident and the oddities afterward. Cheney was drunk, or Cheney is insane. Come to think on it, I’m not ruling out a combination of the 2.

  • Here’s a thought, and it explains a lot. What if the VP had been drinking. Drinking is involved in many hunting accidents. It would explain why the local Sheriff was not allowed to interview him. It would explain why the S/S protected him from the press until the next day. It explains the delays and excuses.

  • I’d say the answer why has to do with the same reason for the whole bubble around Bush. They are so obsessed with keeping complete control of their image and PR. After all, this is a fundamentally political administration, placing politics far above actually running the country.

  • Delicious layer upon layer….. Karma is alive and well in Texas.

    1)Focus on Cheney as enjoyin the massive slaughter of release and shoot fowl. ( insert (Dan Quail and chicken hawk jokes here)
    2) Guns rights and NRA folks are cringing at what Cheney’s was technically doing with sacred fire-arms.(Guns don’t kill people but vice presidents sure can)
    3) Cheney’s friend/ victim is a millionaire lawyer .(Lots of joke material here)
    4)Enhanced Darth Vader image… (Cheney is so mean he even shoots his friends.)
    5) The bungled cover up, 48 hour delay, rumors of drinking, stonewalling.. with glorious details of who what when where and why dribbling out, exposing the Cheney’s private life as an avian flu avenger.
    6) Jon Stewart and friends have top grade deluxe comedy material for many hours of laughs at the administration’s expense.

    The Bush experience in a nutshell…. luxury big money friends on an Abramoff style outing…idiot incompetence…clutzy cover up ..unanswered character questions… retreat deeper into the bunker… while Scotty spins and dangles in the wind. .

  • Potential reasons to cover up Cheney’s latest direct misdeed (accident?) are that he could have been drunk and wouldn’t have coped well with proper questioning by the local law and an “accident” like this demonstrates incompetence, which combined with his age could signal failing mental or phyical abilities.

  • While the reflexive tendency to keep everything secret shouldn’t be discounted, they had to know this would come out. What would be worth the overnight wait?

    Alcohol really is the simplest explanation.

  • I think the whole thing is stage-managed to divert attention from serious issues and get the press etc busy trying to figure out what happened.

  • The news is stranger than fiction lately. The cover of the NY Post today had a photo of Cheney aiming a gun and I don’t know what is de rigeur attire for quail shooting in Texas but I swear he is wearing a suit jacket.

    The other night, I watched Letterman interview John McCain. Letterman is supposed to be taped live but when I heard the audience clapping as soon as Letterman mentioned Bush and Katrina, I thought the interview was done without an audience. Now I think the applause probably was “canned” and someone just goofed editing the tape. No way in Hell that anyone in NYC applauded Bush’s performance during Katrina.

    LOL – Liz Smith is getting a little whacko these days and I love it! She led with a story, also in today’s NY Post, about a “researcher” who tested the countertops in St. Mortiz public lavatories for traces of cocaine. He concluded that 1400 lines of coke per day were being snorted in the tony Alps resort!

  • We’re talking Republicans here, not real people.What part of “above the law” do you folks not understand? 🙂

  • 1) Vice president shoots someone wearing orange on a large private ranch in Texas.
    2) The same vice president is a proponent of torture, secret prisons, and the holding of enemy combatants for life without trial.
    3) The prisoners in these secret prisons wear orange suits
    4) Vice president shoots someone wearing orange on a large private ranch in Texas.

  • Maybe Cheney lost his temper, like when Jayson Williams shot his limo driver here in New Jersey?

    Remember, Williams shot his Rottweiler in front of Dwayne Schintzius, a former team-mate, and told Schintzius, “Clean it up or your next.”

    If Cheney really just shoots birds that are bred and raised in cages from his car, that’s kind of similar activity, don’t you think? Also reminds me of how Bush supposedly hurt animals when he was a kid, and how that’s supposed to be a symptom of being really screwed up, like in a psychopathic way. I could see a guy like that doing somehing– if he thinks he’s big shit because he’s VP Cheney, and he’s in a car together w/ another big ego, and that other guy says something that Cheney thinks is out of bounds. Stuff like that happens all the time.

    In the Williams case, I think the guy he shot was kind of an old-school, macho guy who was raised in Manhattan. Williams was trying to push him around in front of his friends at a party– trying to scare him with one of his guns– and the guy wouldn’t back down. He probably figured, Williams is a rich, law-abiding citizen, so why is he going to risk it all to shoot a harmless old man? The guy didn’t want to back down for something like that. But Williams didn’t want to look like small stuff in front of his friends, so he just snapped and shot the guy– later claimed it was an accident.

    Could be he was just drunk or something, though. Cheney shouldn’t be out hunting– he’s too old & unhealthy.

  • The thing about Cheney is that he’s actually a pussy. He tends to like to shoot animals raised on farms. He got deferments from Nam. Playing into the macho BS of him shooting someone is silly. It’s because Cheney has lived a privledged life, hunting from his car on large multimillion dollar estates that he can think up things like the Iraq War.

    Remember the Powell Doctrine:

    1) The mission must be clear.
    2) You must use overwhelming force to complete the job.
    3) Don’t let Cheney and Rumsfeld within 10 miles of a military planning session.

    You’d think helping bungle ‘Nam would have taught them something.

  • If I may Don Ye Olde Tinfoyle … the whole kerfuffle (while originating in an all-too-real and all-too-unfortunate event) is a manufactured event to (a) clear the front pages and tv screens of anti-Bush news and (b) clear the way for an appointment of Jeb! as Veep so he’s positioned well in advance of ’08.

    Sure, Cheney might have been drunk on Saturday — but perhaps he wasn’t even CONSCIOUS on Saturday.

  • My guess is this Whittington said something that started with, “As I was saying to Pat Fitzgerald the other day….”

  • Me thinks this is appearing to be a brilliant press strategy by the WH. All the attention being taken away from the Katrina report, Iran, Hamas, “terrorist surveillance”, etc. At least for the next week or so.

  • Given his health, I would guess it’s his eyesight, not drinking, that’s the issue.

    Otherwise, they just went to SOP.

    The problem with being at the top is that it’s all downhill.

    Wily E. Coyote is still looking at the audience here. He’s about to look down….

  • According to the official citation, no drugs or intoxicants were involved. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0213061cheney1.html

    If the sheriff was prevented from questioning Cheney the day it happened, how do they know that no drugs or intoxicants were involved? Somebody’s lying, either law enforcement were on the scene promptly to collect the relevant information, or they fudged the citation.

  • I think the wildest thing possible is that Cheney lost his temper and shot the guy for some reason. That’s actually not an unusual type of event at all.
    That’s not really a tinfoilhattish explanation.

    It’s very well likely, though, it was just some kind of stupid accident.

    It’s quite sketchy how the story came out, and I think everyone agrees on that. But the thing is, this administration is so crazy concerned with image, that they don’t want anything that makes them look a little stupid, like this does, even if it’s just an accident. So that could explain them overreacting and getting all stupid about managing the story.

  • Josh Marshall is posting that Rove had a hand in this. Turd Blossom spoke with Katharine Armstrong “apparently within 90 minutes of the shooting.”

    Suddenly things are getting clearer…

  • Politics are about emotion, not facts. This story has more legs and can do more damage than a thousand NSA wiretaps.

    It’s about haircuts, inventing the Internet, who inspired Love Story. That decides elections.

  • There’s one perfectly good explanation for why Scottie couldn’t handle any of those question about who knew what when, or from whom to get certain information. If, as the 18-hour gap implies, they thought about trying to pin this on somebody other than Cheney, which certainly none of them would ever admit, it all makes perfect sense. Let everything wait, keep everyone out, until we get our stories straight.

  • Okay, I just found my tinfoil hat. I went looking for it after I read Aaron S. Veenstra’s post. Perhaps Armstrong went to the press to protect her own ass after Rove tried to get her to take the fall. What do you guys think?

  • I think Aaron is onto something. I was surprised from the beginning that they would own up to Cheney pulling the trigger, and it seemed weird that they left it up to her to tell the Press. I’m thinking they wanted someone to take the fall, left it up to her, and she decided, naw, no thanks.

    At the very least, I think they spent that time trying to come up with some way to spin the whole incident and get their stories straight.

  • I hope that the phrase ” To Cheney” somebody becomes the slang for sending your buddy on trip to the ICU full of birdshot……. in the same way that to “Galooly” means to swack a knee cap with a pipe.
    Dick can become an urban ledgend icon of a creepy friend with a shot gun.

  • Ok, here we go:

    “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, there were 28,663 firearm deaths in the US in 2000. Of that figure, 16,586 (58%) were suicides, 11,071 (39%) were homicides (including 270 deaths from police action), and 1,006 (4%) were due to accidents or undetermined causes.”

    This is from a March 24, 2005 Guardian Unlimited article called “US Gun Laws.”

    *ahem*

  • Then again, the Texas A&M study this article references suggests that proximity to automobiles is related to violent hunting ‘”incidents” (the term includes homicides and accidents).

    Texas study reveals keys to safe hunting, Sunday Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), September 26, 1999.

    After a quick look around, I couldn’t find the text of the study to find out what its recorded rate of hunting incidents established as homicides to hunting incidents ruled accidental was.

    Ah, also I’ve just noticed that the CDC data from my comment above refers to firearm deaths, so supposedly it doesn’t include nonfatatl shootings. It stands to reason that fatal shootings are more likely to ne intentional than nonfatal ones, and the guy Cheney shot didn’t die.

    Anyway, it would be interesting to have a clearer picture of just how frequently murders and intentional shootings of human beings in the U.S. are committed in a hunting setting. It’s pretty easy to find a few news stories from around the country about homicides like that on Google or Nexis, though.

  • Fox News was particularly amusing about this on Sunday.

    The reported the incident as if it were immediately breaking news. They made no mention of the fact that it had happened the day before. They tried to give the impression that the VP’s office had released the information just as it happened.

    Another thing they managed to miss was the name of the third hunter in the party. They kept refering to Pamela Pitzer Willeford as ‘the US ambassador to Switzerland’ and that was so convaluted that they often misquoted it as the ‘Swiss Ambassador’.

    As others have noted, the hunting party was two guys in their seventies and two women in their fifties.

    Curioser and Curioser 😉

  • A Kingsville Tx Game Warden by the name of Jason Duke filled out a Texas Parks & Wildlife Hunting Accident & Incident Report Form which contained this:

    Under the apparent influence of intoxicants or drugs?
    [ ]Yes [x]No [ ]Unknown

    Why not [x]Unknown? Did the SS let Duke see Cheney in time to make an assessment despite having prevented a Sheriff’s officer? Or is Duke taking the word of SS goons and GOP cronies?

  • Doesn’t emergency medical care of a gunshot wound require mandatory police reporting by the medical care giver, or are all bets off in rootin tootin Texas?

  • To Bob, who said: “This will be the first wounding he is responsible for that is not directly connected to Haliburton oil.”

    Anne Armstrong, owner of the “all the tame birds you can shoot from your car” ranch, was aonce a member of the Halliburton board, appointed by Cheney when he was CEO.

  • No, I don’t think Cheney shot the guy on purpose, but this administration doesn’t miss much when it comes to image/story management.
    I paraphrase the great sage Toby Ziegler: “If you don’t like the story, change it.”

    I rest my case.
    1070, 12, 44
    ========================================
    They won’t trap me again. I read stories like this, and I can see the (White)house of cards starting to fall. I’m just positive that there will be a mob replete with pitchforks and torches in Lafayette Park by nightfall (not that I’d advocate such behavior, but I love dramatic mental imagery). It won’t happen. Some bogus terrorist plot will be foiled, or Shrub will rescue a kitten from a wood chipper, or some other stupid goddam thing, and the story will be changed.
    Fool me 25 times, shame on me.
    As of this writing: 1074 days, 13 hours, 38 minutes remaining in the Bush Presidency.

    Comment by Curto — 2/10/2006 @ 10:21 am

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