{"id":1106,"date":"2004-01-19T12:19:27","date_gmt":"2004-01-19T17:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1106.html"},"modified":"2004-01-19T12:19:27","modified_gmt":"2004-01-19T17:19:27","slug":"lat-usat-miss-an-opportunity-with-cheney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/lat-usat-miss-an-opportunity-with-cheney\/","title":{"rendered":"LAT, USAT miss an opportunity with Cheney"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking of Dick Cheney (see below), I noticed that the vice president gave his first detailed interview<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

According to the transcript USA Today made available<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a>, and indeed, no questions about Halliburton’s questionable business deals with the administration at all. I suspect Cheney left the interview relieved.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Would it have killed them to ask a couple of substantive questions about Cheney’s lingering scandals\/controversies?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}