{"id":6609,"date":"2006-02-13T16:36:16","date_gmt":"2006-02-13T21:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6609"},"modified":"2006-02-13T16:36:16","modified_gmt":"2006-02-13T21:36:16","slug":"piquing-the-nations-interest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/piquing-the-nations-interest\/","title":{"rendered":"Piquing the nation’s interest"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i> to make this a big deal by acting as if they have something to hide.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Moreover, if you have a few minutes, watch today’s White House press briefing<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}