Cheney Hunting Diary

Give shooter Dick "I skipped basic training" Cheney credit for one thing: even if it was merely for political reasons rather than moral ones, and even if it came a damning four days late, and even if it was within the safety of a sympathetic interview with Cheney favorite Brit Hume at the Administration-flacking Fox News Network instead of in front of an actual press corps, our arguably most devious Vice President in recent history did somehow will himself to choke forth the words, "You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."

Those two sentences, coming from a man like Cheney, were the equivalent of a hysterically sobbing soliloquy from a person of normal (that is, true) moral fiber. The fact that he uttered them is a testament to the depth of his political troubles, or his sense of shame, or both, as a result of the nature of his shooting of Harry Whittington and his subsequent behavior.

Those two lonely sentences were, however, as close as Cheney dared come to accepting culpability, and they were surrounded by Cheney-esque evasion and self-justification in the February 15 interview with Hume. I suspect, actually, that it was the long-demonstrated rarity of any public candor from this CEO-turned-Vice-President that led some mainstream media outlets (e.g., the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun) to yelp in appreciation of his perceived contriteness.

To see if you agree, take a look at these excerpts from the interview, posted in its entirety on the MSNBC website, with my translations in parentheses:

HUME: Now, you're a seasoned hunter --

CHENEY: I am, well, for the last 12, 15 years.

HUME: Right, and so you know all the procedures and how to maintain the proper line and distance between you and other hunters, and all that. So how, in your judgment, did this happen? Who -- what caused this? What was the responsibility here?

CHENEY: Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And there's no -- it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that is something I'll never forget.

(Cheney owns up to pulling the trigger and to not being able to blame others. Good, Dick. But notice how he precedes it with, "You can talk about all the other conditions that existed at the time..." as if to imply, "In spite of evidence that partially excuses me, I am willing to take responsibility anyway." Cheney is, I believe, a man who is incapable of any clean confession of wrongdoing. In other parts of the interview, in fact, Cheney inserts questions of sunlight, Whittington's appearing by surprise, and Whittington's being partially obscured by elevation, as if it is not basic protocol for a hunter to assess a clear and visible line of fire before pulling the trigger.)

HUME: Was anybody drinking in this party?

CHENEY: No. You don't hunt with people who drink. That's not a good idea. We had --

HUME: So he wasn't, and you weren't?

CHENEY: Correct. We'd taken a break at lunch -- go down under an old -- ancient oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at lunch. After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters. Then we took about an hour-long tour of the ranch, with a ranch hand driving the vehicle, looking at game. We didn't go back into the field to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m. The five of us who were in that party were together all afternoon. Nobody was drinking, nobody was under the influence.

(Notice that in the days following the shooting the story out of the Cheney camp has migrated from his having had no alcohol to his having had "a beer." Stay tuned for more possible revisions. Remember, too, that Cheney stalled 14 hours before being questioned by police. We will never know the reason. But holding the police at bay until any breathalyzer risk is past -- in a county where the sheriff is likely intimidated by the Vice President and his wealthy hosts at the ranch -- is certainly what a man would do after drinking and accidentally shooting someone. Notice, as well, that Cheney does not specify when "lunch" was, or how long the party spent afterward at ranch headquarters before their hour-long tour, making his 3:00 recollection of their resumed hunt meaningless.)

HUME: Now, what thought did you give, then, to how -- you must have known that this was -- whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news. What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be transmitted?

CHENEY: Well, my first reaction, Brit, was not to think: I need to call the press. My first reaction is: My friend, Harry, has been shot and we've got to take care of him. That evening there were other considerations. We wanted to make sure his family was taken care of. His wife was on the ranch. She wasn't with us when it happened, but we got her hooked up with the ambulance on the way to the hospital with Harry. He has grown children; we wanted to make sure they were notified, so they didn't hear on television that their father had been shot. And that was important, too.

But we also didn't know what the outcome here was going to be. We didn't know for sure what kind of shape Harry was in. We had preliminary reports, but they wanted to do a CAT scan, for example, to see how -- whether or not there was any internal damage, whether or not any vital organ had been penetrated by any of the shot. We did not know until Sunday morning that we could be confident that everything was probably going to be okay.

(Cheney's reasoning is hogwash. Whittingon's family knew of the shooting long before Cheney's friend Katharine Armstrong released the story, a line of questioning that Hume then pursues, to his credit.)

HUME: Well, did it occur to you that sooner was -- I mean, the one thing that we've all kind of learned over the last several decades is that if something like this happens, as a rule sooner is better.

CHENEY: Well, if it's accurate. If it's accurate. And this is a complicated story.

HUME: But there were some things you knew. I mean, you knew the man had been shot, you knew he was injured, you knew he was in the hospital, and you knew you'd shot him.

CHENEY: Correct.

HUME: And you knew certainly by sometime that evening that the relevant members of his family had been called. I realize you didn't know the outcome, and you could argue that you don't know the outcome today, really, finally.

CHENEY: As we saw, if we'd put out a report Saturday night on what we heard then -- one report came in that said, superficial injuries. If we'd gone with a statement at that point, we'd have been wrong. And it was also important, I thought, to get the story out as accurately as possible, and this is a complicated story that, frankly, most reporters would never have dealt with before, so --

(This is, again, complete hogwash. The Cheney camp could have released the story that night knowing that Whittington's family had been fully informed. Moreover, it would have been completely appropriate to include in the statement the fact that Whittington's condition was still in question. And Cheney's claim that a story of the Vice President's whirling and accidentally shooting someone is too "complicated" for prompt release is absurdly self-serving.)

CHENEY: ...Katharine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement, that is that she'd put the story out. And I thought that made good sense for several reasons. First of all, she was an eye-witness. She'd seen the whole thing. Secondly, she'd grown up on the ranch, she'd hunted there all of her life. Third, she was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert in all of this.

And she wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which is the local newspaper, covers that area, to reporters she knew. And I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting. And then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the Web site, which is the way it went out. And I thought that was the right call.

(This is nonsense. Accounts have established that Armstrong, although nearby, did not witness the actual physical shooting of Whittington. Her growing up on the ranch and her being a former state wildlife bureaucrat are laughably irrelevant to the fact that the Vice President had shot someone. Nor does her being a hunter have any bearing; if anything, this argument strengthens the case that Cheney himself should have made the public statement.)

HUME: ...Now, the suspicion grows in some quarters that you -- that this was an attempt to minimize it, by having it first appear in a little paper and appear like a little hunting incident down in a remote corner of Texas.

CHENEY: There wasn't any way this was going to be minimized, Brit; but it was important that it be accurate. I do think what I've experienced over the years here in Washington is as the media outlets have proliferated, speed has become sort of a driving force, lots of time at the expense of accuracy. And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible, and I think Katharine was an excellent choice.

(After more questioning by Hume, Cheney elaborates:)

...I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times. But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major story in south Texas.

(What a crock. The town's tiny local newspaper, virtually unstaffed at the time Armstrong called and completely unprepared for such a huge national story, is a better assurance of "accurate" coverage than a fleet of veteran reporters with huge resources at their disposal? Cheney's motives for circumventing both the White House press machinery and the national media are painfully transparent: he hoped that the story would go away if Whittington was not substantially injured, or that he could at least stall for more time until the national media pounced on it. Further, a prompt national release would have created pressure on the local sheriff's office to question Cheney sooner. Whether his drinking was a factor or not, Cheney wanted to duck attention as long as he possibly could.)

And so this is mea culpa, Dick Cheney style.

The only thing we can say for certain, as with most of the Vice President's affairs, is that we don't know the whole story.

It just keeps getting worse.

Now 78-year-old Harry Whittington, accidental shooting victim of bird-busting Vice President Dick "no military draft or quail stamp for me" Cheney, is in intensive care after a migrating birdshot pellet caused what his doctors called a mild heart attack. He will remain hospitalized for up to a week, they say.

Meanwhile, Cheney, as if his past six years of public cretinism were not sufficiently damning of his character, is doing everything possible to appear soulless, cowardly, and deceptive.

He literally sneaked out the back door at a press conference to avoid facing journalists. He has failed to step forward and account for himself in any way regarding the shooting, whether via a statement of anguish or a declaration of responsibility or any other show of humanity or statesmanship. He concealed the incident from public view, waiting 14 hours before being interviewed by police, and later hid behind a friend who made a public announcement of the shooting.

Mind you, it's not as if the police didn't try to talk to the Vice President. A deputy who showed up earlier to question him at the ranch where the shooting happened was turned away -- that's right, turned away -- by guards at the gate, according to the Washington Post. It seems King Dick was not yet ready to allow the inquiries of law enforcement. Imagine how many seconds it would take for you or me to be handcuffed after shooting someone and telling police, "I'm not ready to talk. Come back later."

Some, such as Lawrence O'Donnell at the Huffington Post, are beginning to wonder aloud if Cheney may have been drunk at the time of the shooting, which he denies. We will never know, because he stalled long enough to render a breathalyzer test useless. You have to admit: when a man shoots someone and then avoids the police for 14 hours despite their attempts to talk to him, the logical question is, "Why, if he has nothing to hide?"

And now, in a tilt toward the absurd, it turns out that gun-toting, draft-dodging Dick was also hunting illegally on that day, due to his failure to acquire a routine seven-dollar upland game bird stamp as required by law. Cheney has since reportedly been issued a citation and has belatedly paid his fee.

So here is what we've got: a guy who brazenly evaded military service himself, who has lied and dissembled to wage a disastrous war that has killed tens of thousands for the sake of corporate interests, who has defended torture, who has placed himself and his political abuses above the law at every turn, and who has now shot someone and stalled the police and hidden mutely behind guards and spokespersons while the victim's condition has worsened.

And this guy is Vice President of a sovereign nation.

Remind me again: what country do we live in?

First, let's say we are glad that Cheney's fellow quail hunter, millionaire Texas attorney Harry Whittington, survived Cheney's accidental blast and, at this writing, is in stable condition at a Corpus Christi hospital with shotgun pellets in his face, neck and chest.

And we are just as glad to hear that Dick "fuck yourself" Cheney felt moved to the point of being "very apologetic" about having shot his friend in the face while aiming at birds, according to the Associated Press.

But face it: One would be hard pressed to find a more cruelly fitting metaphor for the brutal havoc and human suffering wreaked by this reckless pug of a vice president, who has wielded his office like a howitzer to force the invasion of a non-threatening nation, destroy political enemies, and line the pockets of his colleagues and friends.

There is, however, in light of his shotgun-spraying incident, one thing to be said on behalf of chickenhawk Cheney, who as a young man connived to use five successive deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam:

This time, at least, Cheney held the gun in his own hands.

© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs