Flushed Out

Mr. Vice finally showed his face, sort of. He took full responsibility for the shooting, never once referring to it as a spraying. That’s good. But, a conservative Reb appearing on Fox “News” is not exactly facing one’s critics. He should have held a press conference in the White House, where he could still make whatever statement he wanted us to hear and be questioned by the full spectrum of the media. Instead, ever the control freak, he sat down for something closer to a fireside chat with Brit Hume where he faced less-than-intensive questioning that included a hunt for the most important answer we’ve all been wondering about – whether the VP “missed the bird?” Considering how many people have flipped the bird to Mr. Vice over the last four days, I think it’s safe to say that there’s no way he could have missed it.

Because this incident is nothing more than a hunting accident, there wasn’t much to learn about what happen at Armstrong Ranch. What we wanted to understand is why the vice president and his staff handled the incident the way they did. On that count, Mr. Vice reloaded and defended himself without the slightest regret.

Indeed, the first reaction was correct – get Mr. Whittington to medical care, advise his wife and children, and get an indication of his well being. The VP acknowledges that all that was done, and that by Sunday morning he was “confident that everything was probably going to be okay.” That would have been a good time to make a statement and take questions. Mr. Vice seemed to know that because he said, “that’s when we began the process of notifying the press.” Well, sort of. That's when we come to the part about how having Katharine Armstrong call the Corpus Christi Caller-Times was clearly and without question the best way to notify the press. That's true only in the vice president's world.

On the one hand, he calls the situation “unprecedented” and on the other hand he calls it “complicated”. True; not true. There’s no question that it’s unprecedented to have the vice president of the United States shoot someone; and that makes it newsworthy. But, there’s nothing complicated about what happened in the field, and that’s all Mr. Cheney needed to discuss. The explanation about how it was handled is just unmitigated babble about Ms. Armstrong being the best person to go to the press because she was an eye-witness, as if the VP wasn’t, and about how she could speak “authoritatively” about what happened, which he seems to say meant that she could explain to the press the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, between a bullet and birdshot. If Mr. Vice couldn’t handle that explanation then he should have his Texas hunting license, his Wyoming residency, and his Y chromosome revoked. Next comes a remarkable statement that is the height of dissemblance, “She probably knew better than I did what had happened since I'd only seen one piece of it.” Uh, yeah, that would be the piece about the shooting – otherwise known as the whole story.

The rest of what flows from this babbling brook is about wanting to wait in order to be accurate about the condition of his “friend”. Of course, he could have, and probably should have, left that part of the story to Mr. Whittington’s doctors and family. But, more importantly, I was struck by his repeated reliance on the image invoked by using the word “friend” during the course of the interview. After all, at the top of the interview Hume asked, “Would you describe [Mr. Whittington] as a close friend, friendly acquaintance, what —.” Cheney responded, “No, an acquaintance.” That’s probably the truth. But, Mr. Whittington somehow morphed from acquaintance to friend because the way this “complicated” situation unfolded Mr. Vice needed a friend to lean on.

What we see here is a man who can’t and won’t say anything until he knows how everyone is reacting; how many options he has; how much delay he can get away with; how little he can say; and how everything is going to turn out before he says a peep. Only at that time can the necessary and appropriate spin be applied to the pitch he finally deigns to throw to the rest of us.

That’s the Dick we know and love.