The Brit Hume Hot Seat: Beleaguered Veep Squirms and Hedges

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.

What we all now know, thanks to an exclusive interview that US Vice-President Dick Cheney worked out with the politically sympathetic Fox News Network and respected conservative broadcast newsman and commentator Brit Hume, is this:

1)     The Vice President shot a man in the face on Saturday afternoon but did not face investigators until the next day after a full(y empty) night’s sleep.

2)     That the Vice President owns up to drinking “a beer” for lunch and that he fixed himself a cocktail after the dust had settled, and that alcohol cannot be abstracted from some role in the accident.

3)     That the Vice President did not have the upland birds game stamp required to hunt quail in the State of Texas and was in fact hunting illegally.

4)   That the Vice President (apparently against the wishes of White House press office and possibly the President himself) made the decision to have the ranch owner make the press release to a small regional newspaper instead of to national news bureaus in line with conventional protocol and to do so nearly 24 hours after the actual event.

5)     That the Vice President did not disclose to the public his version of the events until four days after the shooting.

6)     That the Vice President cannot remember if he began hunting 12 or 15 years ago, is uncertain if the press release was made in the morning or the afternoon after the shooting accident, and, most tellingly, appears to not know whether his victim is a friend or just an acquaintance, identifying him specifically to Mr. Hume first as only an acquaintance, then referring to him three times in the next ten minutes as his "friend, Harry.”

What we do not know for certain but which appears inferentially reasonable is the following:

1)     That the tight shot pattern and the extent of the injuries from such a small gauge shotgun would indicate that the victim was considerably closer to the Vice President than the “30 yards or so,” reported by the parties.

2)     That there is at best an appearance of avoidance of law officers that is eerily reminiscent of Senator Ted Kennedy’s lost hours following Chappaquiddick that would lead reasonable people to suspect an effort to conceal and obfuscate.  Beer drinking hunters like myself marvel at the Vice President's restraint at lunch to "a beer," an apparent one-upsmanship to the standard "couple a beers" that State Troopers hear from drunk drivers nationwide every single day.  Had the Vice President had "one" beer, he would have said as much.  Instead it was "a" beer, which blurs the line between one and four the same way that "a couple a beers" blurs it all the way up to a couple six-packs and more.

3)    That the Vice President for apparently personal reasons suppressed the release of this information to the public despite the fact that this suppression would clearly suggest to reasonable people the appearance of a cover-up and thereby additionally trouble a President and Republican party already on the defensive over a wide range of Vice-Presidential missteps, misstatements, manipulation and steely casual megalomania, not to mention an out-of-control deficit spending, a spiraling trade imbalance, and further borrowing against American futures in the form of growing national debt, plus the panoply of ethical black eyes, many dealt single-handedly from the many dark tentacles of the well-connected Republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff.

4)     That the news release provided by the ranch owner, Katherine Armstrong, was blatant whitewash by a timorous vice presidential advocate.   Armstrong faulted the victim, a successful 78-year old attorney, for rejoining the party from behind the hunting line without yelling out to announce himself, another big no-no in hunting etiquette, precipitating Harry's being "peppered" by Mr. Cheney's swing-around shot that reputable sources insist missed the bird.  A veteran of at least 12 years of hunting experience--if not of a single hunter's safety course, despite his relative hunting inexperience--Cheney properly corrected the record in his internationally shocking mea culpa that it was he, the shooter, that was responsible for the accident and not his acquaintance and friend he had shot in the face.  If Ms. Armstrong was capable of concluding the victim was at fault for being shot by the Vice President, how likely is it that she and the remaining party members would discount the role alcohol may have played in the event, particularly since it was clear that there was some drinking involved?  It is simply one of those ineluctable questions.

The Chancellor of Neo-Conservatism, the Vice President of Torture, the beneficiary of five educational deferments in the Vietnam era, and an institutional feature of conservative presidential administrations nearly ever since, Mr. Cheney has a long track record of nefarious involvement in some of the most explosive political issues of our day and age.  A short list of Mr. Cheney’s honors:

1)     Suppressed the release of information concerning the involvement of corporate energy giants in the reformulation of domestic energy policy.

2)     Declared repeatedly that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and was on a steady drum roll toward a nuclear device’s deployment by terrorist factions.

3)  Declared even after the CIA had debunked the theory that 911 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague and that Iraq was involved in the 2001 attacks and continually insisted that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had ties, even though the two were ideologically polar opposites.

5)     Awarded no-bid contracts for untold billions of dollars to a company that he headed only a few years earlier and to whom he was still (and remains) economically beholden.   

6)     Almost certainly was up to his neck in the decision to circumvent FISA courts and to proceed with illegal wiretaps in contravention to American legislation signed into law in the late seventies on the heels of his tenure in the Ford White House to prevent just such activity.

7)     Has declared that he has the authority to, among other things, de-classify intelligence information according to his own criteria, even if the objectives are for the political advantage of stirring domestic support in turbulent weather.

8)    Almost certainly was up to his neck in the illegal revelation that administration thorn-in-the-side Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame (Plame, not blame) was an active undercover operative employed by the CIA (thereby de-classifying her and compromising all her assets as well as her advancing career).

9)     Used obscenities to rebuke a US Congressman in the halls of Washington where statesmanship and diplomacy are normally considered more appropriate than pool-room boy’s banter.

10) Served as Secretary of Defense twenty years after ducking the Vietnam War-era draft through a whopping five student deferments.

11) Argued for the right to torture enemy combatants to obtain intelligence necessary to obstruct an act in process, a tactical subterfuge for the right for the CIA and the military to torture with relative impunity.  

12) Was the top civilian manager of the first Gulf war and the principal architect through bombing of chemical munitions bunkers of the medical condition ultimately coined Gulf War Syndrome.

13) And has most recently and for the moment most famously now shot a friend and acquaintance in the face with his expensive Italian strange-gage shotgun.

But this is a lucky man, and so his list of mis-deeds may be respectfully restricted to the top thirteen.  Nevertheless, all superstition aside, it is past time for the US President to graciously show Mr. Cheney out through the in-door and end business-as-usual in the shadowy troglodytic secret enclave of the curmudgeonly Neo-Con.  In fact, it is surprising that members of the President’s own Republican party have not pressured for the Conservative-Wet-Job-Wizard's discrete putting-out-to-pasture in advance of mid-term elections coming up.  For those opposed to this presidency and who look forward to a power shift in the 2006 mid-terms, Mr. Cheney’s continued role as the US's Number Two can only be manna from heaven.  However the chips may fall, let us all include the health of President Bush in our nightly prayers, for the last thing this country needs is for the Captain of the Cabal to get his pudgy hands and itchy trigger finger around the reins of even more power than he has already garnered.

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