Shoots, Hides and Leaves

Gibson: "So you're just in on a Sunday and the phone rings, right?"

Garcia: "Yeah. Actually that's kind of how it worked. I was incredibly surprised. I got a phone call from Katharine Armstrong. . . . She was explaining to me what happened, giving me the details, and she kept saying the vice president did this, the vice president did that, we were all hunting. And at the end -- I mean, it's a Sunday morning, it's supposed to be slow at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times -- and . . . I said, are we talking about Vice President Cheney? And she laughed a little bit and said yes, absolutely. And I thought, oh, my God, you're going to have to repeat that story one more time."

Gibson: "She told you, I know, that Mr. Whittington didn't follow protocol, and came up from behind the vice president and didn't sort of announce that he was there, having gone off to fetch a quail. But we've talked to hunters who say there's no protocol like that and the real problem is the shooter has to be aware of where anybody in his hunting party may be. Do you know anything about hunting protocol?"

Garcia: "I don't know that much, I'm not a hunter myself, but I do know a little bit, and I do know you're supposed to look before shooting."

Garcia also described calling the White House.

"I . . . got the switchboard . . . I said, you know, I'm going to need to talk to some sort of public relations office. . . . She said, no, unfortunately it's going to be open on Monday morning. And I said, no, that's not going to work and I tried to be as absolutely dramatic as possible to get the most attention and I said: Vice President Cheney has apparently shot someone accidentally and I need to speak with someone and I need a statement. She got somebody straight away for me. It was very interesting."

Spin Watch

Mike Allen writes for Time.com: "The Vice President flew down to Texas on Friday after working at the White House, his office said. He remained there Sunday but did not hunt, his office said, before flying back to Washington on Sunday night. He is scheduled to join Bush on Monday afternoon when he takes questions from reporters in the Oval Office, following a meeting with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. White House aides can be expected to say that the Vice President did not shoot Whittington, which suggests a bullet, but rather sprayed him with birdshot, a type of ammunition made up of tiny pieces of lead or steel."

Precedents

Susan Page writes in USA Today that "there are few shootings on record by presidents or vice presidents. Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. In some ways, Cheney's accident is more reminiscent of occasions when President Ford drove golf balls into a crowd, beaning bystanders."

Murray and Baker write: "Two years ago, he was criticized for going duck hunting with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia soon after the court had agreed to hear Cheney's appeal in an lawsuit related to his energy task force. A month earlier, he had bagged about 70 stocked pheasants at a private shooting club in Pennsylvania."

Blog Watch

Joel Achenbach writes in his washingtonpost.com blog: "I find the story reassuring. Cheney is a man who doesn't just talk the talk. No, if he's going to send American soldiers into harm's way, where they might be shot at any moment by a deranged fanatic, he's also going to do the same thing to his close personal friends. He's giving his hunting buddies a taste of life in the Cheney Era, when you count yourself lucky just to get out alive."

Blogger Josh Marshall is asking lots of pointed questions.

Oliver Willis asks: "Do you think that if Al Gore had shot someone that the media wouldn't hear/report it for 24 hours?"