Monumental Misfire

Cheney? Tight-lipped? You don't suppose that's why he slipped out of a meeting with Bush and Kofi Annan before the press pool showed up, do you?

Boston Globe : "President Bush was informed by 8 p.m. Saturday that Vice President Dick Cheney had accidentally shot a hunting partner earlier that day in Texas, but the information was not relayed to the White House spokesman until Sunday morning and was not confirmed to the public until around 1 p.m. Sunday, White House officials said yesterday."

LAT : "The Bush White House and the president himself are known for limiting information to not only the press but also to members of Congress, as seen in the debate over the domestic surveillance program by the National Security Agency and the congressional investigation of the administration's handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster."

Philadelphia Inquirer : "Gun-safety advocates say there are very few gun 'accidents' - spontaneous discharges of firearms. Rather, they say, most unintentional shootings involve negligence or carelessness, and are anything but blameless."

New York Daily News : "Vice President Cheney had no license to kill - quail, that is." He needed a $7 stamp.

The New York Post has Cheney as Elmer Fudd, with a headline about two WASCALS: "The White House took heavy flak yesterday for waiting a vewwy, vewwy long time before revealing that wascally Vice President Dick Cheney had shot a fellow hunter."

Josh Marshall poses the question:

"The vice president shoots someone seriously enough to require ICU treatment in the hospital and the White House doesn't see fit to make a public announcement? It's left to the owner of the ranch to let people know?

"Clearly, it's not really left up to her. It's a passive decision. They don't want to touch it presumably. So they leave it to Armstrong to be the public face of it."

Conservative columnist John Podhoretz doesn't sugarcoat it on National Review:

"This story is a very big deal, despite all the mitigating factors -- the accident involved a friend, his medical team was right there to help, and all that. Something like this has never happened before, and it is a genuinely disturbing thing to think that the vice president of the United States actually shot somebody last weekend, even for fans of his.

"It's disturbing as well that there was a news blackout that lasted nearly a day about this serious incident. It seems beyond question that the vice president is going to have to go before the cameras, explain what happened, and show genuine remorse for his actions, however inadvertent. It's a difficult challenge for someone as reticent as Dick Cheney. But unless he does so, and makes a good showing of it, he will be damaged goods for the remainder of the Bush presidency."