Not Exactly Clearing Things Up

" 'No, zero, zippo, and I don't drink at all,' she said in an interview published on Monday in The Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the paper she initially called. 'No one was drinking.' "

Sanger and Kornblut also note: "The administration faced more questions about why the White House Situation Room, when told of the accident by a member of Mr. Cheney's entourage on Saturday evening, was not told that Mr. Cheney fired the shot."

On CNN last night, John King introduced a whole new plot line: "At the White House, we know that Karl Rove learned about this Sunday night, Saturday night, excuse me. They tried to come up with a White House statement, they put the brakes on that when they found out the vice president was going to be interviewed by the sheriff the next day. They decided to wait until Sunday morning, they thought all this would break by noon on Sunday, it didn't break until late afternoon. At one point, they thought the vice president would stop and talk to reporters outside the hospital in Corpus Christi on Sunday. They still can't explain why he didn't do that. One senior adviser involved told me earlier today, quote, 'He just didn't do it.' "

Wow. Is this true? We hadn't heard about this before.

And let's not just leave it to the professionals. Here's a Daily Kos blogger 's compilation of the conflicting statements by Katharine Armstrong.

Behind-the-Scenes Questions

Most of the big guys this morning dutifully reported what Cheney said -- not what he didn't say. But that doesn't mean they feel they have all the answers.

Joe Strupp writes in Editor and Publisher that "journalists covering or directing the story are becoming increasingly interested in the actual chain of events in the field, and at the White House, on the night of the shooting, when the vice president wounded his hunting companion, Harry Whittington. . . .

"Specifically, those who spoke with E&P Wednesday cited details ranging from how far Cheney was standing from the victim (less than the 30 yards as claimed?) to why law enforcement investigators were turned away from the ranch Saturday night. . . .

" 'Was there something going on that they needed to get their ducks in a row?' asks Mark Silva, a White House correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. . . .

" 'There are obvious questions about what was going on at the White House between the president's staff and the vice president's staff,' said Richard Stevenson of The New York Times. 'And in Texas with the Secret Service and local law enforcement.' "

Some Developments

CBS News reports: "President Bush's top political aide, Karl Rove, pushed Vice President Dick Cheney to speak publicly about shooting a fellow hunter, sources tell CBS News.

"Rove worried the vice president's silence on the issue was becoming a political problem, CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod reports.