The Cheney Fallout

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 17, 2006 10:40 AM

So all the people who don't like Vice President Cheney or Fox say it was a terrible interview and how dare he talk only to Brit, and all the people who like Cheney and Fox say it was a perfectly good interview and why doesn't the angry and petulant press corps get off the veep's back over this regrettable accident?

No surprise there.

President Bush came out yesterday and said that his No. 2 handled the aftermath just fine.

No surprise there.

Cheney defenders are trying to make the White House press corps the issue, saying they're just throwing a collective hissy fit, and Cheney critics are accusing him of arrogance and whispering about a cover-up.

No shocking news there either.

What did surprise me was this Peggy Noonan column in the Wall Street Journal. She, after all, is a former Reagan and Bush White House speechwriter who took a leave in 2004 to work for the president's reelection. But here she is putting into play the question of not only whether Cheney is damaged goods but whether he might have to pack his bags:

"The Dick Cheney shooting incident will, in a way, go away. And, in a way, not--ever. Some things stick. Gerry Ford had physically stumbled only once or twice in public when he became, officially, The Stumbler. Mr. Ford's stumbles seemed to underscore a certain lack of sure-footedness in his early policies and other decisions. The same with Jimmy Carter and the Killer Rabbit. At the time Mr. Carter told the story of a wild rabbit attacking his boat he had already come to be seen by half the country as weak and unlucky. Even bunnies took him on . . .

"I suspect what they're thinking and not saying is, 'If Dick Cheney weren't vice president, who'd be a good vice president?' They're thinking, 'At some time down the road we may wind up thinking about a new plan.' And one night over drinks at a barbecue in McLean one top guy will turn to another top guy and say, 'Under the never permeable and never porous Dome of Silence, tell me . . . wouldn't you like to replace Cheney?'

"Why would they be thinking about this? It's not the shooting incident itself, it's that Dick Cheney has been the administration's hate magnet for five years now. Halliburton, energy meetings, Libby, Plamegate. This was not all bad for the White House: Mr. Cheney took the heat that would otherwise have been turned solely on George Bush. So he had utility, and he's experienced and talented and organized, and Mr. Bush admires and respects him. But, at a certain point a hate magnet can draw so much hate you don't want to hold it in your hand anymore, you want to drop it, and pick up something else. Is this fair? Nah. But fair has nothing to do with it."

Personally, I doubt Cheney's going anywhere, any more than Bush's father dumped Quayle from the ticket. But now Noonan has put into play, or at least into print, the idea that Bush might try to anoint his successor by naming a new veep.

With no other hard news on the subject, Bush backing Cheney is the day's story:

"President Bush said on Thursday that Vice President Dick Cheney had handled the disclosure of an accidental shooting of a hunting partner 'just fine' and that the incident had been a 'traumatic moment' for Mr. Cheney as well as a tragic one for the victim," reports the New York Times .

"The remarks came on the same day that the local sheriff's department investigating the shooting said its inquiry was closed and no charges would be filed.

"The president's words appeared to be an effort to tamp down widespread talk about tensions between him and Mr. Cheney. Mr. Bush's aides had made little secret all week that they wished Mr. Cheney had handled the matter differently -- in particular by disclosing it more quickly and via a more established channel than the Web site of a local newspaper in Texas -- and on Wednesday the White House signaled that Mr. Bush was sympathetic to that view."

The Boston Globe spies a pattern: "Criticism rained down on Vice President Dick Cheney this week for failing to disclose his hunting accident to the public for a day, but advocates of open government said the episode was nothing new. For five years, they said, Cheney has led the Bush administration's efforts to curtail the flow of government information.

"From fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the public from seeing records of his energy task force, to withholding briefings on the domestic spying program from most members of the congressional intelligence committees, Cheney has made his penchant for secrecy a hallmark of how he and the administration do business, specialists say."

National Review's Byron York says one part of the Brit sitdown could be "enormously consequential expansion of vice presidential authority":

"Near the end of the interview, Fox anchor Brit Hume brought up a controversy arising from the CIA-leak case, in which prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in court papers that former top Cheney aide Lewis Libby testified he had been authorized 'by his superiors' to disclose information about the classified National Intelligence Estimate to members of the press. 'Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify information?' Hume asked.

" 'There is an executive order to that effect,' Cheney said.

" 'There is?'

" 'Yes.'

" 'Have you done it?'

" 'Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions. The executive order -- '

" 'You ever done it unilaterally?'

" 'I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.' "

Hmmm.

In the New Republic, T.A. Frank gives Hume a passing grade:

"When it came time to talk to Dick Cheney . . . Brit Hume actually did a decent job. And Cheney, while more plausibly human than usual, did quite badly.

"To be sure, not all of Hume's questions were winners. For example, the query '[A]nd I take it, you missed the bird,' while detail-oriented, didn't get quite to the heart of Americans' concerns about the incident. For the most part, however, Hume squeezed out an account of the accident for which local law enforcement officials will undoubtedly be grateful. Hume was persistent and specific: 'You had pulled the trigger and you saw him?' 'What was he wearing?' 'How far away from you was he?' 'What did you think when you saw the injuries? How serious did they appear to you to be?' 'Did you get up and did you go with him, or did you go to the hospital?' 'His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?' . . .

"But when questions turned to how Cheney had handled disclosure of the incident, the vice president made little sense."

Does Cheney think he has a credibility problem? Kevin Drum explains:

"First, Cheney acknowledged that the White House wanted him to issue a statement Saturday night, but he refused. "That was my call, all the way," he said. Translation: he doesn't take guidance from the White House. They take guidance from him.

"Second, he said that he had held up issuing a statement because he wanted to make sure Harry Whittington was all right before saying anything. I don't even know what to make of this. Is he suggesting that his story would have been different if Whittington's injuries had been more serious? That the White House never issues statements about breaking news until it knows how things are going to turn out? Or what?

"Finally, Hume suggested that since this was obviously a national story, Cheney should have informed the national press and gotten the word out sooner. Cheney's reply: 'It isn't easy to do that. Are they going to take my word for what happened?'

"Seriously? Cheney's story is that his own credibility is so poor that a statement from him would have been worthless? Is he really going to stick to that as his explanation?"

Betsy Newmark likes Hume because "he'll ask questions about issues that wouldn't occur to many other interviewers because he is open to the conservative side. I just think that some news interviewers have no idea what the conservative side of an issue is so that it never even occurs to them to ask those questions.

"Sure, Brit's a conservative, but he's also tough and fair. All those news people who insist that they don't twist the news to fit their own self-acknowledged liberal ideology think that a conservative like Brit is incapable of doing the same thing. I think they both do it, and if I'm going to watch the news on TV, I like seeing the conservative twist on things. I just wish they'd all drop the pretense of objectivity because we all know that it is not so. Fox is conservative and ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and PBS are liberal. Fess up now and stop thinking that we're too dumb to notice the choice of stories on all those supposedly unbiased news broadcasts."

Blogger Ed Copeland says that Quailgate could help Bush:

"This week, how often have you even heard Bush's name other than in relation to not getting the word from Cheney about the hunting accident? The spin makes my theory seem more plausible -- the administration surrogates have been united in claiming that the hunting accident is no big deal and that the story is just the poor, jealous media who feel scooped by a lesser media entity. They emphasize how no one wonders how Cheney is feeling (his interview with Brit Hume followed the same tune). There is even a story about Republicans who see the story as a welcome respite from the other scandals they fear. I myself wouldn't put it past Karl Rove to see this as a golden opportunity to force Cheney out and install their own hand-picked successor for 2008 as the new vice president."

He must be channeling Peggy Noonan.

There were signs that the Hill was finally going to get serious about oversight, but . . . nahhh.

"Senate Republicans blocked a proposed investigation of President Bush's domestic spying operation Thursday as the chairman of the Intelligence Committee said he had reached an agreement with the White House to pursue legislation establishing clearer rules for the controversial program," says the Los Angeles Times . "But Senate aides described the discussions with the White House as very preliminary. And angry Democrats expressed skepticism over the negotiations, with some describing them as a ploy to protect the Bush administration and the highly classified surveillance operation from congressional scrutiny."

Abu Ghraib is back in the news. Walter Shapiro , Salon's new Washington bureau chief, explains why the magazine is running these new photos of the stomach-turning abuses there:

"The horrors carried out during the last three months of 2003 by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison are shockingly familiar and, at the same time, oddly remote. The torture photographs that were published when the prisoner-abuse scandal first exploded have lost their power to shock. We have all seen the pictures repeatedly: a pyramid of unclothed prisoners; a naked detainee cowering in front of snarling dogs; captives wearing punitive hoods that seem borrowed from a medieval inquisition; American soldiers grinning over Iraqi dead bodies and, always, that chillingly ironic thumbs-up sign.

"Eventually this visual repetition numbs the senses. All these ghastly images have been viewed so often that they seem to belong to a different war conducted by a different superpower in a different century. Yet the photographs that news organizations have so far published represent only a partial sample of the government's chilling documentary record from Abu Ghraib.

"When Salon's national correspondent Mark Benjamin obtained the never-before-released photographs that accompany this essay, we had to both establish their authenticity and to answer the basic question of our justification for publishing. The images themselves partly answered the why-publish question for us. Speaking for myself, I remain haunted by one of the more seemingly banal pictures in this new collection from the dark side. Taken on Dec. 6, 2003, the photograph shows a uniformed and seemingly untroubled Army sergeant leaning against a corridor wall completing his paperwork. All routine, except standing next to the sergeant is a hooded and naked Iraqi prisoner. Just another day of methodical record-keeping at Abu Ghraib."

On the blogging front, New York magazine's Clive Thompson cites a study by NYU's Clay Shirky that says there are only a relative handful of major players:

"There is enormous inequity in the system. A very small number of blogs enjoy hundreds and hundreds of inbound links -- the A-list, as it were. But almost all others have very few sites pointing to them. When Shirky sorted the 433 blogs from most linked to least linked and lined them up on a chart, the curve began up high, with the lucky few. But then it quickly fell into a steep dive, flattening off into the distance, where the vast majority of ignored blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the B-list is bigger, and the C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences -- and the advertising revenue they bring -- go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity . . .

"In politics, the highest is Daily Kos , one of the first liberal blogs -- with 11,182 links -- followed closely by Instapundit , an early right-wing blog, with 6,513. Uncountable teensy political blogs lie in their shadows."

But even teensy bloggers can have an impact if they're read by bigger boys and girls who pick up on their arguments.

Finally, in a transparent effort to sex up this column, Salon's Rebecca Traister writes about the new issue of Vanity Fair -- and the role of designer Tom Ford -- under the headline "Topless Bodies Found in Brainless Magazine":

"Rachel McAdams ('Wedding Crashers,' 'Red Eye,' 'The Family Stone'), one of the women scheduled to pose for this year's cover, arrived at the photo shoot only to learn that Ford wanted her naked. I had not thought a willingness to disrobe was a condition of appearing on the front of Vanity Fair, but reluctant ecdysiast McAdams not only lost her spot, she is mentioned in the magazine only as 'a certain young actress' who 'bowed out when the clothes started coming off,' thus squelching 'Ford's plan of having a gorgeous female threesome.' "There you have it, ladies, straight from Vanity Fair: We don't care if you star in three successful movies in one year; if you won't get naked for a 'threesome,' you can forget your spot in our pages!

"As for Ford's claim, to editor Jim Windolf, that it was an 'accident' that he plopped himself in the middle of the cover shot (fully dressed, because only the chicks have to take it off), a quick glance at the magazine's cover line ('Tom Ford's Hollywood'), its cover-photo caption ('Ford's Foundation'), its full-page contributor's bio of Ford, the letter from editor in chief Graydon Carter titled 'Vanity Fair's Tom Ford Moment,' a story about the making of the magazine called 'Welcome to Tommywood!' and multiple pictures of Ford (walking sexed-up 12-year-old Dakota Fanning to her photo shoot, taking a bite out of Mamie Van Doren's inflated breast, strutting around in Wellingtons) provide subtle clues that there is nothing 'accidental' about Ford's megalomania."

I hear the comments section at the Post blog is back in business today. Play nice and no talking about %&**!@ or even circ&**@#!