Vice President Cheney Still Under Fire

Those people who have not had their fill of vilifying Vice President Dick Cheney and speculating about his level of competence or sobriety during the shooting of his friend Harry Whittington on February 11 will have more dead horse to devour as Time and Newsweek this week release cover stories on the shooting.

Indicative of the scorching eye of the media upon Cheney is the following passage from the Newsweek article:

A few weeks after 9/11, NEWSWEEK has learned, Cheney worried that he and his family and his staff might have been exposed in an anthrax attack. According to knowledgeable former officials, a mysterious letter turned up at the vice president's mansion. . . . The alarm turned out to be false. Still, to be safe, Cheney and his entourage began taking Cipro, the powerful antibiotic. The story was hushed up.

Yes, you read that correctly, the story was "'hushed up" as if Cheney had flown his daughters to Kyrgyzstan for the purpose of obtaining abortions. So much for a sympathetic story of what was likely a traumatic experience; did all of America absolutely need to know about a false alarm?

The article acknowledges that the Vice President has undergone a lot of stress in connection with his job, but it is not a flattering portrait:

Has Cheney changed? Has he been transformed, warped, perhaps corrupted—by stress, wealth, aging, illness, the real terrors of the world or possibly some inner goblins? The few who know him (and few really do) aren't saying much, except to argue that he takes a longer view than the mean politics of the moment. But there is no doubt that Cheney has become less amiable, less open, less willing to conciliate and seek common ground than he was as a younger politician.

It must be surreal to read about one's supposedly warped psychological condition in a national publication.

Left-of-center blog commentary about the incident reveals both a contempt and automatic-second-guessing of the Vice President, as well as a bit of paranoia. There is speculation that Cheney had several beers, was drunk at the time of the shooting, and sought to coverup this fact. Lawrence O'Donnell at the Huffington Post writes:

How do we know there was no alcohol? Cheney refused to talk to local authorities until the next day. No point in giving him a breathalyzer then. Every lawyer I've talked to assumes Cheney was too drunk to talk to the cops after the shooting. The next question for the White House should be: Was Cheney drunk?

For his part, Cheney in the Fox News interview said that he had consumed one beer with lunch, several hours before the accident at 5:30 p.m.

Even if Cheney drank three beers, this was not a drunk-driving situation. All of the hunters in the party were likely aware of Cheney's drinking (likely very little drinking) and voluntarily chose to be with him... It is highly unlikely that a typical hunter would join other hunters who had been drinking the same day unless he or she he thought the amount of alcohol consumed was safe.

The police have cleared Cheney of wrongdoing-- "This was a hunting accident," said the chief deputy of the Kenedy County Sheriff's Office, "There was no alcohol or misconduct." The wounded lawyer (let's not kill all the lawyers) has publicly apologized to Cheney for what the Vice President has gone through the past several days. Let the conspiracy theories lie and let's move on.