Your humble favorite blogger has been nominated in the “best writing” category. Voting for the finalists hasn’t begun yet, but I believe (a-HEM) I will mention it when it does begin.
Meanwhile — the folks at Wampum put in a lot of work on behalf of the liberal side of the blogosphere by hosting the Koufax Awards. They could use some donations to help pay for bandwidth. The tip jar is in the upper left column.
This morning I really did plan to write about something other than Dick the Dick and his little accident, but Ronald Brownstein and Peter Wallsten have an article in today’s Los Angeles Times that make some excellent observations about what The Incident says about the Bush Administration’s governing “style.”
Observation #1: They are utterly flummoxed by unexpected events that weren’t part of The Plan.
Bush and his White House often seem to struggle when pressed to react to unexpected events, a difficulty highlighted Wednesday by the continuing furor over Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting accident and a congressional committee’s sharply critical report about the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
“There are maybe three or four things [Bush] really cares about, and on those things he will be clear, decisive and maybe even ruthless,” said Donald F. Kettl, an expert on government administration at the University of Pennsylvania.
But Bush and his aides “are not very good at … quick reaction, on-the-fly decision-making,” Kettl said. …
…From his initial campaign for Texas governor in 1994, Bush has excelled at establishing and adhering to long-term plans. He is rigorous about sustaining a message or limiting his legislative agenda to a few priorities. But that laser-like focus can sometimes leave the administration unable to quickly recognize the significance of events that don’t fit into their blueprint, critics say.
“That’s just not how they think,” said Ron Klain, a former Clinton administration aide.
“Not very good” is an understatement. This blogger has written many times about the Bushies’ pathological inability to respond to unexpected crises. This is from the December 28, 2004 Mahablog about his slowness to respond to the tsunami disaster:
This, of course, is just part of a pattern. After September 11 The Brat had to hide out on Air Force One for several hours before he could pull himself together (or sober up?) and act like a president. More than a year ago he had to be coaxed into addressing the nation after a particularly bloody day in Iraq (not as bloody as the days have been since, of course). And do you remember The Blackout of August 2003? I wrote at the time
It took him four hours to bring himself to speak to the nation after the Blackout began, and then he could do so only on tape. (Drunk or stupid? We report — you decide.) After this week’s bombing that killed at least 20 UN workers, Bush’s keepers managed to get him off the golf course, into a suit and tie, and in front of cameras a bit faster. The keepers are learning, it seems.
Of course, he would have been a lot quicker if he’d been able to wear a quasi-military costume and prance around in front of a few thousand screaming groupies.
You can read more about the Boy’s slow response to the tsunami in this Washington Post article of December 29, 2004:
The Bush administration more than doubled its financial commitment yesterday to provide relief to nations suffering from the Indian Ocean tsunami, amid complaints that the vacationing President Bush has been insensitive to a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. … domestic criticism of Bush continued to rise. Skeptics said the initial aid sums — as well as Bush’s decision at first to remain cloistered on his Texas ranch for the Christmas holiday rather than speak in person about the tragedy — showed scant appreciation for the magnitude of suffering and for the rescue and rebuilding work facing such nations as Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Indonesia. …
… Some foreign policy specialists said Bush’s actions and words both communicated a lack of urgency about an event that will loom as large in the collective memories of several countries as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do in the United States. “When that many human beings die — at the hands of terrorists or nature — you’ve got to show that this matters to you, that you care,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
There was an international outpouring of support after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and even some administration officials familiar with relief efforts said they were surprised that Bush had not appeared personally to comment on the tsunami tragedy. “It’s kind of freaky,” a senior career official said.
Last March, the White House was criticized for failing to express sympathy for the shootings on the Red Lake reservation in Minnesota.
And may I say … Katrina?
Brownstein and Wallsten draw parallels between Katrina and the veep’s utterly inappropriate non-response to his shooting of a hunting partner:
The Cheney shooting and the Katrina response have raised tough questions about what the president knows, when he knows it and how the White House shares information with elected officials and the public.
Which leads us to …
Observation #2: They can’t communicate with each other.
White House counselor Dan Bartlett rejected the suggestion that the two controversies [Katrina and The Shooting] pointed to communication failures among Bush and his aides. “That’s just over-interpreting,” he said.
Yet other observers, in both parties, maintained the incidents underscored concerns about Bush’s willingness and capacity to react to unanticipated challenges.
“If the buck stops with you, you are the person who has to take charge,” said Leon E. Panetta, a White House chief of staff under President Clinton. “I get the impression in this White House that the buck sometimes stops everywhere else but [with] the president…. Frankly, that mentality leads to nothing but trouble.”
Some senior Republicans, including top officials from previous GOP administrations, privately said they shared Panetta’s views.
One GOP fundraiser close to the White House said he thought the administration’s response to the news that Cheney had mistakenly shot a fellow hunter Saturday so closely replicated the Katrina experience that he wondered, “Is this a bad dream we are seeing again?”
“There is a pattern here,” said the fundraiser, who requested anonymity when discussing the administration’s workings.
Regarding the Saturday hunting incident, the White House account of who said what to whom, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card told the President there had been a hunting accident at 7:30 pm Saturday, but Card had not learned that Cheney was the shooter. First, does anyone remember who told Card? I know he didn’t hear about the shooting from Cheney. Second, how weird is it that Card hadn’t bothered to ask who the shooter was? It was left to Karl Rove to inform Bush of this little detail, about 7:50 pm. It appears Karl learned what happened from ranch owner Katharine Armstrong, not through Bush Administration channels.
This is the same pattern we saw after Katrina, when White House staff tip-toed around in fear of telling the President the true dimensions of the unfolding catastrophe. Brownstein and Wallsten also remind us of the decision to invade Iraq:
But the question of whether the president receives a wide enough range of information has persisted for years — most notably in the administration’s conclusion before invading Iraq that leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
In a little-noticed remark in November, national security adviser Stephen Hadley conceded that there might have been flaws in the information flow to the Oval Office, preventing Bush from hearing that many intelligence experts disagreed about Hussein’s arsenal.
“One of the things we’ve all learned from that is that it is important [to] … make sure that dissenting opinions also are given visibility,” Hadley told reporters.
Ya think?
The final observation:
Observation #3: Who’s in Charge?
Brownstein and Wallsten write,
The hunting imbroglio has sparked a related question about Bush’s management style: whether he has provided the vice president too much autonomy in an administration in which Cheney has wielded as much influence as any second in command. …
…The incident has also revived the debate about the degree of Cheney’s independence in the administration. Cheney’s office did not confirm the shooting until Sunday, after his host on the ranch, with his agreement, informed a local newspaper.
In an interview Wednesday with Fox News, Cheney said White House communications officials encouraged him “to get the story out,” but deferred to him on how to release the story.
That follows the pattern established since Bush took office in 2001, said one former senior administration official who closely observed the relationship between the presidential and vice presidential staffs.
“The vice president’s office does indeed operate with a significant degree of autonomy,” said the former official, who requested anonymity when discussing internal White House relations. “Unless the vice president is helping the president to deliver a message [on policy], it is really the VP’s office that decides what they want to do when.”
This is from yesterday’s New York Times article by David Sanger:
Until this week, the periodic disconnect between Mr. Cheney’s office and the rest of the White House has been the source of grumbling, but rarely open tension. … In the past five years, Mr. Cheney has grown accustomed to having a power center of his own, with his own miniature version of a national security council staff. It conducts policy debates that often happen parallel those among Mr. Bush’s staff.
Sanger relates an incident in which the Vice President made a speech that stated a position contrary to the President’s decisions. Sanger writes, “it was left to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, to call Mr. Cheney and get him to strike that wording from a speech he was giving a few days later.”
Bush can’t stand up to Cheney? So who’s in charge?
Back in 2000, when George W. choose Dick to be his running mate, there was much gushing in news media about the seasoned, experienced hand that would be guiding Bush in foreign policy. But as revealed in this 2003 article in Washington Monthly by Josh Marshall, “Vice Grip,” going way back Cheney’s judgments and opinions have been, um, kind of freaky. I urge you to read it, because it reveals much about the Cheney mindset — for example, this paragraph about the corporate-Washington-insider class of which Cheney is the insider’s insider:
In such a framework all information is controlled tightly by the principals, who have “maximum flexibility” to carry out the plan. Because success is measured by securing the deal rather than by, say, pleasing millions of customers, there’s no need to open up the decision-making process. To do so, in fact, is seen as governing by committee. If there are other groups (shareholders, voters, congressional committees) who agree with you, fine, you use them. But anyone who doesn’t agree gets ignored or, if need be, crushed. Muscle it through and when the results are in, people will realize we were right is the underlying attitude.
That might work, except Cheney is more often wrong than right. Josh provides lots of examples. Worse, I strongly suspect Cheney is pathologically delusional. I wrote about this in the past; see “Moron, Idiot, or Nefarious Bastard?”
In sum, we a President who likes to prance around in flight suits and talk tough, but who can’t stand up to his father-figure Vice President. And the veep is a whackjob. Nice.
I see that Deadeye Dick has finally taken responsibility for shooting Mr. Whittington. However, Joe Strupp and Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher report that The Dick is less than contrite.
Speaking on camera and disclosing some of the unaired footage, [Brit] Hume said Cheney was “utterly unapologetic” about the reporting lag but “a shaken man” in his interview. In comments on the cable channel just minutes after ending a 25-minute interview with Cheney, Hume described the encounter as revealing, but with little contrition on Cheney’s part.
“He didn’t blame anyone else, he blamed himself [for the shooting],” Hume told Fox’s Shepard Smith during a brief conversation. “But he didn’t take blame for the way it was handled…the White House press corps be damned.”
The veep admitted having one beer with lunch that day, but also said no one had any beer. See Think Progress for more about the amazing appearing and disappearing beer story. Other rumors for which I have no corroboration whatsoever involve women.
You knew Maureen Dowd would have something to say about The Incident. Today’s column (via True Blue Liberal) doesn’t disappoint, as she describes the “swift-BB-ing” of Harry Whittington.
Private citizens have been enlisted to blame the victim. Maybe poor Mr. Whittington put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he was, after all, behind Vice, not in front of him. And the hunter pulling the trigger is supposed to make sure he has a clear shot. Wouldn’t it be, well, classy for Shooter to express just a bit of contrition and humility?
Instead, the usual sliming has begun, with the Cheney camp trying to protect the vice president by casting a veteran hunter as Elmer Dud.
Indeed, righties are lashing out at everyone in North America except those in the Bush Administration. Get this editorial at National Review Online:
Never has an accidental shooting occasioned so much glee. Whatever mistakes Vice President Dick Cheney might have made while hunting on the Armstrong Ranch in Texas this weekend, or in deciding how to make the mishap public, have been eclipsed by the disgusting wallowing in the accident of all his critics and the unsurpassable self-regard of national reporters outraged by a delay of at least 14 hours in getting alerted to the story. They worked themselves into a first-class tizzy at Monday’s White House press briefing, proving that no matter what the story is, reporters think it’s all about them. It is understandable that Cheney would not consider notifying the media his first priority following an accident during a quail-hunting trip with friends, and the meaning that is being read into the incident — about Cheney’s character, the administration’s competence, Bush’s foreign policy, and much else — is absurd.
This little tantrum is followed by the mild suggestion that, um, maybe the Veep should make a public statement now. But how juvenile is this? NRO sounds like a kid who got in trouble for not doing his homework and who then complains to Mom and Dad that Teacher picks on me.
Dear righties: Vice screwed up. Big Time. Stop making excuses for him and let him take his lumps like a man.
Fact is, even some Republicans are acknowledging that Cheney’s behavior is seriously weird. Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker write in today’s Washington Post:
Vice President Cheney’s slow and unapologetic public response to the accidental shooting of a 78-year-old Texas lawyer is turning the quail-hunting mishap into a political liability for the Bush administration and is prompting senior White House officials to press Cheney to publicly address the issue as early as today, several prominent Republicans said yesterday.
The Republicans said Cheney should have immediately disclosed the shooting Saturday night to avoid even the suggestion of a coverup and should have offered a public apology for his role in accidentally shooting Harry Whittington, a GOP lawyer from Austin. …
… “I cannot believe he does not look back and say this should have been handled differently,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who is close to the White House. Weber said Cheney “made it a much bigger issue than it needed to be.”
Marlin Fitzwater, a former Republican White House spokesman, told Editor & Publisher magazine that Cheney “ignored his responsibility to the American people.”
This episode does speak volumes about Dick Cheney’s character. And what it’s saying isn’t good. Whatever happened in that quail hunt, the fact that the Vice President couldn’t even tell the President what happened, and that he still cannot publicly state that he is sorry he pulled that trigger, bespeaks a pathological lack of character.
This is genuinely disturbing. Even your standard sociopath could have managed an act of contrition for the public once he understood it was in his best interest to do so.
And if the Veep is so unglued by a hunting accident that he can neither inform the President nor speak in public about it, what’s he doing a heartbeat away from the presidency?
David Sanger writes in today’s New York Times that The Incident has created a serious rift between the President’s and Vice President’s staffs. “The tension between President Bush’s staff and Mr. Cheney’s has been palpable,” Sanger writes.
Until this week, the periodic disconnect between Mr. Cheney’s office and the rest of the White House has been the source of grumbling, but rarely open tension. … In the past five years, Mr. Cheney has grown accustomed to having a power center of his own, with his own miniature version of a national security council staff. It conducts policy debates that often happen parallel those among Mr. Bush’s staff.
Um, so who’s in charge?
At WaPo, David Ignatius placed The Incident in the context of “An Arrogance of Power.” The Bush Administration, he writes, has become intoxicated with a belief in its own “God-given mission.”
I would be inclined to leave Cheney to the mercy of Jon Stewart and Jay Leno if it weren’t for other signs that this administration has jumped the tracks. What worries me most is the administration’s misuse of intelligence information to advance its political agenda. For a country at war, this is truly dangerous.
The most recent example of politicized intelligence was President Bush’s statement on Feb. 9 that the United States had “derailed” a 2002 plot to fly a plane into the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. Bush spoke about four al Qaeda plotters who had planned to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door. But a foreign official with detailed knowledge of the intelligence scoffed at Bush’s account, saying that the information obtained from Khalid Sheik Mohammed and an Indonesian operative known as Hambali was not an operational plan so much as an aspiration to destroy the tallest building on the West Coast. When I asked a former high-level U.S. intelligence official about Bush’s comment, he agreed that Bush had overstated the intelligence.
“Bush and Cheney are in the bunker,” Ignatius concludes. “That’s the only way I can make sense of their actions.” And the hard-core culties are in the bunker with them, outraged that anyone dare question the Vice President’s actions.
Criticize a politician? In America? Unthinkable. Our dear leaders are beyond reproach. Unless they’re Democrats.
(Cross-posted to The American Street)
There are some must-read items on the web today — let’s start with Digby’s “Dispatches From The Fever Swamp.”
The president’s approval rating is stuck at around 40% and I think it’s pretty clear that it isn’t the reporting in the mainstream media or by the “reasonable” Democrats at the New Republican that brought that about. If left up to them the Republicans would be coasting to another easy re-election.
I don’t say this because I think that liberal blogs are taking over the world and have changed the face of politics as we know it. I say it because I know that without us there would have been virtually no critical voices during the long period between 2001 and the presidential primary campaign during 2003. We were it. The media were overt, enthusiastic Bush boosters for well over two years and created an environment in which Democratic dissent (never welcome) was non-existent to the average American viewer. In fact, it took Bush’s approval rating falling to below 40% before they would admit that he was in trouble.
I believe that if it had not been for the constant underground drumbeat from the fever swamps over the past five years, when the incompetence, malfeasance and corruption finally hit critical mass last summer with the bad news from Iraq, oil prices and Katrina, Bush would not have sunk as precipitously as he did and stayed there. It literally took two catastrophes of epic proportions to break the media from its narrative of Bush’s powerful leadership. And this after two extremely close elections —- and the lack of any WMD in Iraq.
It’s a beautiful thing to see reality crystallized into a few concise sentences. Makes me want to cry. But this is why I started blogging. What was being reported as “news” on television and in newspapers was such obvious propaganda, such nonsense, I had to speak up.
Among the few negative emails I got after the recent C-SPAN gig were from gentlemen (why always men?) who patiently lectured me that news media is overwhelmingly liberal and for me to say otherwise was a self-evident lie. And I think, who am I supposed to believe — the Republican Noise Machine or my own lying eyes? And there’s no use arguing with them, you know. They’ve been told all their lives that the media is “liberal.” If you go back to the early 1950s you find Joe McCarthy saying it. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew declared all-out war on media in the early 1970s. Rightie talk radio, Faux News, and the rest of the echo chamber pour this lie into the ears of millions of non-thinking listeners, who accept “liberal media bias” as gospel.
That excellent resource Media Matters has a new study out called “If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative: An analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 – 2005.” The executive summary is here; the full report in PDF format is here. And the report tells us what any viewer with a usable brain surely has noticed — the guest lists of the Sunday television political programs are lopsidedly right-wing. “Panel discussions” also tilt right. In the crucial period leading up to the Iraq invasion, congressional opponents of the Iraq invasion were largely absent from the Sunday shows.
What’s particularly galling to me are the phony liberals — people who don’t speak for us liberals and progressives at all, yet they represent us on television. For example, take Christopher Hitchens and Joe Klein. Please.
Kevin Drum discusses the Media Matters report and also links to an article by Paul Waldman in the current Washington Monthly:
This ideological imbalance isn’t only evident in the “official” sources that are interviewed: the elected officials, candidates, and administration officials who make up most of the shows’ guests. It is even clearer in the roundtable discussions with featured journalists, [where] it has been a frequent practice for a roundtable to consist of a right-wing columnist or two supposedly “balanced” by journalists from major newspapers.
….The consequence of all this is that in every year since 1997, conservative journalists have dramatically outnumbered liberal journalists, in some years by two-to-one or more. Why would the producers of the shows believe that a William Safire (56 appearances since 1997) or Bob Novak (37 appearances) is somehow “balanced” by a Gwen Ifill (27) or Dan Balz (22)? It suggests that some may have internalized the conservative critique of the media, which assumes that daily journalists are “liberal” almost by definition, and thus can provide a counterpoint to highly partisan conservative pundits.
Kevin says,
The result is that genuinely liberal pundits get almost no exposure on these shows. You get conservative guests, super-conservative guests, moderate liberals, and journalists. And though it’s not part of this study, they’re almost all men. Only 10% of the guests on Sunday talk shows are women.
Some balance.
And this is particularly strange when you consider that the right-wingers are to the right of the majority of Americans on many issues. For example, 62 percent of adults recently polled by CBS News and the New York Times said that the “federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.” If you listen to “mainstream” political talk shows, however, you’d think the only people supporting this view are the far-left Marxist fringe.
The right-wing agenda is presented incessantly on mainstream media; genuinely progressive policy ideas are rarely presented at all. Yet the media has a “liberal” bias. Uh-huh.
While you’re at Hullabaloo reading Digby, see also this post by Tristero. Excellent. For example:
The genuine major voices opposed to war weren’t permitted anywhere near an effective microphone, but they were known. When Jessica Mathews of Carnegie Endowment – as sober an American as one could ask for and certainly known within the media – started to make a convincing case on NPR that democracy by invasion was a crazy pipe dream, even that relatively unimportant network was too big. William Kristol personally called up and horned in on her time with ludicrous assertions designed to prevent the conversation from touching upon the substantive issues at stake.
We can’t return America to the people without straightening out the problems in media, IMO. Democracy can’t work unless the people are truthfully informed. And when they aren’t seeing their real concerns being addressed by the political psychobabblers on television, most people will just tune out politics as being kind of pointless. And the Wingnuts will continue to run our beautiful country into the ground, because people don’t even know they might have had another choice.
The Democratic Party seems largely unable to pull itself together and push back. There are individual Democrats who are terrific people. But any Democrat who sticks his neck out is instantly, and visciously, smeared throughout news media, and the Dem Party won’t provide cover.
So it’s left to the Blogosphere to push back. It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.
CNN is reporting that Harry Whittington, the man “peppered” by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident, suffered a “mild” heart attack. Yes, this the same guy who’s been in the hospital since Saturday even though he’s just fine. Somehow, some birdshot that had “peppered” Mr. Whittington’s face migrated to his heart.
Uh-HUH.
This is starting to remind me of the “cat on the roof” joke.
Meanwhile, Dr. Atrios has learned that “Every conservative on the internet is an avid hunter and they’ve all been shot multiple times.” Suggestion: Stay out of the woods in red states.
In other news, Dr. Atrios observes the Stalinist discipline of rightie bloggers and Glenn Greenwood suggests that righties may have some double standards (Really? Wow!).
Update: See Dan Froomkin, “Loose Cannon.“
Proving once again that she lacks a basic appreciation of traditional American culture and values, Michelle Malkin is outraged at Dana Milbank’s gentle ribbing of the Vice President on last night’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.
If you watch Countdown, you know that the program mixes humor with hard news. So it was not at all out of keeping with the show’s format for reporter Dana Milbank to appear dressed in an orange vest and hat. His current location was near the vice president’s residence, he said.
Cute, I thought.
But Michelle Malkin and others on the Right are on a rampage. Media bias! they scream. They want to know when Countdown will display a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy.” Can they not tell the difference between good-natured kidding and hateful meanness? I’d hate to sit down to a family dinner with these folks.
In some ways its a sign of respect to be able to kid our leaders. It says we’re comfortable enough with them to tease them. And Americans have made fun of our leaders since the guys at Valley Forge sat around the campfire and badmouthed George Washington. Some of our most-beloved humorists — Mark Twain, Bob Hope and Will Rogers come to mind — showed how it was possible to poke fun at leaders — often in their presence — without being mean about it. Here’s an example from Will Rogers —
The fire at the Treasury Department started on the roof and burned down until it got the place where the money ought to be and there it stopped. The Harding Administration had beat the fire to it. A fire in the Treasury Building is nothing to get excited about during a Republican Administration.
Damn, that’s still funny.
Malkin et al. will argue that Dana Milbank is not a humorist, but a journalist. To which I might say, since news coverage is a joke, what’s the difference? (Ba-bump BUMP) But I think it could be argued (to anyone not a twit) that Milbank’s costume showed a pro-Cheney bias. It signalled the audience that this is not a serious story. Nothing to get fired up about. Let’s have a chuckle and forget about it.
Believe me, a reporter with a real anti-Cheney bias would have taken a more sober approach to this story. In fact, I bet the White House has a crack team of joke writers on the job right now …
Updates: See “Cheney Accident Triggers Jokes on Late-Night TV“; “After Cheney’s Shooting Incident, Time to Unload“; “Groans at Home Re: (Cheney Joke Here).” See also Ezra Klein.
Update update: Boy, was I right about the White House crack team of joke writers, or what? Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports:
The White House has decided that the best way to deal with Vice President Dick Cheney’s shooting accident is to joke about it.
President Bush’s spokesman quipped Tuesday that the burnt orange school colors of the University of Texas championship football team that was visiting the White House shouldn’t be confused for hunter’s safety wear.
“The orange that they’re wearing is not because they’re concerned that the vice president may be there,” joked White House press secretary Scott McClellan, following the lead of late-night television comedians. “That’s why I’m wearing it.”
The president’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, took a similar jab after slapping an orange sticker on his chest from the Florida Farm Bureau that read, “No Farmers, No Food.”
“I’m a little concerned that Dick Cheney is going to walk in,” the governor cracked during an appearance in Tampa Monday.
If you watched yesterday’s Scotty McClellan press briefing you saw reporters attempt, with mounting frustration, to tease a simple chronology of events out of the press secretary. Transcript at Raw Story —
Q But when did the president specifically know that the vice president had shot somebody?
MR. MCCLELLAN: I’m sorry?
Q When did the president know that the vice president —
MR. MCCLELLAN: He was learning additional details into that evening, on Saturday —
Q (Off mike) — it was the vice president that pulled the trigger —
MR. MCCLELLAN: Yeah, but we didn’t know the full details. But I think he was informed because Karl —
Q (Off mike) —
MR. MCCLELLAN: — I think his deputy chief of staff had spoken with Mrs. Armstrong and provided him additional update in that evening. So there were more circumstances —
Q The deputy chief of staff —
MR. MCCLELLAN: — more circumstances known Saturday evening, so the president was getting more information about who was involved, and that was in — that was late Saturday evening.
Q Scott —
Q So he knew — so he knew Saturday evening —
Q Scott, definitively, did the president know —
MR. MCCLELLAN: Some additional information, yes, and that the vice president —
Q — (inaudible) —
MR. MCCLELLAN: — and that the vice president was involved, but didn’t know the full facts of what had occurred.
Q How is that possible?
At one point, a frustrated reporter asked, “Was the vice president immediately clear that he had accidentally shot his friend or not, or did that information become available later?” One wonders.
Today Maria Newman reports in the New York Times that President Bush did, in fact, learn that the veep had shot someone. He learned it about 8 pm Saturday, from Karl Rove.
Now, Scottie, was that so hard?
Reading on, however, we find that Karl Rove got his story not from the Secret Service or the veep’s staff, but from Katherine Armstrong, the lady on whose property The Incident took place. The veep didn’t bother to report this to the President himself, or direct anyone on his staff to make a report. Hmmm. Then we learn from Jim VandeHei and Sylvia Moreno at the Washington Post that
… the White House allowed Cheney to decide when and how to disclose details of the shooting to the local sheriff and the public the next morning.
So, who’s in charge here? And does the President serve any actual function beyond smirking?
Cheney, in fact, has yet to make a public statement about The Incident. VandeHei and Moreno continue,
Cheney, who had a private White House lunch with Bush yesterday, did not comment on the shooting. Late yesterday, he issued a statement that did not mention the shooting but acknowledged not having paid $7 for a permit that allows him to shoot upland birds; it said he is sending a check to the state. Cheney said he expects to be issued a warning by state authorities for not obtaining the permit.
Further, local law enforcement could not interview Cheney until Sunday morning, about 14 hours after the shooting.
I can think of only three possible explanations for the veep’s behavior: (1) He’s hiding something; (2) he was so emotionally unhinged by The Incident he cannot deal with it; or (3) he doesn’t give a rat’s behind about accountability to the public or the law. Any one of those possibilities disqualifies the Dick from being a heartbeat away from the presidency. And, of course, all three explanations could be true.
An editorial in today’s New York Times says Dick’s behavior is juvenile:
The vice president appears to have behaved like a teenager who thinks that if he keeps quiet about the wreck, no one will notice that the family car is missing its right door. The administration’s communications department has proved that its skills at actually communicating are so rusty it can’t get a minor police-blotter story straight. And the White House, in trying to cover up the cover-up, has once again demonstrated that it would rather look inept than open.
Also true to form, the White House is blaming the wounded Mr. Whittington for the shooting.
Time for a Bush quote!
In a compassionate society, people respect one another, respect their points of view. And they take responsibility for the decisions they make. The culture of America is changing from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else, to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life. If you are fortunate enough to be a mom or a dad, you’re responsible for loving your child with all your heart. (Applause.) If you are concerned about the quality of the education in the community in which you live, you’re responsible for doing something about it. If you’re a CEO in corporate America, you’re responsible for telling the truth to your shareholders and your employees. (Applause.)
And in this new responsibility society, each of us is responsible for loving our neighbor just like we would like to be loved ourselves. We can see the culture of service and responsibility growing around us.
Oooo, but this responsibility thing is haaaaaard work. We don’t wanna do it ourselves. That’s what the help is for.
And if Dick’s a weenie, but the President defers to his bad judgment, doesn’t that make the President a worse weenie?
Dead-Eye Dick is nowhere to be found. He hasn’t spoken to the press or the public since The Incident.
That is beyond strange, people. No politician in my memory would have behaved like this. Any politician in my memory would have hustled to be sure his version of what happened was the first version the press heard. If he wasn’t able to get in front of cameras himself, he would have had a spokesperson hold a press conference asap. The politician or his surrogates might have been lying, but he certainly wouldn’t have gone into hiding without issuing a statement.
Why isn’t Dick Cheney on TV right now?
The vice president of the United States shoots someone in a hunting accident and rather than immediately come clean to the public, his office keeps it a secret for almost a whole day. Even then, it’s only to confirm a report in a local paper.
And still from the White House, no details, no apologies, and no Cheney.
The excuses: The veep’s first concern was getting medical help for Mr. Whittington. What, did the veep assist in surgery? I can undetstand waiting for a doctor’s prognosis, but by all accounts there was a prognosis late Saturday afternoon. Effects of a shotgun blast aren’t all that hard to diagnose, I suspect.
The other excuse: The White House was waiting to get more information. Lordy, no wonder they couldn’t deal with levee breaks. This story is (I assume) simple: There was an accident. The Vice President accidently shot his friend while hunting. The friend will be fine. The veep is real sorry. You can throw in the Official Story — the friend stepped into the veep’s line of fire. If more details come to light we will share them.
Yet something as simple as a hunting accident seems to have confounded them. The White House is struggling just to get its story straight about who knew what, when; and who told what to whom. The veep cannot pull himself together to even issue a statement. This is exceeding strange.
Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story reports that the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson “caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad.”
According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame’s work. Their accounts suggest that Plame’s outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran’s burgeoning nuclear program.
I’d like to see this corroborated by other news sources before filing it away as “proven fact.” But we already know, even if righties won’t admit it, that the disclosure of Plame Wilson’s status as a CIA agent damaged American intelligence gathering efforts. Dafna Linzer reported in the Washington Post (October 29, 2005):
More than Valerie Plame’s identity was exposed when her name appeared in a syndicated column in the summer of 2003.
A small Boston company listed as her employer suddenly was shown to be a bogus CIA front, and her alma mater in Belgium discovered it was a favored haunt of an American spy. At Langley, officials in the clandestine service quickly began drawing up a list of contacts and friends, cultivated over more than a decade, to triage any immediate damage.
Also,
The CIA has not conducted a formal damage assessment, as is routinely done in cases of espionage and after any legal proceedings have been exhausted.
This is significant, because Bob Woodward claimed on Larry King Live that the CIA had done a damage assessment and found no significant damage. The Right, of course, accepted Woodward’s word as gospel and has also claimed all along that Plame Wilson’s status wasn’t really classified.
Of course, no evidence is solid enough to persuade righties that their Plame Wilson mythology is wrong. Righties will tell you that Plame Wilson’s CIA status was not classified, even though the CIA itself has been saying all along that it was. In the February 13 issue of Newsweek we read “The CIA Leak: Plame Was Still Covert“:
… special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done “covert work overseas” on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA “was making specific efforts to conceal” her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge’s opinion.
Did that settle anything. Of course not. The rightie Byron York of NRO, for example, questions (in some nicely overpadded prose) if the judge actually knew what he was talking about. This gives the Righties a slim reed of an excuse to hang on to their belief in Plame Wilson’s non-classified status. But they will hang on to that reed with everything they’ve got.
If we get corroboration of Alexandrovna’s, watch to see what excuse the righties dig up to ignore it.
See also “Betrayed by the White House.”