Shorter David Brooks: Poor, put-upon Dick Cheney

If there was ever an incident that begs the question, "What if the shooter's name were 'John Kerry' or 'Al Gore'?", it's the saga of the Vice President Who Couldn't Shoot Straight Or Perhaps He Could Who Knows?".

When set against the larger picture of playing on Americans' fears to lie the country's way into a war without end; an energy commission stacked with Cheney cronies in secret, unaccountable to anyone; the Administration's non-response to those left homeless and injured and dead from Hurricane Katrina; the complete LACK of any kind of meaningful safeguards put in place after 9/11; the drive to have every American, particularly dissidents, under constant surveillance; and on and on and on, that Dick Cheney accidentally shot a hunting companion is really trivial by comparison.

At this point, the story has become a distraction -- which almost makes me wonder if the stonewalling and the cover-up was done DELIBERATELY, because the White House knows that a hunting accident is just the kind of shiny bauble it can dangle in front of the White House Press Corps to keep them away from REAL stories, like the $400 million worth of mobile homes warping and rotting in the Hope, Arkansas (yes, really) sun while thousands of the Katrina homeless are being kicked out of their hotel rooms.

But with the always reliably loyal John Tierney having had Valentine's Day duty this week and rising to the occasion with a truly loathsome piece of claptrap (deconstructed nicely by Amanda, here), it falls upon the other member of the two-headed New York Times Bush Cult Hydra, David Brooks, to point out that shooting your companion in the face and putting him in the hospital for a week is really no big deal:

On a personal level, the Cheney-Whittington accident was a sad but unremarkable event. Two men go hunting. Both are sloppy, and one friend shoots another. The victim is suffering but gracious. The shooter is anguished in his guilt.

"The image of him falling is something I will never be able to get out of my mind," Dick Cheney told Brit Hume yesterday, adding, "It was ... one of the worst days of my life."

Afterward, he looked back, relived the moment and took responsibility. "It was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else," Cheney said. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."

In normal life, people would look at this event and see two decent men caught in a twist of fate. They would feel concern for the victim and sympathy for the man who fired the gun.

But we in Washington are able to rise above the normal human reaction. We have our jobs. We have our roles.

So in the days following the Cheney-Whittington accident, liberal pundits had to live up to their responsibility to manufacture a series of unsubstantiated allegations while turning the episode into a Clifford Odets-style tale of plutocrats gone wild. "Was he drunk? I mean, these are ultrarich Republicans, at a weekend, fun-time hunting," the pundit Lawrence O'Donnell wondered on MSNBC.

Meanwhile over at the blogosphere, the keyboard jockeys had a responsibility to sniff up vast conspiracies and get lost in creepy minutiae. "The 50,000 acre Armstrong Ranch is in Kenedy County. So I figure the Armstrongs probably have a lot of pull in county government. So, just a question: how thorough was the investigation of what happened?" the influential blogger Josh Marshall queried darkly. Earlier, he veered off, as he must, into picayune and skin-crawling theorizing about the path the pellets took through Whittington's body:

[snip]

Meanwhile we in the regular media have our own stereotypes to guide us. We are assigned by the Fates to turn every bad thing into Watergate, to fill the air with dark lamentations about cover-ups and appearances of impropriety and the arrogance of power. We have to follow the money. (So was born the stories of the potentially missing $7 hunting license.) We are impelled to elevate horse race over substance and write tales in which the quality of the message management takes precedence over the importance or unimportance of what's being said.

Then, rushing to the footlights, come the politicians, with their alchemist's ability to turn reality into spin. It would have been natural, and probably smart, for some politician to put politics aside and say simply that Cheney and his friend were to be sympathized with at this moment. But life is a campaign, and they are merely players.

Brook's righteous indignation is directed in the wrong place. As this of all administrations ought to know, it's not the crime that's the problem, it's the cover-up. If Cheney had gone before the cameras, in front of the hospital, and come clean with what had happened, and if the stories coming out of said hospital were consistent with each other, and if Cheney had had a normal human response (i.e. remorse and concern) instead of being only concerned with spin and being annoyed that anyone thinks he should be accountable for anything, yes, people like me would still say that the man has no business with a gun, but there wouldn't be this sharklike feeding frenzy about the whole thing.

Most Americans can't relate to the intricacies of FISA courts, and they don't have time to dig through reams of information to decide for themselves whether the Bush Administration deliberately lied to us because it wanted to go to war with Iraq. But many Americans CAN relate to a hunting accident, or to any kind of accident involving a gun, and the "If it bleeds, it leads" rule was exacerbated by Cheney's stonewalling.

Brooks' blind loyalty to this Administration is I'm sure appreciated on the right-hand side of the aisle. But there's no excuse for the way Cheney has handled this; and a carefully manufactured "interview", featuring what passes in Cheney's world for "contrition" on Fox News changes nothing.