Swiftboating Harry Whittington

With friends like Dick Cheney, who needs enemies? Here are the things Dick Cheney has not done:

1) He has not appeared before the camera expressing regret for shooting his friend; and

2) He has participated in, or at least not attempted to squelch, the swiftboating of said friend, allowing the "blame the victim" tactic to proceed.

The story of who knew what when continues to change on a minute-by-minute basis, and now it seems that either Bush knew on Saturday night or he didn't. The problem here is that if he didn't know that his vice-president had shot a man, why not? And does this prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bush really IS just the sock puppet, and Cheney is actually running the country? And if Bush is just a sock puppet, what does that do to the Cult of Bush Worship?

When the best scenario is that the president is Charlie McCarthy to Cheney's Edgar Bergen, things are at a sorry pass indeed.

MoDo speaks:

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.

Scott McClellan told the White House press corps that Katharine Armstrong, a lobbyist with government ties who owns the Texas ranch (and whose mother, Anne, was on the Halliburton board that hired Mr. Cheney as C.E.O.), "pointed out that the protocol was not followed by Mr. Whittington when it came to notifying the others that he was there."

As the story of the weekend's bizarre hunting accident is wrenched out of the White House, the picture isn't pretty: With American soldiers dying in Iraq, Five-Deferment Dick "I Had Other Priorities in the 60's Than Military Service" Cheney gets his macho kicks gunning down little birds and the occasional old man while W. rides his bike, blissfully oblivious to any collateral damage. Shouldn't these guys work on weekends until we figure out how to fix Iraq, New Orleans, Medicare and gas prices?

This version of "The Most Dangerous Game" neatly follows the four-step Bush-Cheney cycle:

Step 1: Set out to pick off what you think is an easy target, like quail this time or pen-raised and netted pheasant in the past, or a certain sanction-caged Iraqi dictator.

Step 2: In the corrupt company of lobbyist-contractor friends, botch things up. Ignore the peril at hand — as with, oh, Osama at Tora Bora, or Katrina, or the Iraq occupation — and with steely resolve, indulge your raging incompetence. (Oops.)

Step 3: Stonewall. Resist giving Congress information about 9/11 or Katrina; don't tell the public how you're tapping phones at home, setting up gulags abroad and making war and energy policy in secret. Why give the taxpayers, who are ponying up for these weekend hunting trips, the extraordinary news that Vice shot his hunting companion in the face and chest? Scott McClellan knew before yesterday's White House briefing at noon that Mr. Whittington was worse, but did not tell the reporters. He left that to Corpus Christi doctors, who spun the heart attack as "an inflammatory response to a metallic foreign BB."

Step 4: Admit no mistakes. Express sympathy. Blame the victim without leaving fingerprints by outsourcing the smear to the private sector.

As much as the White House wants this story to go away, it won't. The press may leave going to war on a lie alone. It may leave outing a CIA agent under nonofficial cover investigating weapons of mass destruction in and out of Iran alone. It may leave how much of a connection there was between Jack Abramoff and the Bush White House alone. But while this shooting doesn't involve a dead girl or a live boy, it has enough CSI television factor that the press is going to dig and dig and dig until it gets answers.

This White House is accustomed to being able to stonewall the press until the press gives up -- which given the nature of the mainstream press these days, is about five minutes. But when blood and guns are involved, the press smells a month of Rita Cosby shows, and they are not going to give up so easily.

It would be interesting if with all the crimes, all the corruption, and all the atrocities in which this Administration has been wallowing for the last five years, and with all the reputation as a highly-disciplined operation this White House is, if it were the cover-up of an episode of the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight which brought it down.

I, however, am not holding my breath. There are still those photos of Chris Matthews that I think the White House has.