In one respect, the Cheney shooting accident was the best thing to happen to the Bush administration in a while because it has shifted attention, albeit temporarily, from all of its other problems.Yes, there are a gadzillion developments in a story that would have had a brief shelf life were it not been for the obdurate vice president himself.
They range from the serious:
* The police have reopened their investigation. (You can read their original report here.)
* The veep acknowledges that he had a beer for lunch before going hunting, but there were reports that the drinking continued out in the field.
* The doctors treating victim Harry Whittington apparently weren't particularly aggressive when it came to evaluating the 78-year-old's risk for coronary complications.
* Why was the White House so out of the loop?
To the silly:
* The two women accompanying Cheney and Whittington were not their wives.
* Charges that presidential spokesman Scott McClellan displayed bad taste by wearing a hunter's orange necktie to a press briefing and joking about it.
And yes, Cheney finally broke his silence, although not even Fox News's obsequious Brit Hume was buying the veep's lame excuse that he had commandeered control of news coverage because he wanted to make sure the story was "accurate." (Cheney, in fact, used the word "accurate" eight times, so you know he was lying.)
In the long term, however, the incident presents another problem:
It yet again begs the question about whether a man who has been hospitalized multiple times for multiple problems is fit to be vice president -- and more importantly, is fit to be president should George Bush be incapacitated or, heaven forbid, die. (*)
In the main, the press has tip-toed around this issue for years.
Attempts to get information on the specifics of Cheney's health, let alone a list of his medications, have been rebuffed. (Although various folks take a shot at that here and here.) It is perfectly legal for the secrecy-obsessed Cheney to keep such information close to the vest, but it does make you wonder about whether there are troubling things that he and the administration want to hide.
Well, where the press tip-toes, the marvelous Peggy Noonan wades in with hip boots.
Noonan, a former Reagan speechwriter and (usual) Bush loyalist, always calls 'em as she sees 'em, and her take on Cheney as damaged goods has nothing to do with his problematic health or hunting etiquette.
Noonan, in an excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece today, calls Cheney the administration's "hate magnet" and makes a plausible case for easing him into early retirement.
An excerpt:
[W]hat are they thinking that they're not saying? Here's a hunch, based not on any inside knowledge but only on what I know of people who practice politics, and those who practice it within the Bush White House.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.
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