Lyndon Johnson and Dick Cheney

[Tim Gratz]

I do agree with you that power can be a very corrupting influence on a person.

I do not understand the analogy to McGovern and the Eagleton incident.

[Christopher T. George]

Hi again Tim

You say, "And I still do not understand what you think Cheney did wrong other than mistaking his friend for a quail."

Well, that's an amusing statement. But. . .

Should Cheney have had a gun in his hands at all? Here is a guy who himself has a well-established history of heart problems. What if he had a heart attack and gun went off in his hands as he collapsed? Was he drunk when this happened? He said he had only had one beer. But had he in fact drunk much more? That should be investigated. He shot somebody who was correctly dressed in orange while looking into the sun? That sounds like negligence to me, at the very least.

The 18-hour delay in reporting the incident is highly suspicious. The public has a right to know anything that has a bearing on the health and well-being of its top public officials. The fact that Cheney was remiss in not even informing the President of the incident until some time after it occurred is alarming and wrong. The whole episode raises a boatload of character questions about Richard B. Cheney quite apart from politics.

Chris

Edited February 18, 2006 by Christopher T. George

[Nancy Eldreth]

Going back into histroy.

All of the strange accidents to me Dick Cheney doing this is just one more to add to the records.

if his victum knew something over heard something and or was either being intimadated to keep

silent and or was being planned to be a totalled.

Yes, Cheney certainly did brake a lot of laws just to execute a bird which ended up as a hunting

accident.

Past the list is large,

from Senator Tower going down in a plane to many in past like LHO, David Ferrie, Johnny Roselli,

Charles Nicolletti, Sam Giaciana and list going on and on. What is it with Jim Marrs pointed out

list of 230 or so people on question to make goine for silent purposes to keep the truth from coming

out. I know one who found a military paper and to me he is another one on the list to silent and that was only month ago dead after complications from being rammed into a tree. So, no they still need to keep

the truth from coming out.

Now, why would Dick Cheney have to do such a thing? Well, maybe the certain picked on group told

Dick Cheney and Bush to forget it we had it with your slaughter list? Gee, NO MORE murders if that is the

case. These guys are now on their own. Senate would be on this fast now because they do

watch Bush on even a phone call he gets info on. Certain ones want to impeach Bush because of misuse

of a system which he seems to violate laws in it. Several weeks ago the men that were imprisioned

because of attack on USS Cole were able to escapte from prison. This all adds up, who let those men

out or able to escape. Why a group of them to escape? Has to be upper channels in our own government to do that to help those men to escape?

Yes, I do link Bush with many crimes that have happened and he is involved with them in some way and or somehow. I know this is bold but this is what I do believe.

Why is it not questioned on all the thnigs that Bush Jr.? HE SHOULD BE and CHENEY AND HIS GROUP IS NO EXCEPTION TO THIS EITHER.

The democrates try hard to do this and each time somehow and in someway Bush's get out of it and this

is the rule for a long time into our histroy. They just do manage to cover up and turn over and keep from

letting the US citizens the real truth.

[Christopher T. George]

I do agree with you that power can be a very corrupting influence on a person.

I do not understand the analogy to McGovern and the Eagleton incident.

Hi again Tim

To be crass about it: if a man is judged by the voting public to be incompetent to be Vice President because he has had wires attached to his head, what about a man who shoots another man in the face with birdshot, causing the man to subsequently have a heart attack, and uses, as everyone admits, poor judgement in being slow at reporting the incident?

Chris

[Nancy Eldreth]

Correction Chris,

Cheney was not slow in reporting in the accident that was right away. That report would have been

done by calling for help for the victum, which Cheney had no other choice there. Maybe the report was not as complete as it should have been by game warden, another point.

What Cheney was slow at was telling the public (which HE NEVER DID DO) and to be frank about it which most agree I don't think he would have EVER told the public if he could have gotten away with it. Another slide under the rug if possible. Glad the owner of the ranch told the public. This is another neglet that Cheney was wrong on NOT doing.

[Christopher T. George]

Correction Chris,

Cheney was not slow in reporting in the accident that was right away. That report would have been

done by calling for help for the victum, which Cheney had no other choice there. Maybe the report was not as complete as it should have been by game warden, another point.

What Cheney was slow at was telling the public (which HE NEVER DID DO) and to be frank about it which most agree I don't think he would have EVER told the public if he could have gotten away with it. Another slide under the rug if possible. Glad the owner of the ranch told the public. This is another neglet that Cheney was wrong on NOT doing.

Hello Nancy et al.

Nancy, are you correct that the accident was reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife, as you say, "right away"? If you look on the "Smoking Gun" website, the copy of the official accident report states that the accident took place at 5:30 pm on February 11 BUT another page of the same report shows that the accident report was filed by the game warden two days later, on February 13.

A third page shows that the Kenedy County Sheriff's Office press release, surprisingly appears to be undated. This press release, written somewhat confusedly, tells us a sheriff's officer arrived at the ranch and that people on the gate had no information on the incident "due to a lack of communication" but that "Sheriff Salinas was informed shortly after the incident by Secret Service Agents by phone" (presumably despatching the Kenedy County Officer to the ranch). The sheriff's department, we learn, "is fully satisfied that this was no more than a hunting accident." Perhaps there had to be a wait to speak to Mr. Whittington to get his version of the event, as the press release appears to imply when it says, "Mr. Whittington's interview collaborated Vice President Cheney's statement."

Even so, if as the sheriff's office press release states, the sheriff did know of the accident "shortly after the incident" why was the accident report by the game warden signed two days after the accident and not the same day, or the next day (February 12). Anybody else have an idea if that is regular procedure, for such a delay to occur in filing a report on a hunting accident? Does the local police authority have to sign off on the incident and satisfy themselves that it indeed was an accident before the game warden gets involved?

Best regards

Chris George

Edited February 19, 2006 by Christopher T. George

[Tim Carroll]

Guns don't hurt people, vice-presidents do.

http://www.toonedin.com/cheney.html

[Ron Ecker]

There is now reason to believe that Bush had foreknowledge of Cheney's shooting of Whittington.

When the first report reached the White House, Laura was reading Bush's favorite goat story to him. Andrew Card came into the room and whispered in Bush's ear, "Harry Whittington is under attack."

Bush just sat there and did nothing for seven minutes while Laura finished reading the story.

[Mark Stapleton]

There is now reason to believe that Bush had foreknowledge of Cheney's shooting of Whittington.

When the first report reached the White House, Laura was reading Bush's favorite goat story to him. Andrew Card came into the room and whispered in Bush's ear, "Harry Whittington is under attack."

Bush just sat there and did nothing for seven minutes while Laura finished reading the story.

[Nancy Eldreth]

Ron,

Indeed thanks for the laugh. I just thought of 9/11 and Bush reading to the kids while we

were under attack and it didn't even seem to faze him one bit.

Thank you Chris,

That is most informative and thank you for your answer / question. Yeah.

It could be that they do have to wait until they do get more information from Cheney

friend before they do any actions, you are right.

But Sitll, one wonders if this will get reviewed by Senate the way it should. Bush is one

to give out a full answer to the media well in advance even if the shoe does not fit.

[Tim Gratz]

Have you ever heard of Executive Ordedr 12392?

Dick Cheney fans will no doubt enjoy this article from National Review:

http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200602160841.asp

Edited February 22, 2006 by Tim Gratz

[John Simkin]

This is a peceptive article about Dick Cheney in the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Colum...1714273,00.html

Last week, millions of people turned on their TV sets to hear words of regret they never imagined anyone from the Bush administration would utter. "Ultimately," said Dick Cheney, "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger."

In fairness, it was always going to be tough for the vice-president to pin his accidental shooting of a hunting buddy on anyone else (although I wouldn't rule out whispers of a quail insurgency in the coming days). Yet Cheney's mea culpa made a shocking impact against the backdrop of a political climate - on both sides of the Atlantic - where the concept of "taking responsibility" has been debased beyond all recognition.

Now some of the laughter has subsided, and it turns out there isn't going to be an immediate funeral, the post mortem is in full swing. In yesterday's International Herald Tribune, Mary Matalin, Cheney's longtime troubleshooter and a mastermind intimately involved in the way in which the shooting story was made public, explained that the first press release on the matter had been scrapped on the basis that "a bad statement is worse than no statement". If only she had managed to hold her nerve with that approach.

The general consensus seems to be that the real damage was done by the vice-president not speaking out sooner, but having endured several airings of his still perma-looped interview with Fox News, I can't help feeling that that verdict is misplaced. What are the more pervasive criticisms that attach themselves to Cheney? Are they allegations of secrecy? Obsessive news management? I am not sure those things strike a deep chord with what we might unsatisfactorily refer to as average Americans. But the image of Cheney as a rich man, the ultimate corporate crony who understands nothing of life's harsher realities: this has been the one that has defined him ever since he gave up his post running Halliburton to be George Bush's number two. And it is this characterisation which is shored up by that ghastly, dolorous news interview, where the overriding sense is of a cossetted creature who has just been forced to confront possible death and personal responsibility for the very first time; a man who has hitherto had the luxury of conceiving of both in abstract, theoretical terms, and has suddenly had their true meaning revealed to him in the most personal of ways.

Not for the first time when contemplating Mr Cheney, I found myself put powerfully in mind of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. In that play, that savage indictment of wartime profiteering, Miller's anti-hero is Joe Keller, a businessman who knowingly dispatches defective airplane parts to the very front on which his son is stationed. Though his son never flies the same model of plane, the audience discovers that he was driven to undertake a suicidal mission by the deaths of his colleagues who did and never came back, and by the discovery that back home his father has shifted all blame for the situation on to his partner. Ultimately, Joe Keller's realisation is that his guilt is inescapable, that his public responsiblities are indivisible from his personal ones.

"Sure, he was my son," runs his devastating final line. "But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were."

Even without the Halliburton profiteering analogies, comparisons between the vice-president and Miller's capitalist-brought-low are enormously seductive. Half close your ears during Cheney's interview, and you could almost fancy you were hearing the first faltering admissions of responsibility for the quagmire the Bush administration's Iraq adventure has long been. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger ... " "The image ... is something I will never be able to get out of my head." "You can't blame anybody else." Who knows, had the exclusive been granted to anyone other than Rupert Murdoch's ineffably supine Fox News, perhaps the interviewer might have asked how the feeling compared with the first US casualty in Iraq, or the 1,000th, or the 10,000th Iraqi civilian death.

But we didn't get the "they were all my hunting buddies" speech, and as such Cheney's appearance served to do nothing so much as throw the administration's silence on all other matters of possible regret into the sharpest relief. The focus remained determinedly on a single lawyer, who took some buckshot in the face, and the profound agonies this had caused Mr Cheney. And when such a pose is struck by a man who has famously not simply never attended the funeral of a single US soldier killed in Iraq, but who fought tooth and nail to prevent even photographs of the military coffins being shipped back from the warzone, one conclusion is inescapable. This is a man who places his narrow responsibility to his circle of friends far above his wider responsibility to the American people.

One particularly memorable moment in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 comes when the documentary maker asks various senators who voted for the war whether any of their sons are in the military. It's classic Moore editing, no doubt, but the look on all their faces as they hurry flustered away from from the camera is faintly appalled."Good God, no!" they seem to say. "Not our sons."

As for the Bush administration's Joe Keller, he has returned to seclusion in his bunker, a more fascinating paradox than ever. The warmonger who is torn apart by a quail-hunting mishap, the parent of a lesbian who refuses to condemn his party's opposition to gay marriage ... Yes, dramatists in search of a character - dramatists who seek to filter wider social issues through the prism of the personal - could do a lot worse than start with Mr Cheney.

[Tim Gratz]

I am not sure if any pundit (or late night comedian) has pointed out that when the Vice President goes hunting there may in fact be danger for fellow hunters but the quail are probably safe.