This is my first and last post on the Cheney Shooting Incident (CSI for short). Just a few random thoughts on the subject...

• Although it is my personal opinion that hunting trips shouldn't involve alcohol at any time, if the timeline is correct, I find it difficult to believe that a beer with lunch translates to a hazardous situation at 5:30pm.

• I do, however, find it odd that Cheney did not speak to the police until (at best) 14 hours after the shooting incident. If you're a naturally suspicious person and/or just don't like Cheney (like me), that issue alone is enough to make you speculate why he wouldn't speak to the police for so long. Perhaps it was because he was getting Whittington to the hospital and was concerned to see that everything was ok. Perhaps he was falling down drunk and they needed to sober him up before the police could come in. Perhaps it is any of the countless points in between those spectrums... If the police had been involved in a more timely fashion, the guesswork would be unnecessary.

• The failure to get the word out on this and get ahead of it to control the message was laughable and very uncharacteristic. It seems to me that the Republican Noise Machine (RNM) has been off its game quite a bit since the Prez's numbers went into the toilet. Further weird is the fact that he waited until four days after the shooting to even speak about it and then did it through a one-on-one interview with Fox News. If you had any doubt as to Fox's bias, this should have answered them.

Now let me just say that I find many, many things about this accidental shooting (and I DO think it was accidental and I doubt that alcohol played a part) so totally representative of Cheney and the Bush administration. It's that "fuck you" kind of mentality that says that they're just going to do what they're going to do and do it their way and if you don't like it, you can just go jump off a bridge. In the case of the shooting incident, probably not so important. But when you're declassifying documents and crafting energy policy in secrecy and refusing to answer questions etc. and so forth and so on, it gets old and you start to see a lot of representative connections between what you don't like generally and the incident particularly.

So if you wonder why the left has been harping on this, that's my explanation. I think it's time to move on from it, however. Enough.

posted by RenaRF at 9:36 PM 2 comments