Monday, February 13, 2006
Dick Cheney's quail-hunting story full of holes.
Well, here's someone (via ThinkProgress) who knows how to ask the right questions.
HERE'S ANOTHER WEIRD INCONSISTENCY: Hanging out on the stationary bike down at the gym over lunch, and watching/listening to the Scott McClellan press gaggle, and something very odd happened. The current talking point is that shooting victim Harry Whittington came up quietly behind Cheney's group and didn't properly announce his presence, which makes it Whittington's fault.
This is, at best, a lame argument since one would think that, if you're out with a group of hunters, you should know where they are at all times and, if you don't, you simply don't shoot. If Whittington was a member of Cheney's hunting party, what the hell was Cheney doing firing without having a good idea where Whittington was at the time? But that's not the oddity.
At one point (and I'm doing this strictly from memory), McClellan described Whittington's sudden arrival as if it was a complete surprise; as if Cheney would have had no reason to even know Whittington was even in the area. Based on the way McClellan phrased it, the impression I got was that someone listening to his explanation would have concluded that Whittington was somehow part of a totally different group of which Cheney had no knowledge whatsoever. But that doesn't make any sense as McClellan continually referred to Whittington as a "member of the vice-president's hunting party."
Something here just doesn't make sense.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
There's quite a bit of information at the Talking Points Memo blog. Read down through several of the posts, because he asks for email from hunters to comment on the incident.
The general consensus is that unless the victim is extremely self-destructive, when you shoot someone it's your fault. Period.
There's also something questionable about the fact that the White House left it to Katharine Armstrong, whose property it was, to deal with the press, as though the White House crowd didn't want to touch it, and left her to deal with it to the media.
Put on your tinfoil hat for a moment and consider this. Whittington was needling Cheney about his actions as VP or how the Bush admin has conducted itself. This provoked Cheney into a rage and he shot him. Now it's being covered up and passed off as an accident.
And here's a really obvious inconsistency in how this whole thing was handled -
Suppose instead that it had been Whittington who shot Cheney in the head.
Do you think in that case it would have been up to the hostess to deal with the media?
Tonight the Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time-there-were-quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be the 78 year old man. Even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists-he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face.
~ Rob Corddry
Post a Comment