The Cheney Hunting Non-Story

Unbelievable how insane the White House press corps is behaving after Vice President Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter while after quail earlier this week. "Why weren't we notified for 18 hours?" they ask. No, make that, they DEMAND to know. The idea that Cheney somehow had an obligation to notify the national news media right away is just stupid. This was a hunting accident. A private affair. Get over it.

For what it's worth, the owner of the ranch that Cheney had been hunting on told the Vice President that she was going to go ahead and call the local newspaper, to which he said, "fine," and that was that. But the national press corps is still outraged that they didn't get the scoop. Where's my violin? Also, according to the V.P., the police told him on the phone that they'd be out at 10am the next morning (the accident happened at 5:30pm) and he reportedly told them, "make it 8". So where's the big conspiracy?

Mona Charen at Townhall.com does a much better job at lambasting the press in this situation than I could. Check out her column; it's a riot.

Fox News's Brit Hume conducted an interview with the Vice President about the incident, and Fox has it on their website. The two parts I watched were about 5 minutes each and worth the time to get Cheney's side of the story, straight from the horse's mouth. Hume guides the Vice President through the minute details of the incident, did a nice job.

Contrast that with John Gibson's later interview on Fox of former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe on the subject. McAuliffe was livid and couldn't stop himself from lobbing all kinds of really conspiratorial-sounding rhetoric out there. He admitted he hadn't even heard the interview with Cheney, yet suggested all kinds of things, such as the possibility that the V.P. had been drunk when the incident occurred, and that it was in fact some sort of cover-up that he'd waited so long to report it to the media.

I have never hunted birds, but I used to shoot skeet and trap. One thing I remember from that experience was that different kinds of birds fly in different kinds of patterns. I remember that quail start from the ground and go up, unlike others which might just fly across your field of view, higher up in the sky. Mr. Cheney said that he and a fellow hunter had separated from Mr. Whittington, who had gone over toward a quail he had downed. At one point Cheney heard/saw some quail off to his right flying up, turned quickly and pulled his shotgun trigger, seeing Whittington getting hit and falling as he did. Mr. Cheney said during the interview that he cannot get that image (of Whittington falling) out of his head, as we would expect a reasonable, moral hunter to feel.

And today, the man who was shot, Harry Whittington, met with the press and explained HIS side of everything. He was fairly eloquent and at one point actually apologized to the Cheney family for having caused so much aggravation.

So someone please tell me where is the story, here? The story is actually just one more obvious example of hateful Democrats overreacting to a potentially negative story about the White House, trying to drum it up to generate as much negativity as possible. I'll bet they're so proud of their accomplishments.