The Chronicle‘s crack D.C. bureau was on the Cheney case this weekend!
Michael Hedges and Bennett Roth inform us that (shockingly!) Democrats have criticized Cheney’s hunting in the past.
Yes, it took two D.C. bureau reporters to come up with this:
But overshadowed by the controversy about his accidental shooting of a fellow hunter Feb. 11 was the fact that Cheney’s private-life passion already had brought him a variety of criticisms and served as a symbol for his aversion to the public eye.
His 2004 hunt with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for instance, was seen as a possible conflict of interest. Also, animal-rights advocates said one of his 2003 outings was more slaughter than sport.
Cheney’s refusal to share details of his hunting trips or other travel — his closed-door meetings on energy policy and other issues led to his secretive image — has prompted criticism from Democrats who say he should be more accountable to voters.
“The American public has a right to know where their elected officials travel while they are in office, and whether taxpayer dollars are being used or outside interests have paid for travel,” eight Democratic lawmakers wrote to Cheney in December.
The amount of column space devoted to this non-story blows the mind.
But wait — it gets better! There’s this dispatch from the D.C. bureau’s Julie Mason:
It was a moment made for anti-macho pink.
For his relatively emotional mea culpa on Fox News last week, Vice President Dick Cheney confounded fashion expectations and donned a soft-pink necktie.
That’s right — Dick Cheney, often depicted by critics as the Darth Vader of the Bush administration.
With U.S. involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and weighty debates at home about eavesdropping, high fuel prices and tax cuts, the single sartorial shift earned the vice president and his rosy necktie a lengthy story in the Washington Post. It puzzled over his choice and compared it to pigtails on a rapper.
It’s well past time to shutter the D.C. bureau, and boost the Chronicle‘s metro/state reporting and editing. Especially the editing.
The Chronicle‘s reader representative may be angling for a D.C. bureau appointment, if this week’s apologia for the bad decisions of Chronicle executive editors is any indication. A favorite theme of Campbell’s of late is to parrot the Editorial LiveJournalist line that the paper is neither liberal nor conservative by sharing with readers some of the email he gets from an idiot on the left AND an idiot on the left (seemingly insinuating that all Chron readers are idiots — and he may be right, but in defense of the readers, the Chron is the only English-language metro daily). Here’s his defense of what many Americans think has been press overkill on the Cheney hunting incident:
Cheney’s failure to immediately report the incident represents a continuing pattern of secrecy by the Bush administration, and thus reason for the media to cry foul — again. In that regard, Cheney was his own worst enemy and did more to feed the media frenzy than quell it.
Leave it to the Chronicle‘s reader representative actually to misstate the facts of this story that the media have been obsessing over nonstop for a week. Cheney did report the incident immediately, as the timeline in USA Today makes clear.
6:30 p.m.: Cheney accidentally shoots fellow hunter Harry Whittington while aiming for a bird. Secret Service agents and medical personnel with Cheney tend to wounds on Whittington’s face, neck and chest.
7:20 p.m.: An ambulance takes Whittington to a Christus Spohn Hospital Kleburg.
7:30 p.m.: White House chief of staff Andy Card tells President Bush there was an accident, but Card is unaware Cheney was involved.
7:50 p.m.: The head of the Secret Service office in McAllen, Texas, calls the Kenedy County sheriff to report the accident. The sheriff asks to speak to Cheney, and they schedule an interview for 9 a.m. Sunday. At the White House, presidential aide Karl Rove tells Bush that Cheney was the shooter, after talking to ranch owner Katharine Armstrong.
[snip]
9:15 p.m.: Whittington is flown to Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial and is treated in the intensive care unit.
SUNDAY, FEB. 12
6 a.m.: White House press secretary Scott McClellan is awakened by a phone call from the White House situation room, informing him Cheney was the shooter. McClellan contacts the vice president’s office and urges that the information be made public quickly.
9 a.m.: Kenedy County sheriff’s deputies interview Cheney. Armstrong begins calling a reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and leaving messages. Armstrong says she told Cheney she wanted to tell the local paper what happened, and he agreed.
So, Campbell’s statement that Cheney failed to report the incident immediately is simply incorrect.
What Campbell apparently means — but did not write — is that he thinks Cheney’s office should have immediately issued a press release to the D.C. media, instead of handling the matter as it did. Charles Krauthammer has some sympathy for that perspective, but I tend towards a much different view personally.
In any case, Campbell needs to use language more carefully and get facts right.
At some point, I was going to make fun of the fact that the Chronicle chose to interview a fifth-grader on his thoughts about the American presidency. That was before reading the combined efforts of Bennett Roth, Michael Hedges, Julie Mason, and James Campbell on the Cheney hunting accident. Frankly, the fifth-grader was much more compelling.
