All Apologies
It now emerges that Vice President Dick Cheney’s first words to shooting victim Harry Whittington were, “Harry, I had no idea you were there.”
The Vice President, at long last, spoke publicly about last weekend’s hunting accident in an interview on FOX News. Despite the regrets he offered up, there was less a sense of mea culpa and more a sense of self-pity. Though the words he spoke professed sorrow and remorse over the incident, his contrite words lacked sincerity, and it was clear to the viewer that the interview was transparently orchestrated to conjure up an image of a less callous Vice President and to provide some defense for his actions last weekend.
Dissecting his initial statement, we see none of the self-proclaimed contrition Mr. Cheney emotionlessly intoned during his interview with Brit Hume. Nor do we see any trace of his claim that he accepts responsibility for the accident. Instead his immediate reaction appears to have been to blame the victim and deflect responsibility for the incident from himself. In the majority of cases, a person who has just accidentally shot their friend can be expected to react in one of two ways: either by screaming out a question of concern (“Are you okay?”) or expressing some remorse (“I’m sorry”). That his first statement was filled with neither concern nor penitence but rather a carefully worded phrase that absolves him of any liability of the shooting should be, at the least, disconcerting.
Equally troubling was the venue in which Mr. Cheney chose to break his silence following the incident. Rather than holding a traditional press conference where the Washington press corps would have the opportunity question him, or releasing the details of the incident to someone in the press office so they at least could deliver the news, Mr. Cheney chose to speak on the subject in a controlled interview with Brit Hume on the FOX News channel. In what amounted to a play acted out on FOX News, Mr. Hume and company were sympathetic to Mr. Cheney, lobbing him softball “questions” that felt to the viewer more akin to rehearsed lines of dialogue than any real tête-à-tête.
Aside from the obvious reasons this was a poor choice from the public’s perspective – FOX News is notoriously partisan in its reporting one interviewer can never be as comprehensive in his line of questioning than a room full of fifty reporters from all regions of the country and – the interviewer himself was clearly not up to the task of asking any tough questions or, for that matter, any relevant questions. Mr. Hume asked Mr. Cheney to walk him through the events – it should be noted that Mr.Cheney stumbled a few times when recollecting the incident, providing a sketchy account of whether or not he was completely unaware as to Mr. Whittington’s presence – and interrupted at one point to ask if Mr. Cheney had missed the bird he was aiming for. Such a query is a sign of a feeble mind, a callous person, or a conservative lackey attempting to provide his hero a moment in which to appear compassionate, none of which serve the best interests of the people. Mr. Cheney’s remark that he felt a private citizen who possessed a “knowledge of hunting” was the best person to disseminate the news, by leaking it to the local newspaper in a small Texas town is laughable, and was not challenged in the least by Mr. Hume. The public deserves a forum in which Mr. Cheney answers questions, not a carefully orchestrated interview full of scripted questions and prepared remarks. But such a production is to be expected from the administration that stages town hall meetings.
On every level of this farce (should Mr. Whittington’s condition worsen, the affair will be downgraded to “tragedy”) the Vice President acted as if above the law. This arrogance runs down to some of the more minor adjacent issues to the main story, such as the stamp for hunting quail. Mr. Cheney’s spokespeople later claimed that the Vice President was unaware of the necessity of a specific quail stamp to go along with his hunting license and later sent a check for $7 to the appropriate authorities. Offering to pay the license fee after the government has discovered you don’t have one is somewhat akin to offering to pay a quarter into the meter when the traffic cops write you a ticket. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law we, as private citizens, are often told. The issue here is greater than the license; it is the belief that Mr. Cheney holds that he is above the law. It’s a repellant quality displayed by many in the current administration, but none more so than Mr. Cheney himself.
It is disheartening that our Vice President should act in so cowardly a manner, but unfortunately, this has become Mr. Cheney’s modus operandi during his current tenure within the executive branch of federal government. Almost more detestable are those members of the fourth estate who would make excuses for Mr. Cheney’s actions and condemn those who would attempt to hold Mr. Cheney accountable. Those staunch patriots over at FOX News who allowed the Vice President what amounted to a plea for sympathy for himself, rather than the victim, were surpassed in their illogical defense of the Vice President only by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Mr. Brooks chants a similar refrain to those on the far right who are attempting to spin this story from the wrongdoing of a sitting Vice President and a subsequent cover-up, into a simple hunting accident that has been blown out of proportion. But the nation should find the bypassing of the regular avenues by which information about the government and its players flows down to the people distressing, to say the least. In that case, why would the Vice President bother keeping a press office – surely they are not experts on all matters that they may be required to speak on. But they are the point of communication between the public and their government.
Mr. Brooks misses the point entirely. This administration has proven time and again that it prefers to act without the public’s knowledge of what it is doing in matters large and small. It treats the information that it releases to the public with the type of frugality that Ray Bradbury feared in Fahrenheit 451. Under this administration, we have continually moved further away from an open government, from the democracy our forefathers envisioned, and closer to a closed totalitarian state where even basic information is guarded as though it were a state secret. President Bush was wrong when he as much as stated that the terrorists will win in our great battle of Democracy versus Dictatorships now that the media has exposed the existence of his illegal wiretapping program. We can’t lose what we’ve already surrendered.
On February 17, 2006, Lindsey Jacobellis, a 20-year-old snowboardcross competitor finished with a silver medal after blowing a huge lead due to her showboating. Following her gaffe at the Olympics, Ms. Jacobellis immediately took questions and responsibility for what she did. She didn’t shy away from the media glare, eager to demonize her; rather, she answered the questions with grace and maturity that belied both her youth and lack of experience in the spotlight. In short, she showed more maturity and less cowardice than the Vice President did. When teenage snowboarders are more responsible than our elected officials, we should worry about the state of our government.