Littwin: In Cheney's world, we don't need to know

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Now, it's clear. In Dick Cheney's America, we're all on a need-to-know basis.

And, apparently, unless we work for the NSA, we don't need to know much.

I'm just trying to figure out which is the most amazing chapter in Dick Cheney's amazing adventures.

Let's recap.

He shoots a friend - OK, a lawyer friend - while quail hunting in Texas. We'll assume it was an accident. From all reports, Scooter Libby was nowhere in the vicinity.

We have to assume - because Cheney isn't telling.

He didn't tell us for an entire day. And he apparently didn't even call the president to tell him. It reportedly took the White House - still working on its post-Katrina crisis response time - 90 minutes after the fact to learn that Cheney was, in fact, the shooter.

Either Cheney's cell phone wasn't working, the spy satellites are on the blink or Cheney really does have other priorities.

Or maybe he's still working on a statement. He could say he thought the quail would welcome his hunting party as liberators.

We can't be sure about any of this because no one will say when or if Cheney ever called the White House. It's one more thing we apparently don't need to know.

Cheney was at the White House on Monday but bravely slipped out to an undisclosed location, not to be confused with a duck blind. No word on whether he was armed. Certainly he's dangerous. But when it came to answering questions, he, uh, deferred.

There are questions for Cheney and not just whether he'd prefer to be compared to Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam.

Like, why it took so long to reveal that there was a shooting. And why the news came from the ranch owner, who alerted America by calling the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

And why it has been so hard to find out exactly who was in the hunting party. Maybe if one was married to a CIA agent, Cheney would have had someone leak the name.

What we know is that, once again, the cover-up - or in this case, the blindingly orange hunting vest - is worse than the crime.

Cheney is the first vice president since Aaron Burr to shoot someone - unfortunately for Alexander Hamilton, he wasn't sprayed by shotgun pellets - and the White House believes the best way to handle it is to have the Texas ranch owner call the local paper 18 hours later.

So much for the 24-hour news cycle. Somebody put in a call to the Pony Express.

In his daily press briefing, White House spokesman Scott McClellan tried to get us to believe that the holdup was because Cheney wanted to defer to ranch owner Katharine Armstrong, whose mother, Anne Armstrong, was once - this is for you conspiracy buffs - on the board of Halliburton.

And if Cheney wanted to defer to Armstrong, apparently the president was ready to defer to Cheney.

Katharine Armstrong's version of the story was that Harry Whittington, 78, unwittingly got in the way of Cheney as some poor quail took to the air and that Cheney basically had no choice but to plug Whittington.

Cheney adviser Mary Matalin, in the quote of the day, said of her boss, "He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the (rules.) He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do."

Except, like, you know, shoot the guy.

I don't know much about hunting, but after talking to people who do, they all said it's pretty much the shooter's responsibility not to shoot any actual people. Whittington was apparently 30 yards away. One hunter told me, "You're not gonna kill a guy at 30 yards, but you're gonna make him mad."

I tried to reach someone at the NRA. I figured I'd get something like: Guns don't shoot people; vice presidents do.

I can only guess why Cheney was out shooting quail in the first place. He's supposed to be defending the free world. I doubt it was a pre-emptive attack, but maybe he thought he was the first line of defense against bird flu.

Is this a story with wings? The story is, of course, one more account of a secretive White House that never learned how to share.

It started back when Cheney, you'll remember, wouldn't say which oil companies were helping to write administration energy policy.

It goes right up to the NSA, and the secret wiretaps George W. Bush says he's authorized to do because he's the president and we're not. Congress, meanwhile, doesn't get documents on Katrina and the White House doesn't release photos of the president with Jack Abramoff. And the list goes on.

You can see why this administration might want to keep some of the details secret. I couldn't help noticing that Cheney conveniently has an ambulance with him at all times at the same time the administration sticks seniors with a Medicare drug plan they need a lawyer to decipher.

In any case, this was already what you'd call a bad news cycle. According to The New York Times, an all-Republican House report rips the White House on Katrina. An audit tells of $438 hotel rooms, $450 tattoos and, yes, $150 spent at "Condoms to Go." Add the Abramoff photo, the report that "superiors" told Scooter Libby to leak classified information and, of course, Iraq.

And now there's shooting closer to home.

For Cheney, there was this headline waiting for him on WashingtonPost.com: "Shoots, Hides and Leaves."

littwinm@rockymountainnews.com