Day: February 12, 2006

Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter

Jon Ponder

So not making this up:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was “alert and doing fine” in a Corpus Christi hospital Sunday after he was shot by Cheney on a ranch in south Texas, said Katharine Armstrong, the property’s owner.

He was in stable condition Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System in Corpus Christi.

Armstrong in an interview with The Associated Press said Whittington, 78, was mostly injured on his right side, with the pellets hitting his cheek, neck and chest during the incident which occurred late afternoon on Saturday.

She said emergency personnel traveling with Cheney tended to Whittington until the ambulance arrived.

Cheney’s spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said the vice president met with Whittington and his wife at the hospital on Sunday. Cheney “was pleased to see that he’s doing fine and in good spirits,” she said.

New Orleans — And Even Brown? — Tell the Truth About Katrina

Trish

Gotta love the people of New Orleans as they put on Mardis Gras.

Brown: “Had there been a report coming out . . . that said, ‘Yes, we’ve confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee,’ then everybody would have jumped all over that

This year’s parade theme was C’est Levee, a pun on the French expression c’est la vie , or that’s life.

Floats and props built for the Saturday evening parade in the French Quarter included hand-pulled carts elaborately decorated with blue tarps, fake broken levees, cardboard travel trailers and effigies of Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D).

One display asked France to buy Louisiana back, suggesting that the state might get better treatment from the French than it has from the U.S. government.

Indeed. As PR editor Jon notes, Bush Etc. didn’t give a crap about the people of New Orleans or the Gulf Coast, except for losing one day of vacation.

And even I had to hand it to Brownie the other day. He did a heckuva job at nailing the feeling at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.

“Had there been a report coming out . . . that said, ‘Yes, we’ve confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee,’ then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could,” Brown said.

But how do you exploit the weather for political gain? True, Bush did use it as a convenient exit strategy to get away from a summer of press coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s fruitless attempts to get him to acknowledge her. But let’s face it, a hurricane doesn’t offer the “talkin’ tough” and fanning-the-flames-of-fear opportunities of a terror attack.

Meanwhile, New Orleans makes the best of it.

The Mid-City parade, scheduled for Feb. 26, will have floats called “New Orleans Culture” — that’s culture as in mold — and “I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was gone,” a bitter twist on the line from Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

List of Scooter Libby’s “Superiors” is Pretty Short

Trish

Columnist Cragg Hines notes the list of people who might have instructed Scooter Libby to tell members of the press that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent is pretty small.

Libby didn’t have that many “superiors.” Bush, Cheney and, at least organizationally, White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

As emerged in news reports, Libby told a grand jury that “superiors” told him to leak to reporters in June and July 2003 information about Iraq’s weapons capability. Let’s examine this megawatt info…

Libby didn’t have that many “superiors.” Bush, Cheney and, at least organizationally, White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

Or could there be some higher, metaphysical “superiors” being suggested, which would be interesting jurisprudentially if not strategically (unless there’s to be a sudden shift to an insanity plea)?

Hines adds that Bush keeps waffling on his response to the wrongdoing. My own personal theory is that Bush talked tough early on about firing people because he never thought he, Rove, and Cheney would be found out.

In the wake of his indictment, Libby resigned. But Bush’s deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, who remains under investigation by Fitzgerald, has been shown to have leaked. He’s still firmly ensconced in the White House.

That, in part at least, is because Bush last summer moved the goal posts for what it takes to get the heave-ho.

“If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration,” Bush said.

As I’ve noted before, that’s a lousy benchmark for someone who, as Bush did repeatedly in the 2000 campaign, swore he would uphold the “honor and dignity” of the White House.

Under Bush’s sliding standard of leaking as a firing offense, as long as Rove remains unindicted, he apparently can hang around.

Now we have Libby reaching for Cheney’s throat — at least as a pretrial tactic.

My problem is that I don’t believe that even if Bush fired Rove publicly that he would quit taking orders from him privately. Bush, who isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, needs Rove behind the scenes to think of…stuff. He’ll find a way to keep him on a payroll somewhere, and keep pulling the strings in the White House.

Was ‘Bubble Boy’ a Hoax?

Jon Ponder

At hearings into the Hurricane Katrina disaster by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday, Chairman Susan Collins and Ranking Member Joe Lieberman revealed that they had received conflicting testimony about what President Bush and other top officials knew about the extent of the damage after the storm hit New Orleans last summer.

The truth is, President Bush was neither clueless or misinformed. He just didn’t give a damn.

Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29, 2005, at 7 a.m. For the next 48 hours, President Bush stuck to his schedule, relaxing at his vacation home in Texas and touring Arizona and California on Air Force One to appear at events that were political as well as official. The disaster escalated over the next two days almost entirely because federal help never came.

The Bush Administration’s response in the critical first 48 hours after landfall was a fiasco. By 72 hours into the disaster, Team Bush was facing a Category 5 political crisis. No presidential administration in memory had performed so poorly. They were drawing fire from their supporters — and even from their usually reliable stooges in the news media.

Gaming it out, Bush and his handlers realized that if they did not take corrective action immediately, the criticism could pave the way to nasty congressional hearings, at best, and criminal charges of official negligence, and worse.

Something had to be done. So they did what they do best: They created a new reality — a quasi-fictional version of events in which Bush and his lackeys were simply confused and misinformed, not apathetic about the loss of the last Democratic bastion in the South — and inserted it retrospectively into the narrative of the storm’s first 48 hours.

Using carefully coordinated statements in the media, both in public and anonymously sourced, Bush and his senior officials created a picture in the public mind of a president so out of touch with the country that he was simply unaware of the severity of the situation on the ground in New Orleans.

The created “Bubble Boy,” a caricature of President Bush who would appease public anger by excusing his negligence by tying it to his infamous lack of curiosity and aversion to watching the news. The strategy called for four parallel counter-attacks:

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