Tuesday, February 14, 2006

"You just stand there lookin' cute...."

Sorry, that's been going through my head. It's about all there is to say.

This incident (you know exactly what I'm talking about without links, right?) doesn't change my view of Cheney, the administration, guns, gun laws, hunting, the media, etc.... it's pretty much consistent with what I already thought about most of these things and one incident is a pretty small piece of data in these patterns. Note it and move on. To be honest, I suspect the same thing is true of most people: I would love to hear from or about anyone whose mind was changed about anything due to this incident. Comments are open....

I think the furor over the "delay" is stupid. If Cheney had shot a cabinet secretary, a Supreme Court Justice, a member of Congress, or if he'd outright killed the guy, or if they'd been having a serious disagreement immediately before, then I could see immediate disclosure as a significant obligation. But this was an accidental injury of uncertain magnitude to a private citizen, a friend and political ally, on private land at a private event. In other words, there were privacy issues involved, and it's nice to see the administration struggling with those just a little bit. Unless there's evidence that they tried to squelch the story entirely -- that would be evidence of a lot of things, including incredibly unrealistic expectations -- there was no issue of governance or law or public interest which was harmed by a 24 hour delay.

Let's not let this bit of retail violence distract us from the wholesale damage, death and destruction being done by this administration, shall we?

3 comments:

ArticulateDad said...

I'm with you. It's disappointing how Air America has come out supposedly as an alternative to the trash right-wing garbage talk radio. And frankly, most of them (Stephanie Miller, Randi Rhodes, Ed Schultz) are quite often just as bad. Their blathering for the sake of blathering (as in harping on this little incident as if it were earth-shattering) does little good for this country. The only talk radio show I can listen to these days is Al Franken, because, the occasional fart joke aside, he's intelligent, and makes an attempt to look at the nuances of issues.

Ahistoricality said...

It's not just the liberal commentators (I don't get Air America; I don't have time for talk radio anyway); for whatever reason the press smells blood (real blood, this time) and goes nuts. Just because something happens to someone famous and powerful doesn't mean that it's interesting. My morning paper included not just Cheney frenzy (including a reprinted editorial from Texas about The Delay) but comments from the Secretary of Transportation about Britney Spears' unbelted child pictures. Who cares? Mineta doesn't have better things to do?

If half of them just went out and did some actual investigative reporting....

I'm a big fan of Harry Shearer's Le Show. It's not terribly nuanced, sometimes, but his satires are pretty good and his targets are mostly Republican more by virtue of their being in power than anything else. His shots at the Clintons are pretty good, actually. And sometimes he just nails an issue in a way that nobody else does.

By the way: I was looking at the Articulate Child blog: the Little Anachronism used to love to stand on the counter and smell spices, one after another; we haven't done that for a while and it's time to get back to it, so we can move away from the unspiced, unmixed foods thing....

Anonymous said...

Thank you. Aside from my distaste at the White House's insistence on blaming the victim, I've found the entire story overblown.

Anne
http://annezook.com