zorca:
… the bottom line is that cheney’s behaviors during quailgate only serve to exemplify his much greater sins of greed, callousness, power-mongering, and secrecy. if these larger sins aren’t what is at the heart of media discussions about the event, if there is no attempt to shine a light on the larger discrepancies, then all this blather about whether or not he sat by a bed or valentine-fucked some woman other than his wife will serve as nothing but a cheap little side show.
It’s a great rant. Read it all.
And here’s Josh Marshall:
Even if Dick Cheney is blameless in this matter in any deep moral sense, let’s not forget that his immediate reaction was to send out his surrogates to publicly blame what happened on the victim.
Actually, that may afford him too much credit since it wasn’t actually his ‘immediate’ reaction. It was his considered reaction after the 24 hour cooling off period he gave himself between the shooting and when he chose to make it public.
By my count, he continued to have his public surrogates blame Whittington for fully three days. He only relented and took responsibility himself when the public and no doubt private political clamor became too much to sustain.