Though I lived and worked inside the Beltway for almost ten years, there are times when the mentalité of the political commentariat, Left and Right, is as indecipherable to me as a page of Sanskrit. The swelling uproar over Vice President Cheney’s accidental wounding of a fellow hunter is one of those times.
National Review editorializes that Mr. Cheney “should make a public appearance on the matter” to “express his regret and explain in his own words what happened”. Otherwise, the Bush Administration risks grave political damage. Well, it probably does, if every chatterer in Washington and New York devotes the next several weeks to declaring that political damage has been suffered. But does NR’s prescription make political or – dare I use the word? – moral sense?
Leaving aside the fact that apologies are due to Harry Whittington and his family, not to the general public, we all know, based on past performance, that no expression of contrition by the Vice President will satisfy his media critics. A Washington Post reporter who mocks him by donning faux hunting garb for a television appearance isn’t going to say, “He’s sorry, and that’s that.”
“Explaining in his own words what happened” raises a more delicate point. As a gentleman, the Vice President cannot describe the incident in a way that casts blame on a 78-year-old friend who is lying in the hospital and has suffered a heart attack (of the kind detectable only if one happens to be hooked up to hospital equipment, but no happy experience nonetheless). Therefore, he can only criticize himself or try to exculpate everyone. The latter seems to me to very likely be the truth, but an accident recollected in tranquility always has to be somebody’s fault. Asserting that no one was negligent will draw only sneers from the pundits.
The normally sensible John Podhoretz posed a question today whose answer has different implications from what he supposes: “If, during his vice presidency, Al Gore had gone out hunting, had shot someone during the hunt, and had failed to make the incident public for 18 hours, what would conservatives have said and thought?”
If Al Gore had acted exactly like Dick Cheney, I don’t know the answer. On the other hand, I’m quite certain that Gore’s conduct would have been very different. Within minutes, his spinners would have been telling the media that it was entirely the victim’s fault, and that version would have been relayed uncritically around the world. There would have been no thought for the other man’s pride and honor, and the VP’s first hospital visit would have been accompanied by every TV camera within 50 miles. As for the 18 hour interval, that would have been devoted to a war room exercise à la Lewinsky.
Speaking of that tawdry affair, weren’t the media instructing us then that private conduct has no bearing on fitness for high office? There the private conduct consisted of adultery and perjury. Here it is, at worst, an instant’s inattention on the part of a man who has been hunting and shooting for decades without any previous mishap.
Well, nothing that I write will influence the commentariat. But, if this is the sort of “scandal” that makes or breaks Presidencies, our country has sunk to such a depth of frivolity that we have no prospect of surviving in a dangerous world. In that case, we should all start learning Arabic and getting ready to pay the jizya tax, for Robert Ferrigno’s future is crossing the horizon.
Aside from the fact that so many members of the media are openly antagonistic to the current administration, I sort of wonder if part of the problem is that many of them think that hunting is wrong anyway, so this just compounds things.
I have never hunted quail, and it has been many years (I was a teenager) since I did any game hunting at all (duck, pheasant, deer). I (thank goodness) never shot one of my fellow hunters, but I did learn how easy it is to make a slight mistake, like the time I let go with both barrels of a 20-gauge shotgun (unintentionally; it's almost never a good idea to fire both barrels simultaneously) with the stock not properly grounded against my shoulder. I ended up flat on my back with a massive bruise around my right shoulder; however, I'm lucky that I didn't break my collarbone, and really lucky that in the process of bowling me over, the shot didn't spray wildly and catch one of my uncles.
The point is, to me, that hunting is not inherently evil, and that mishaps happen. Despite my own misgivings about the current government, I find this obsession with the VP's hunting accident distasteful at best.
Posted by: Kevin Standlee | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 07:49 AM