Some Dick Cheney jokes..

[RICHARD]

The furor over the accident and the White House delay in making it public are "part of the secretive nature of this administration," said Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "I think it's time the American people heard from the vice president."

I laughed when I heard the press conference snippets....

Media people are stupid.

First of all,

In any accident that involves gunplay, an police investigation HAS to be done. When a person is taken to a hospital, that is where the whole thing starts.....

Also, there are the HIPPA confidentiality laws....No info can be given out about a patient without their permission......

Again, the media wants to be spoon fed details about any story.


The days of Jimmy Olson, cub reporter, are over...


THis is another reason not believe anything in the media---ANYTHING.

[Edwina's Secretary]

Except that......

When the law enforcement guys went to interview the VP (aka Dead-Eye Dick) immediately following the "incident" -- as would occur if you or I shot a 78 year old guy in the face.....they were denied access to the shooter. Until the next morning. "Opps!" says the secret service! Our bad.

There is no law...or even practice...that the police must investigate before the media can report on an incident. The whole thing doesn't start when the person is taken to the hospital...the whole thing starts when the person is shot!

Sorry my friend....I believe the media far more than this they have weapons of mass distruction and we know where they are administration...(although I will refrain from calling them names.... like stupid...incompetent....dishonest...sneaky....lyin g....dishonorable)

[RICHARD]

Except that......


There is no law...or even practice...that the police must investigate before the media can report on an incident. The whole thing doesn't start when the person is taken to the hospital...the whole thing starts when the person is shot!

Oops!

Any idiot with a police scanner or 'insider' (imagine that.....not having the home state of the pres wired.....) would have knows something was going on.

Hold on a second!

I said accident....

When someone gets shot you do not stop and wait for the cops. Because the VP has heart problems he is always followed by a med team.

Beacause a shotgun blast to the torso tends to bleed a little, he was taken STAT..I always wanted to use that word!!! to the ER

When the patient arrives at the ER/Trauma unit the attending physician, by law, has to call the cops.


Because I was standing next to a friend that was shot, in a hunting accident and work in a hospital - think that I remember some of those rules...
The person that shot my BIL was there in the ER and admitted to it.

The LASD came out took notes and cleared the whole thing up, no charges, no other kind of BS.


Unless the cops think that it was something else they will not bother to go out to the site where it happened...example?

Two gangbangers show up at an ER at two in the morning, one has his intestines spilling out of his gut. Chances are that it's a crime scene where he was shot. The police are usually concerned if someone gets shot and the person doesn't come forward.

--------------------------------

And you have to remember that the SECRET SERVICE is a Law Enforcement Group...

I only mentioned that the hospital cannot give out info.....not the PD......they are not bound by any info laws.....It's only the hospital...

Sooooooo, It the media is lazy, to lazy to check the police blotter for the weekend, it's their own fault.

[Edwina's Secretary]

A quote from today "....Cheney responded. "The accuracy was enormously important. I had no press person with me."

So the reason Cheney could not speak to the public about how and why he mistook a 78 year old man for a quail was because he didn't have any spin doctors with him to tell him how to tell the truth?????

And it is fault of the media....or the dog....or the victim...or the bird...

Where is Alice in Wonderland when you need her??????

[Lady's Human]

ES, if the person who was shot approached the hunting party without announcing his presence, he wasn't following normal guidelines. Just like the person who backs out without looking and gets hit is at fault, but there's no hunting insurance to make people follow the "rules of the woods" as it were.

The media was contacted less than 24 hours after the incident, but the national media didn't pick the story up off of the wire until late in the afternoon. It was a private hunting trip, and unlike the President, the VP doesn't have a press pool that follows him around.

[Edwina's Secretary]

Gosh LH...you, Dick Cheney, the NRA and the gun safety groups disagree. ALL have said it is the fault of the guy who shots the gun. The 78 year old man was behind Cheney.

And in fact there are "rules of the road" for hunting. Check here... Rules

Cheney felt his hostess for the killing of harmless animals should make the press announcement. Guess he was too chicken...or quail as the case may be.

I think 24 hours is a long time not to mention the vice president of the United States shot someone. And I think four days is a long time to duck the press.

But most of all....I cannot tell you how appalling it is that anyone would consider the 78 year old victim at fault. As a woman that hits just a little too close to home.

[Lady's Human]

ES, living in an area where hunting is commonplace and it's normal coffee shop discussion, and having spent plenty of hours in the woods while in Tx, the general attitude is that the person who came up to the group without announcing his presence is in the wrong. The VP is in the wrong for letting himself get "target locked" and not paying attention to the area around his target. In other words, there's plenty of blame to share, but the person who was shot bears responsibility in this as well. Sorry, ES, but this is not an impeachable offense.

[lizbud]

ES, if the person who was shot approached the hunting party without announcing his presence, he wasn't following normal guidelines. Just like the person who backs out without looking and gets hit is at fault, but there's no hunting insurance to make people follow the "rules of the woods" as it were.

This is not true according to Indiana Hunters I've heard from. It is the
responsibilty of the shooter to know where his fellow hunters are before
shooting. The usual custom is to wait for those retrieving birds to join
back up with the party before resuming the shoot.

I did get to read the pdf file published of the actual shooting report. It did
have marked that both shooters had on orange jackets & hats. Cheney
just got very careless.

[RICHARD]

A spooked bird doesn't fly straight up into the air.

It probably will fly a nap-of-the-earth take-off pattern..watch any bird that you happen to walk up to .......I can see where someone could get shot by breaking the simple rules ..

you don't bother with anything outside of the 10 and 2 o'clock positions.....

Also, some of the questions and reports from the media were pretty stupid.

Some people were reporting buckshot.......some were reporting the style of hunt...

If anything the delay allowed the media to get some of the facts.

I think the media was more of a threat to that dude! Heaven forbid they kill the poor old guy......Just like the way that they brought those poor miners "back-to-life" ....

And I think four days is a long time to duck the press.

Hey, that was punny!!

[lizbud]

Cheney's Bad Aim
Shoot first; don't answer questions later.
By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, Feb. 13, 2006, at 7:18 PM ET


In a distant corner of a faraway land known as "Texas," a shotgun blast rang out and a man fell to the ground, wounded. Natives called the shooter by an obscure title: "Vice President of the United States of America." Surrounding him was a clan of primitive warriors, their buckskin belts weighed down by tribal trinkets they dubbed "cell phones," "walkie-talkies," "BlackBerrys," and "two-way pagers." On the roadside sat their humble transport, massive vehicles capable of little beyond serving as the command center for the most powerful nation in the world. So, no wonder that news of the shooting took a day to make it 60 long miles away to Corpus Christi, and from there, to the outside world.

Vice President Cheney shot a man in the head on Saturday, and 21 hours later you had to be looking at the Web page of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times to find out about it. (The victim has now suffered a heart attack as a result of being shot.) As White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan picked buckshot out of his own hide, he said "the vice president's office was working to make sure information got out. We learned additional information overnight—throughout the night. We were learning additional information here in Washington."

If the vice president's office was "working," it was working awfully slowly. They didn't even let McClellan know until 6 a.m. Sunday morning, 12 hours after the hunter had been "peppered." McClellan, by focusing on the distinction between what was going on "here in Washington" and what might have been going on down on the ranch, tried an unusual strategy for such a unified administration: to separate the president from the vice president. McClellan implied that it was Cheney's show and it was his advisers who held up the information. Furthermore, McClellan reminded the press corps, he did things differently. He recounted what had happened last July when President Bush collided with a police officer during the G8 in Scotland. Reporters were notified quickly and given a rundown on Bush, his bike, the condition of the officer and the phone call Bush placed to make sure the officer was okay.

Perhaps the even more apt analogy was Bush's own hunting incident in 1994. When the gubernatorial candidate accidentally killed a protected killdeer during a dove shoot, he wrote that he reacted this way: "Karen [Hughes] and I looked at each other. What now? 'We confess,' we both said, almost simultaneously. Bush then called every reporter who had been on his hunting trip. He then announced it at a press conference. The lesson of the shooting, Bush wrote in his biography, is that "people watch the way you handle things; they get a feeling they like and trust you, or they don't."

Unfortunately for the president, Bush wasn't able to give his vice president this advice. (He learned about the shooting from Karl Rove, who talked to the ranch owner.) Cheney played his own press secretary after this incident, agreeing with the owner of the ranch that there would be no official notice and that she could release the information herself. Cheney's allies (and those are different than Bush allies in this case) argue that Cheney cared more about his hurt friend and his host than he did about informing the Beltway press. Maybe for the first hour or two, but to wait so long only points out what we always have known about the vice president: He doesn't give a damn about the public or press' right to know.

A Bush adviser once described the Cheney press strategy this way: "Never explain, never apologize." This has damaged Cheney's public standing and hurt the president, but it is a legitimate philosophical position, linked to his stingy views about sharing information with Congress. But in this case, treating the press like Patrick Leahy is bad staff work. As a veteran staffer of two administrations and a cabinet secretary in another, Dick Cheney should know that he is not supposed to embarrass his boss.

Cheney's silence has forced White House aides to answer for the 21-hour delay without being able to give the real story (there is still no official account of what happened). The Cheney delay has also exacerbated questions about the Bush administration's candor and truthfulness. Those topics were already in the news enough. Last week, the former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year charged White House officials with "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war. This week, Republicans in Congress will issue a report that says the Bush administration delayed the evacuation of thousands of New Orleans residents by failing to act quickly on early reports that the levees had broken during Hurricane Katrina, a charge that contradicts the president's assertion about when they knew the levees would fail. Suddenly, a lot of columnists sound like Maureen Dowd, bemoaning the gang that can't get the truth straight.

And at some point Cheney's starchy behavior is also insulting. Shouldn't there be some minimum level of explanation he's willing to offer as the second-highest ranking public official? When you nearly commit manslaughter as a public official shouldn't the honor of your office compel you to stand up and explain yourself in some fashion, at least say something in a press release and not just whisper it to a Texas rancher?

If that sense of duty doesn't compel him, Cheney should see the political necessity of saying something fast. He doesn't want the GOP to become the it's-OK-to-shoot-people-while-hunting party. A few early words from Cheney could have quelled controversy (and, incidentally, saved us from the horrible spin his supporters are starting to offer: It's just a flesh wound. Elite city opinion writers don't know boo about quail hunting; I've been peppered my whole life, never hurt me.)

Aaron Burr was the last sitting vice president to shoot a man. He killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804. Since then, vice presidents have become known for attending funerals, not necessitating them. If Cheney had handled this right, it would have been a one-day story. Now, the vice president may find it won't become history fast enough.