[Mb-civic] RE: QUAILGATE: The Cheney Fallout - Howard Kurtz - Washington Post Blog

[William Swiggard]

The Cheney Fallout

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 17, 2006; 10:40 AM

So all the people who don't like Vice President Cheney or Fox say it was 
a terrible interview and how dare he talk only to Brit, and all the 
people who like Cheney and Fox say it was a perfectly good interview and 
why doesn't the angry and petulant press corps get off the veep's back 
over this regrettable accident?

No surprise there.

President Bush came out yesterday and said that his No. 2 handled the 
aftermath just fine.

No surprise there.

Cheney defenders are trying to make the White House press corps the 
issue, saying they're just throwing a collective hissy fit, and Cheney 
critics are accusing him of arrogance and whispering about a cover-up.

No shocking news there either.

What did surprise me was this Peggy Noonan 
<http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007972> column 
in the Wall Street Journal. She, after all, is a former Reagan and Bush 
White House speechwriter who took a leave in 2004 to work for the 
president's reelection. But here she is putting into play the question 
of not only whether Cheney is damaged goods but whether he might have to 
pack his bags:

"The Dick Cheney shooting incident will, in a way, go away. And, in a 
way, not--ever. Some things stick. Gerry Ford had physically stumbled 
only once or twice in public when he became, officially, The Stumbler. 
Mr. Ford's stumbles seemed to underscore a certain lack of 
sure-footedness in his early policies and other decisions. The same with 
Jimmy Carter and the Killer Rabbit. At the time Mr. Carter told the 
story of a wild rabbit attacking his boat he had already come to be seen 
by half the country as weak and unlucky. Even bunnies took him on . . .

"I suspect what they're thinking and not saying is, 'If Dick Cheney 
weren't vice president, who'd be a good vice president?' They're 
thinking, 'At some time down the road we may wind up thinking about a 
new plan.' And one night over drinks at a barbecue in McLean one top guy 
will turn to another top guy and say, 'Under the never permeable and 
never porous Dome of Silence, tell me . . . wouldn't you like to replace 
Cheney?'

"Why would they be thinking about this? It's not the shooting incident 
itself, it's that Dick Cheney has been the administration's hate magnet 
for five years now. Halliburton, energy meetings, Libby, Plamegate. This 
was not all bad for the White House: Mr. Cheney took the heat that would 
otherwise have been turned solely on George Bush. So he had utility, and 
he's experienced and talented and organized, and Mr. Bush admires and 
respects him. But, at a certain point a hate magnet can draw so much 
hate you don't want to hold it in your hand anymore, you want to drop 
it, and pick up something else. Is this fair? Nah. But fair has nothing 
to do with it."

Personally, I doubt Cheney's going anywhere, any more than Bush's father 
dumped Quayle from the ticket. But now Noonan has put into play, or at 
least into print, the idea that Bush might try to anoint his successor 
by naming a new veep.

With no other hard news on the subject, Bush backing Cheney is the day's 
story:

"President Bush said on Thursday that Vice President Dick Cheney had 
handled the disclosure of an accidental shooting of a hunting partner 
'just fine' and that the incident had been a 'traumatic moment' for Mr. 
Cheney as well as a tragic one for the victim," reports the New York 
Times 
<http://nytimes.com/2006/02/17/politics/17cheney.html?hp&ex=1140152400&en=ae1f373f8fc9fc89&ei=5094&partner=homepage> 
.

"The remarks came on the same day that the local sheriff's department 
investigating the shooting said its inquiry was closed and no charges 
would be filed.

"The president's words appeared to be an effort to tamp down widespread 
talk about tensions between him and Mr. Cheney. Mr. Bush's aides had 
made little secret all week that they wished Mr. Cheney had handled the 
matter differently -- in particular by disclosing it more quickly and 
via a more established channel than the Web site of a local newspaper in 
Texas -- and on Wednesday the White House signaled that Mr. Bush was 
sympathetic to that view."

The Boston Globe 
<http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/02/17/activists_assert_secrecy_is_cheneys_hallmark/> 
spies a pattern: "Criticism rained down on Vice President Dick Cheney 
this week for failing to disclose his hunting accident to the public for 
a day, but advocates of open government said the episode was nothing 
new. For five years, they said, Cheney has led the Bush administration's 
efforts to curtail the flow of government information.

"From fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the public from 
seeing records of his energy task force, to withholding briefings on the 
domestic spying program from most members of the congressional 
intelligence committees, Cheney has made his penchant for secrecy a 
hallmark of how he and the administration do business, specialists say."

National Review's Byron York 
<http://nationalreview.com/york/york200602160841.asp> says one part of 
the Brit sitdown could be "enormously consequential expansion of vice 
presidential authority":

"Near the end of the interview, Fox anchor Brit Hume brought up a 
controversy arising from the CIA-leak case, in which prosecutor Patrick 
Fitzgerald said in court papers that former top Cheney aide Lewis Libby 
testified he had been authorized 'by his superiors' to disclose 
information about the classified National Intelligence Estimate to 
members of the press. 'Is it your view that a Vice President has the 
authority to declassify information?' Hume asked.

" 'There is an executive order to that effect,' Cheney said.

" 'There is?'

" 'Yes.'

" 'Have you done it?'

" 'Well, I've certainly advocated declassification and participated in 
declassification decisions. The executive order -- '

" 'You ever done it unilaterally?'

" 'I don't want to get into that. There is an executive order that 
specifies who has classification authority, and obviously focuses first 
and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President.' "

Hmmm.

In the New Republic, T.A. Frank 
<http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060213&s=frank021606> gives Hume a 
passing grade:

"When it came time to talk to Dick Cheney . . . Brit Hume actually did a 
decent job. And Cheney, while more plausibly human than usual, did quite 
badly.

"To be sure, not all of Hume's questions were winners. For example, the 
query '[A]nd I take it, you missed the bird,' while detail-oriented, 
didn't get quite to the heart of Americans' concerns about the incident. 
For the most part, however, Hume squeezed out an account of the accident 
for which local law enforcement officials will undoubtedly be grateful. 
Hume was persistent and specific: 'You had pulled the trigger and you 
saw him?' 'What was he wearing?' 'How far away from you was he?' 'What 
did you think when you saw the injuries? How serious did they appear to 
you to be?' 'Did you get up and did you go with him, or did you go to 
the hospital?' 'His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?' . . .

"But when questions turned to how Cheney had handled disclosure of the 
incident, the vice president made little sense."

Does Cheney think he has a credibility problem? Kevin Drum 
<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_02/008235.php> 
explains:

"First, Cheney acknowledged that the White House wanted him to issue a 
statement Saturday night, but he refused. "That was my call, all the 
way," he said. Translation: he doesn't take guidance from the White 
House. They take guidance from him.

"Second, he said that he had held up issuing a statement because he 
wanted to make sure Harry Whittington was all right before saying 
anything. I don't even know what to make of this. Is he suggesting that 
his story would have been different if Whittington's injuries had been 
more serious? That the White House never issues statements about 
breaking news until it knows how things are going to turn out? Or what?

"Finally, Hume suggested that since this was obviously a national story, 
Cheney should have informed the national press and gotten the word out 
sooner. Cheney's reply: 'It isn't easy to do that. Are they going to 
take my word for what happened?'

"Seriously? Cheney's story is that his own credibility is so poor that a 
statement from him would have been worthless? Is he really going to 
stick to that as his explanation?"

Betsy Newmark 
<http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2006/02/howard-kurtz-has-article-looking-at.html> 
likes Hume because "he'll ask questions about issues that wouldn't occur 
to many other interviewers because he is open to the conservative side. 
I just think that some news interviewers have no idea what the 
conservative side of an issue is so that it never even occurs to them to 
ask those questions.

"Sure, Brit's a conservative, but he's also tough and fair. All those 
news people who insist that they don't twist the news to fit their own 
self-acknowledged liberal ideology think that a conservative like Brit 
is incapable of doing the same thing. I think they both do it, and if 
I'm going to watch the news on TV, I like seeing the conservative twist 
on things. I just wish they'd all drop the pretense of objectivity 
because we all know that it is not so. Fox is conservative and ABC, CBS, 
NBC, CNN, and PBS are liberal. Fess up now and stop thinking that we're 
too dumb to notice the choice of stories on all those supposedly 
unbiased news broadcasts."

Blogger Ed Copeland 
<http://edwardcopeland.blogspot.com/2006/02/thursdays-news-and-topics.html> 
says that Quailgate could help Bush:

"This week, how often have you even heard Bush's name other than in 
relation to not getting the word from Cheney about the hunting accident? 
The spin makes my theory seem more plausible -- the administration 
surrogates have been united in claiming that the hunting accident is no 
big deal and that the story is just the poor, jealous media who feel 
scooped by a lesser media entity. They emphasize how no one wonders how 
Cheney is feeling (his interview with Brit Hume followed the same tune). 
There is even a story about Republicans who see the story as a welcome 
respite from the other scandals they fear. I myself wouldn't put it past 
Karl Rove to see this as a golden opportunity to force Cheney out and 
install their own hand-picked successor for 2008 as the new vice president."

He must be channeling Peggy Noonan.

There were signs that the Hill was finally going to get serious about 
oversight, but . . . nahhh.

"Senate Republicans blocked a proposed investigation of President Bush's 
domestic spying operation Thursday as the chairman of the Intelligence 
Committee said he had reached an agreement with the White House to 
pursue legislation establishing clearer rules for the controversial 
program," says the Los Angeles Times 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-spying17feb17,0,5180017.story?coll=la-home-headlines> 
. "But Senate aides described the discussions with the White House as 
very preliminary. And angry Democrats expressed skepticism over the 
negotiations, with some describing them as a ploy to protect the Bush 
administration and the highly classified surveillance operation from 
congressional scrutiny."

Abu Ghraib is back in the news. Walter Shapiro 
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/02/16/abu_ghraib_intro/> , 
Salon's new Washington bureau chief, explains why the magazine is 
running these new photos 
<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/16/abu_ghraib/portfolio.html> 
of the stomach-turning abuses there:

"The horrors carried out during the last three months of 2003 by U.S. 
soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison are shockingly familiar and, at the same 
time, oddly remote. The torture photographs that were published when the 
prisoner-abuse scandal first exploded have lost their power to shock. We 
have all seen the pictures repeatedly: a pyramid of unclothed prisoners; 
a naked detainee cowering in front of snarling dogs; captives wearing 
punitive hoods that seem borrowed from a medieval inquisition; American 
soldiers grinning over Iraqi dead bodies and, always, that chillingly 
ironic thumbs-up sign.

"Eventually this visual repetition numbs the senses. All these ghastly 
images have been viewed so often that they seem to belong to a different 
war conducted by a different superpower in a different century. Yet the 
photographs that news organizations have so far published represent only 
a partial sample of the government's chilling documentary record from 
Abu Ghraib.

"When Salon's national correspondent Mark Benjamin obtained the 
never-before-released photographs that accompany this essay, we had to 
both establish their authenticity and to answer the basic question of 
our justification for publishing. The images themselves partly answered 
the why-publish question for us. Speaking for myself, I remain haunted 
by one of the more seemingly banal pictures in this new collection from 
the dark side. Taken on Dec. 6, 2003, the photograph shows a uniformed 
and seemingly untroubled Army sergeant leaning against a corridor wall 
completing his paperwork. All routine, except standing next to the 
sergeant is a hooded and naked Iraqi prisoner. Just another day of 
methodical record-keeping at Abu Ghraib."

On the blogging front, New York magazine's Clive Thompson 
<http://newyorkmetro.com/news/media/15967/> cites a study by NYU's Clay 
Shirky that says there are only a relative handful of major players:

"There is enormous inequity in the system. A very small number of blogs 
enjoy hundreds and hundreds of inbound links -- the A-list, as it were. 
But almost all others have very few sites pointing to them. When Shirky 
sorted the 433 blogs from most linked to least linked and lined them up 
on a chart, the curve began up high, with the lucky few. But then it 
quickly fell into a steep dive, flattening off into the distance, where 
the vast majority of ignored blogs reside. The A-list is teensy, the 
B-list is bigger, and the C-list is simply massive. In the blogosphere, 
the biggest audiences -- and the advertising revenue they bring -- go to 
a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity . . .

"In politics, the highest is Daily Kos <http://dailykos.com> , one of 
the first liberal blogs -- with 11,182 links -- followed closely by 
Instapundit <http://instapundit.com> , an early right-wing blog, with 
6,513. Uncountable teensy political blogs lie in their shadows."

But even teensy bloggers can have an impact if they're read by bigger 
boys and girls who pick up on their arguments.

Finally, in a transparent effort to sex up this column, Salon's Rebecca 
Traister 
<http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/02/14/tom_ford/index.html> writes 
about the new issue of Vanity Fair -- and the role of designer Tom Ford 
-- under the headline "Topless Bodies Found in Brainless Magazine":

"Rachel McAdams ('Wedding Crashers,' 'Red Eye,' 'The Family Stone'), one 
of the women scheduled to pose for this year's cover, arrived at the 
photo shoot only to learn that Ford wanted her naked. I had not thought 
a willingness to disrobe was a condition of appearing on the front of 
Vanity Fair, but reluctant ecdysiast McAdams not only lost her spot, she 
is mentioned in the magazine only as 'a certain young actress' who 
'bowed out when the clothes started coming off,' thus squelching 'Ford's 
plan of having a gorgeous female threesome.' "There you have it, ladies, 
straight from Vanity Fair: We don't care if you star in three successful 
movies in one year; if you won't get naked for a 'threesome,' you can 
forget your spot in our pages!

"As for Ford's claim, to editor Jim Windolf, that it was an 'accident' 
that he plopped himself in the middle of the cover shot (fully dressed, 
because only the chicks have to take it off), a quick glance at the 
magazine's cover line ('Tom Ford's Hollywood'), its cover-photo caption 
('Ford's Foundation'), its full-page contributor's bio of Ford, the 
letter from editor in chief Graydon Carter titled 'Vanity Fair's Tom 
Ford Moment,' a story about the making of the magazine called 'Welcome 
to Tommywood!' and multiple pictures of Ford (walking sexed-up 
12-year-old Dakota Fanning to her photo shoot, taking a bite out of 
Mamie Van Doren's inflated breast, strutting around in Wellingtons) 
provide subtle clues that there is nothing 'accidental' about Ford's 
megalomania."

I hear the comments section at the Post blog is back in business today. 
Play nice and no talking about %&**!@ or even circ&**@#!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/02/17/BL2006021700610.html
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