Cheney's License to Kill

Pardon me while I yawn.

The press is in an uproar because of the way Cheney and his staff handled notifiying them about Cheney accidentally shooting a 78 year old lawyer in the face on a ranch owned by a Republican lobbyist.

This is, of course, exactly the kind of story the media prefers to cover: a media story where they get to criticize Cheney's staff for not adhering to accepted media practices. Again I yawn.

A New York Times editorial today - White House Shoots Foot - concludes that "The vice president appears to have behaved like a teenager who thinks that if he keeps quiet about the wreck, no one will notice that the family car is missing its right door. The administration's communications department has proved that its skills at actually communicating are so rusty it can't get a minor police-blotter story straight."

I can't imagine that the White House is shaking in its boots on this one. They know that there's no one on the Left with the propaganda skills to turn this story into a larger indictment of Cheney and Bush gang. Nor are there any mainstream media outlets that would carry such a story.

Remember how the media jumped all over the (untrue) story about Clinton's haircut on the runway on Air Force One snarling air traffic and costing taxpayers millions of dollars? That story, manufactured by the right wing noise machine, had the media chattering for weeks. The right managed to turn this (untrue) story into a sign that Clinton didn't really care for the little people, that he was selfish and imperious. The press took the bait and ran with it. Then ran with it some more.

It seems to me that a real "liberal" newspaper would not scold Cheney for acting like "a teenager." A real liberal publication would point out that Cheney was hunting on an illegal license. Then it would go on to say this disregard for the law is similar to his behavior on the war in Iraq: that he manufactured an illegal license for the invasion of Iraq, a license to kill based on lies. Behavior more like a warlord than a teenager.

Cheney is lucky the man he accidentally shot didn't die, unlike the thousands of Americans and Iraqi civilians who have died, some accidentally but mostly otherwise, in his illegal war based on a faked license to kill.

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