When silence isn't golden
Leonard Pitts Jr.
is a columnist for the Miami Herald
They'd take my columnist license away if I didn't write about Dick Cheney today.
There are, I suppose, other things going on in the world, but they pale in comparison. Heck, it's not every day a vice president of the United States shoots a guy. As even the remotest village in Malawi must have heard by now, Cheney did just that during a quail hunt on Feb. 11 in Texas. While aiming at a bird, he accidentally sprayed his hunting companion, 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington, with bird shot. This was promptly disclosed to the public. Just 18 hours later.
And even then, the notification was made not through a statement issued by the vice president's office, as you would expect, but by a private citizen, the woman who owned the ranch where the shooting took place. Cheney himself did not publicly address the incident until four days later when he gave an interview to Fox News.
Not surprisingly, the V.P. has become the punch line to a national joke. The Daily Show dubbed him "No. 2 With A Bullet." David Letterman called him a weapon of mass destruction. Even one of my students got in on the fun, saying this incident, like the Iraq war, illustrates the administration's penchant for shooting first and asking questions later.
Perhaps I'm simply jealous those worthies got all the good jokes first, but when I consider the incident - and more important, the vice president's handling of it - my first response is not laughter. Unless you mean that pathetic laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind of laughter. In which case, yeah.
Because it occurs to me that this is not just a microcosm of the Iraq war, but of the entire Bush administration.
The analogy is almost painfully perfect: bad decision leads to unfortunate outcome leads to stone wall of arrogance, secrecy and silence. We could be talking about torture, Abu Ghraib, WMDs, wiretapping, the Valerie Plame leak... .
But we're talking about a hunting accident.
Point being, it is not scandal, war, corruption or anything else of national import. Nor does it carry any suggestion of nefarious behavior. Addressed promptly and openly, it's the kind of story that would ordinarily flare up and flare out in a day or two. Does anybody even remember the story about the guy who sustained minor injuries in a bike accident with President Bush last year?
To the degree this has metastasized into something more, it reflects disquiet over the closed nature of this administration and its utter disdain for the right of the people to know.
And Cheney's claim, made in the Fox interview, that somehow this boils down to media pique at having been kept out of the loop, is silly. It seems to have escaped his notice that he is the vice president of the United States. What happens to him and the President is of national interest. How many other bicycle mishaps made national news last year?
You have to ask yourself: If they're this close-mouthed about a hunting accident, what kinds of secrets do they keep on matters that matter? What information should you and I have that we don't? What things should we know that we won't until it's too late?
Not national security secrets, mind you. Just basic information on a government that is, by the way, employed by, and accountable to, us. But we have a President who lives in a yes-man bubble from whence he ventures to hold news conferences only slightly more often than pigs fly. We have a government that has quietly removed millions of government documents from the public domain. And we have a vice president who treats a hunting accident like a nuclear secret.
Not coincidentally, we also have a dubious war based on a dubious premise with a U.S. casualty count - dead and injured - of more than 19,000 and rising.
And suddenly it doesn't bother me so much that all the good jokes are taken.
This stuff gets less funny everyday. |
