The week has ended, and apparently taken with it the Big News Story that, you might have noticed, I never really commented on. Why is that? Simple.
I don’t give a damn.
Vice President Dick Cheney made two colossal errors. First, he didn’t ascertain the location of every member of his party before he fired his shotgun. I haven’t handled a firearm since I was 10 years old, and I still remember, very well, that the first rule is to make goddamn sure there isn’t a person anywhere in the vicinity of where your barrel is pointed. Second, he didn’t own up to it immediately. This was politically stupid, in addition to unethical: if the story broke Saturday, most people still wouldn’t have found out until Sunday, and there wouldn’t be the tarnish of a cover-up.
But those two colossal errors don’t add up to anything. Mistakes happen on the range, although I hope like hell Cheney never goes hunting again.
More importantly, this is not the first ever awful thing Cheney has done. I would imagine it wasn’t the most awful thing he’s done in the last ten days. This isn’t the event that breaks the Bush White House – perhaps there are some people who are only just now realizing that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, or that Bush is kept in the dark by his subordinates, or that the current adminstration extracts all of its power from secrets and lies. But those people are not reading this, so why bother writing for them? Everyone here knows about the culture of corruption already.
That said, a lot of great writing on this topic has hit the internets in the past week, and I want to specifically mention that if you’re not already reading firedoglake daily, this was an ideal week to begin.