Goodness gracious! Could it be that comedians are doing a better job of connecting the dots regarding Dick Cheney’s high crimes and misdemeanors than are the unintentionally ridiculous members of the White House press corps?
Huntergate is certainly worthy of coverage, especially now that the vice president has admitted to shooting while intoxicated. But the on-bended-knee “reporters” who hang around the briefing room waiting for a presidential spokesman to feed them their daily diet of spin look pretty absurd chasing after this particular story with so much gusto while they continue to ignore the big picture of Cheney’s misuse of intelligence data before and after the invasion of Iraq and his role in schemes to punish critics of the administration.
If the Bush administration’s court reporters are not quite up to the job of holding the vice president to account, however, the nation’s fearless comedians are up to the task.
“Good news, ladies and gentlemen,” announced David Letterman after news of the vice presidential shooting spree finally came out, “we have finally located weapons of mass destruction: It’s Dick Cheney.”
Letterman scored another direct hit when he observed: “It turns out now that Dick Cheney did not have a license to hunt, and coincidentally, turns out we didn’t have a license to go into Iraq.”
Jay Leno was equally on target when he explained that: “You can’t blame [Cheney]. Bush says you can spy on people without warrants, you can torture people, you can hold people without a trial, so Dick Cheney thinks, ‘Oh what the hell, I can shoot a few guys.'”
Ultimately, however, it was “Daily Show” correspondent Rob Corddry who hit the bullseye, when he reported that: “The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington’s face.”
All seriousness aside, there is a good deal of humor to be found in the fact that members of the White House press corps have finally been roused to mount the journalistic barricades by a hunting accident. While they cannot be counted on to go after the big stories, they are unrelenting in their determination to get to the bottom of every tale of celebrity folly — be it Britney Spears failure to place her baby in a carseat or Dick Cheney’s inability to shoot straight after he’s downed a cold one.
But, as in the days when Pravda and Tass could not be relied upon to go after the big stories of Soviet shenanigans, Americans now know that, for the full story about this administration, they must turn to the comedians and the satirists who understand that Cheney’s abuse of beer and guns cannot compare with his abuse of the most powerful vice presidency in American history.
John Nichols’s book The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History (The New Press) is available nationwide at independent bookstores and at www.amazon.com. Publisher’s Weekly describes it as “a Fahrenheit 9/11 for Cheney” and Esquire magazine says it “reveals the inner Cheney.”
