Dick Cheney spoke about his hunting accident on Fox News (where else) today.
In the interview, Cheney took full reponsibility.
"You can talk about all of the other conditions that exist at the time but that's the bottom line and — it was not Harry's fault," he said. "You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."
It's great that he's taking responsiblity - no sarcasm here. He said the right thing even if it took him a half a week to do so. But Cheney, unfortunately, still thinks that he did the right thing in the aftermath (cue Rob Corddry joke on Monday's Daily Show here).
Cheney has been roundly criticized for failing to tell the public about the accident until the next day. He said he thought it made sense to let the owner of the ranch where it happened reveal the accident on the local newspaper's Web site Sunday morning.
"I thought that was the right call," Cheney said. "I still do."
Cheney said he agreed that ranch owner Katharine Armstrong should make the story public, because she was an eyewitness, because she grew up on the ranch and because she is "an acknowledged expert in all of this" as a past head of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He also agreed with her decision to choose the local newspaper as the way to get the news out.
"I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting and then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the Web site, which is the way it went out and I thought that was the right call," Cheney said.
I'm just wondering at this point if Cheney has a different definition of "immediately" than the rest of us do. I don't think it's the right call - I think they had to pause and say, "How can we handle this?" so they waited. Of course, full disclosure would have been the best way to handle it. It looks very bad when the story goes up on a local newspaper's Sunday website.
I understand that they had to see how Whittington was doing. But it doesn't take 18 hours to do that. They called the White House three hours after the incident - the press could easily have been notified.
As for the drinking thing... I'll have to think more about it. On one hand, everyone drinks while they hunt. On the other hand, the VP should be held at a higher standard than your average person.
Update: For more on the story about MSNBC changing their story to take out mentions of beer, read this Think Progress post.
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