- This is the guy who pulled the trigger
of the gun that fired the round that hit his friend that ruined the hunt
and shed some light on the world that Dick built...
-
- Four days after blasting 78-year-old
hunting partner Harry Whittington in the face, neck and chest with birdshot,
vice president Dick Cheney emerged from his fortified bunker to make a
snarling, unapologetic taped announcement to Fox News' Brit Hume that basically
amounted to what he did on his own time was his own business. Dick said
shooting Harry the previous Saturday was one of the worst days of his life
-- which is quite an admission considering the fate of those who have been
in Dick's crosshairs over the years.
-
- Harry, no longer Dick's friend but a
mere "acquaintance," emerged from the hospital two days later
to apologize to the media for the delay he had caused by having an operation,
a heart attack and a shotgun pellet in his heart. Harry begged Dick and
his family to forgive him for the trouble he and his family had caused
them. "We all assume certain risks in whatever we do, whatever activities
we pursue," Harry said. "And regardless of how experienced, careful
and dedicated we are, accidents do and will happen -- and that's what
happened last Friday..."
-
- Last Friday? Now -- if you're a reporter,
wouldn't you be a teeny bit interested in whether the shooting occurred
on Friday rather than Saturday? Wouldn't you wonder why it took three hours
to get Harry to a hospital 20 minutes away when Dick's ambulance was on
the scene, why it took four days -- perhaps five -- for Dick to go public?
Perhaps it would even cross your mind that Dick might be waiting to see
which story he should peddle. If Harry died, he could send ranch owner
Katharine Armstrong out to say she had seen it all and it was poor, dead
Harry's fault. If he survived, Dick would suck it in and somberly tell
a sympathetic Hume -- "Ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger
that fired the round that hit Harry..."
-
- But even then, Dick and Katharine couldn't
keep their stories straight. Katharine first said she was sitting in a
car and wasn't aware of an accident until she saw the Secret Service guys
running toward the group. Then she remembered she was right there at Dick's
elbow and saw the whole thing, a bonafide eye-witness and the only one
qualified to deal with the media. According to Katharine, there was "zero,
zippo" drinking that day, but then she remembered there might have
been a "few" beers consumed, and even Dick admitted he "popped
a top" at the pre-hunt barbeque.
-
- Members of the press corps might wonder
why Dick chose to return to the house and fix himself a cocktail rather
than accompany his victim to the hospital. They might also be interested
in comments made by Dick's Secret Service agents who say Dick was "clearly
inebriated" when he bagged Harry. Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson
reports, "According to those who have talked with the agents and others
present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend
and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials
on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting
party time to sober up."
-
- Thompson says the agents reported that
members of the hunting party, including Dick, consumed alcohol "before
and during the hunting expedition," and their report also noted that
"Cheney exhibited 'visible signs' of impairment, including slurred
speech and erratic actions."
-
- Ehrlich: Again, how about the Secret
Service agents reports on 9-11?
-
- But reporters don't ask such questions
in Dick's world. Those who are not house-broken are, at a minimum, paper-trained.
They don't ask questions in the house or even close to the house for fear
of tracking the resulting mess in on the rug. Their yapping and barking
on-camera at White House press secretary Scott McClellan concerned just
one issue -- they should have been told first. "We have cell phones,"
they wailed. "We have Blackberries! We're the press corps -- we should
have been given the story before a local newspaper!"
-
- There's a big difference between being
"given" a script to copy and hitting the investigative trail
to dig up what really happened. Apparently, no one in the mainstream media
dared question Dick's final taped account. Not one questioned the 14-hour
delay in the Kenedy County Sheriff's Department getting access to Dick
nor wondered why the Sheriff would send a deputy to dutifully jot down
Dick's account and take depositions from other parties without asking pertinent
questions about alcohol consumption, or why Dick can't get it straight
whether he "turned right," as he said several times, or "counter-clockwise"
as he is saying now.
-
- Ehrlich: emphasis in paragraph below
in original.
-
- While reporters were frenziedly chasing
their tails, Internet reporter Joseph Ehrlich wrote an excellent piece
wherein he addressed both questions and answers in this tangled affair.
Ehrlich meticuously laid out the timeline, the elaborate behind-the-scenes
machinations, and Dick and Katharine's ridiculous efforts to cover up what
actually occurred, to include having the Secret Service bump the time of
the shooting to 5:50 PM to put the sun in Dick's eyes when he pulled the
trigger. Ehrlich even quotes Harry's daughter who, in a strange revelation,
said that after her father was shot, he lay there for such a long time
"he was unsure whether he was being taken to the hospital or the morgue."
-
- Such a ghoulish remark is more than passing
strange, yet the media failed to pick up on it. Little attention has been
given to poor Harry other than he is a 78-year-old Austin attorney, and
the victim of yet another Dick Cheney "accident."
-
- Ehrlich: This is the reason why Whittington
is at risk and why there are serious rumors that Cheney will be retiring
after the November elections. It cost Bush and the NWO a lot of political
capital to kill the story and misdirect public and press attention from
facets of the incident dutifully offered by the entire Internet community.
-
- In truth, Harry, like those with whom
he cavorts, is a multi-millionnaire, and a major Republican player and
donor. Bush appointed Harry to chair the Texas regulatory Funeral Service
Commission in 1999, just in time to force the commission to settle a whistleblower
lawsuit shortly before the 2000 election. Harry managed to keep Bush out
of the courts and out of jail in the burgeoning Funeralgate scandal that
theatened to engulf not only Bush but Robert Waltrip, owner of Service
Corportion International (SCI), the largest funeral corporation in Texas;
Joe Albaugh, Bush crony, campaign manager and former FEMA director; Texas
Attorney General (now Senator) John Cornyn; and, of course, Bush counsel
(now U.S. Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales.
-
- Dick's world is an incestuous world whose
core is Texas power and money -- lots of it. As Sydney Blumenthal writes
in Salon, both Dick and Karl Rove literally owe their present positions
to Katharine and her family. "Anne Armstrong, Katharine's mother,
was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick Cheney its chief executive
officer," Blumenthal said. "Tobin Armstrong, Katharine's father,
financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove's political consulting firm." Blumenthal
says Katharine is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts, founded
in the 19th Century by the family of James A. Baker, former secretary of
state, Poppy Bush's buddy and the architect of the 2000 presidential coup
d`etat that gave the presidency to Bush and Dick.
-
- The people who inhabit Dick's world possess
such power they can silence an entire White House press corps in mid-yelp
-- such arrogance they can turn away law enforcement officers and delay
an investigation until a more convenient time, even though a man has been
shot in the face. Bill Moyers, formerly of PBS, now President of the Schumann
Center for Media and Democracy, very succinctly sums them up...
-
- "It is a Dick Cheney world out there,"
Moyers writes, "--a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together,
dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together,
all the while carving up the world according to their own interests."
-
-
- Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer
and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular
contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net
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