Column: Cheney's got a gun

DAILY IOWEGIAN | February 27, 2006
By Dan Ehl

It’s rather amusing that the very far right almost circles to meet the left. I have a friend who makes most Republicans look like communist sympathizers. He is always bringing me literature detailing the latest sinister plots by the White House neocons. The far right blogs he refers me to spout such hatred of Bush’s World Order that they make anything written by the Democrats seem meek.

He and most of those ultra-conservative webpages continue to produce what they see as proof that the World Trade Towers were not taken out by a bunch of lunatic Arabs, but by the CIA under orders from Bush and Cheney. The reason — an excuse to invade Iraq.

Even I, with my extreme distrust of our current administration, have a difficult time imagining such a scenario — though ultimately many of their more mundane plots have caused more suffering and damage than 9/11.

These blogs, along with left leaning webpages, have lately been highlighting Vice President Cheney’s broadsiding his millionaire attorney friend with bird shot. I’ve been ready to write the affair off as just another example of Cheney’s trigger-happy personality. They see the affair as a nefarious example of how the White House spews out lies and does knee-jerk coverups.

They first point to one paragraph mysteriously yanked from an MSNBC story credited to Aram Roston and the NBC Investigative Unit.

It read: Armstrong also told NBC News that she does not believe alcohol was involved in the accident. She says she believes no one that day was drinking, although she says there may have been beer available during a picnic lunch that preceded the incident. "There may be a beer or two in there," she said, "but remember not everyone in the party was shooting."

Yikes. Did the Cheney hunting party more closely resembled a kegger attended by The Three Stooges — a bunch of staggering-drunk city slickers looking like they’d just stumbled out of an L.L.Bean catalog?

“Wise guy, huh? Take that, yah bean brain,”an inebriated Cheney in a perfect Moe imitation might have howled as he smacked one of the fellow hunters over the head, with the shotgun then firing and peppering Harry Whittington.

Or maybe Cheney just decided to do some target shooting with beer cans and picked one being held by Whittington.

It must be a first, but many of the far-right blogs quote The Nation, a liberal weekly publication — “Vice President Dick Cheney, who was forced to leave Yale University because his penchant for late-night beer drinking exceeded his devotion to his studies, and who is one of the small number of Americans who can count two drunk driving busts on his driving record, may have been doing more than hunting quail on the day that he shot a Texas lawyer in the face.”

But the conspiracy doesn’t stop there.

Since any self-respecting rightwinger owns more guns than the local National Guard armory, it’s no wonder they immediately put the supposed shooting explanation to the test. And all of them smelled something rotten in Denmark and it didn’t have anything to do with those whining Moslems and a bunch of cartoons.

Take the website called infowars.com, one of the more well known blogs amoung conspiracy buffs. Not one to beat about the bush (no pun intended), it starts out with, “A massive cover-up has been conducted concerning the shooting. We know that most of the facts that have been told to the public are manufactured frauds.

“Cheney claims that he shot Whittington at 90 feet, ballistic tests from the spread of the shotgun pellets to their penetration depth is 100 percent conclusive.

“Harry Whittington was shot at close range, between 15 and 18 feet, not the 90 claimed by Dick Cheney and the Secret Service. It is now clear why they refused to let Sheriff's Deputies interview Cheney for over 13 hours and why they claimed that Whittington's injuries were superficial when in truth they were grievous.”

Reenacting the incident, on hand were “a former NASA contract engineer from the Apollo program with prior service in the Air Force to make sure the measurements were correct. Another in our team was Karl, a former Airborne Infantrymen, M.P., weapons and self-defense instructor, and former law enforcement, to explain the nature of shot trajectory and wound ballistics.”

The test was elaborately detailed. They used the same size shotgun shells and a shotgun like Cheney’s — “a 28 gauge side-by-side double barreled shotgun with one barrel modified and the other full-chocked. Which means the first barrel has a slightly wider spread than the second, this allows for a quick reaction shot when the bird is flushed, and if missed, the second shot will allow for a better aimed tighter spread shot.”

They also used three cameras to film the test, two were fixed at different angles to the targets.

The final results — “With the data from these distances and their corresponding spreads we feel comfortable in stating that Mr. Whittington was shot from a distance of between 15 and 18 feet. There is no confusing this distance with that of 90 feet.”

“In conclusion, the Kennedy County Sheriff’s Department closed its investigation on Thursday February 16th, without ever even being allowed to conduct one. It was clear from day one that the Cheney and Rove spin machine were engaging in a cover-up,” the web site concluded, and added, “ Meanwhile the liberal press is attacking Cheney for all the wrong reasons and the straw-men they build will easily be toppled, unless the people stand-up and demand an examination of the real facts.”

Not an expert on firearms, I have to take the webpage’s explanation on faith. But if there are any hunters out there who would also like to perform such a reenactment, let me know — though this is one of the few times I want to leave the beer at home.

Last modified February 27, 2006