[Dialogue] Leonard PItts Reflections on Cheney's Secrecy

[FacilitationFla@aol.com]

He hits the implications well.  Cynthia
 
 
 
Vice  president's secrecy is no laughing matter
 
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
_lpitts at MiamiHerald.com_ (mailto:lpitts at MiamiHerald.com) 
They'd take my columnist license away  if I didn't write about Dick Cheney 
today. 
There are, I suppose, other things going on in the world, but they pale in  
comparison. Heck, it's not every day a vice president of the United States  
shoots a guy. As even the remotest village in Malawi must have heard by now,  
Cheney did just that during a quail hunt last Saturday in Texas. While aiming at  
a bird, he accidentally sprayed his hunting companion, 78-year-old attorney  
Harry Whittington, with birdshot. This was promptly disclosed to the public.  
Just 18 hours later. 
And even then, the notification was made not through a statement issued by  
the vice president's office as you would expect, but by a private citizen, the  
woman who owned the ranch where the shooting took place. Cheney himself did 
not  publicly address the incident until four days later when he gave an 
interview to  Fox News. 
Not surprisingly, the VP has become the punch line to a national joke. The  
Daily Show dubbed him ''No. 2 With a Bullet.'' David Letterman called him a  
weapon of mass destruction. Even one of my students got in on the fun, saying  
this incident, like the Iraq war, illustrates the administration's penchant for 
 shooting first and asking questions later. 
Perhaps I'm simply jealous those worthies got all the good jokes first, but  
when I consider the incident -- and more importantly, the vice president's  
handling of it -- my first response is not laughter. Unless you mean that  
pathetic laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind of laughter. In which case, yeah. 
LIKE THE ADMINISTRATION 
Because it occurs to me that this is not just a microcosm of the Iraq war,  
but of the Bush administration entire. 
The analogy is almost painfully perfect: Bad decision leads to unfortunate  
outcome leads to stone wall of arrogance, secrecy and silence. We could be  
talking about torture, Abu Ghraib, WMDs, wiretapping, the Valerie Plame leak . .  
. 
But we're talking about a hunting accident. 
Point being, it is not scandal, war, corruption or anything else of national  
import. Nor does it carry any suggestion of nefarious behavior. Addressed  
promptly and openly, it's the kind of story that would ordinarily flare up and  
flare out in a day or two. Does anybody even remember the story about the guy  
who sustained minor injuries in a bike accident with President Bush last  
year? 
To the degree this has metastasized into something more, it reflects disquiet 
 over the closed nature of this administration and its utter disdain for the  
right of the people to know. 
And Cheney's claim, made in the Fox interview, that somehow this boils down  
to media pique at having been kept out of the loop, is silly. It seems to have 
 escaped his notice that he is the vice president of the United States. What  
happens to him and the president is of national interest. How many other 
bicycle  mishaps made national news last year? 
You have to ask yourself: If they're this closemouthed about a hunting  
accident, what kinds of secrets do they keep on matters that matter? What  
information should you and I have that we don't? What things should we know that  we 
won't until it's too late? 
BASIC INFORMATION 
Not national security secrets, mind you. Just basic information on a  
government which is, by the way, employed by, and accountable to, us. But we  have a 
president who lives in a yes-man bubble from whence he ventures to hold  press 
conferences only slightly more often than pigs fly. We have a government  
that has quietly removed millions of government documents from the public  
domain. And we have a vice president who treats a hunting accident like a  nuclear 
secret. 
Not coincidentally, we also have a dubious war based on a dubious premise  
with a U.S. casualty count -- dead and injured -- of over 19,000. 
And suddenly it doesn't bother me so much that all the good jokes are  taken. 
This stuff gets less funny everyday.
 
Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax  305-378-9178
http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla
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