Cheney's doctor and
Secret Service detail gave first aid, had the veep's ambulance
brought up and put the bleeding 78-year-old man in, and all went
back to the Armstrong ranch for what had to be a horrible evening
of anxiety about how gravely Harry Whittington had been wounded.
By 8 p.m., White
House Chief of Staff Andy Card knew of the accident and Karl Rove
had called Katharine Armstrong and been informed the vice president
was the shooter.
The sheriff came
around early the next morning and met with Cheney. As Cheney had
no traveling press aide, it was agreed that Armstrong would inform
the local paper. By afternoon Sunday, the story was on the wires.
But Monday, it had
become something else altogether, as the White House press corps
took on the aspect of that Muslim mob outside the Danish consulate
in Beirut. Press secretary Scott McClellan, mild-mannered presenter
of the daily press line, got the full Abu Ghraib treatment.
What caused the riot
in the briefing room? The White House press corps, self-anointed
custodians and conveyers of all news from the White House, had
been left in the dark about what had happened in that field, while
some little paper in Texas had broken the story, 12 hours after
the accident. They had been left out of the loop.
To the White House
press corps, it was all about them, about why they were not told,
and thus there must be a Nixonian cover-up going on. But as the
berating and badgering of McClellan went on and on, broadcast
on cable, with clips rebroadcast all week, the White House press
corps suffered serious damage. Right-wing talk radio replayed
the clips and ripped them to pieces.
Rather than
being seen as the informed and cool customers they play on talk
shows, the White House press corps came off as nasty prep-school
bullies. Said Dana Milbank of The Washington Post: "The
press always looks awful. They (the White House) will once again
make us look awful."
But the truth is
the press revealed itself. The White House had nothing to do with
it, unless one believes Cheney went dark for four days knowing
a frustrated White House press would go berserk.
Yet, off-putting
as their conduct was, the press succeeded. They directed the nation's
attention to the shooting. They drove the story into headlines.
They captured the agenda from George Bush. They raised suspicions
about the incident that linger. They forced the vice president
to accept responsibility in an interview with Fox News. And they
appear to have driven a wedge between the White House and Cheney,
if not between the president and Cheney. By midweek, White House
aides were leaking word President Bush felt his vice president
mishandled the incident.
The press corps damaged
itself, but it also damaged the White House, too, which should
take note. The adversary press of the Nixon era is back, and it
is out for blood.
As some of us have
long argued, the Washington press corps -- deeply ideologized
as it is -- is both a cargo vessel of news and information and
a carrier of contraband. Though it flies a neutral flag, there
is nothing neutral about it. The D.C. press corps is to liberalism
what the Inquisition was to Catholicism: the defender of orthodoxy
and scourge of heretics.
In the endless war
in Washington, the national press corps is the most formidable
ally of the Democratic Party. If it sides with a GOP president,
as the press corps did from 9-11 to March 2003, the president
is almost invincible.
But when the press
returns to its ideological camp, and turns the full force of its
hostility on the White House, as it did on Nixon in Watergate
and Reagan in Iran-Contra, it is the Democrats' last, best hope
of bringing down a president.
Cheney's mistake
in this episode was that he acted as a normal human being, not
a vice president being stalked. He gave his enemies an opening,
and they stormed through it. The lesson of last week is that the
Bush White House had better get its act together, because the
adversary press has its act together.
They aim to take
this president down, and last week they got the scent of blood
in their nostrils. It was written all over them in that pressroom.
They liked it, and
they will be back.
