But He Didn't Shoot the Deputy
By Peter Fredson
February 14, 2006
I just finished my daily review of news and blogs, and paid special attention to the Dick Cheney shotgun blast incident. Actually there is a ton of news, joking, and commentary on this topic, so I will limit my comments to something I saw which may not have been reported. At least I didn't see any comments.
Yesterday, when eating supper and watching TV, I saw a report on the Cheney shooting. On the screen appeared the female reporter from the Corpus Christi newspaper that broke the story. She was proudly holding her newspaper. I only caught a glimpse of part of the headline, but it read CHENEY HURTS FRIEND. I first went into a paroxysm of laughter, but then suddenly realized that this was a microcosmos of the entire Bush administration strategy.
Never admit to anything negative. Deny anything occurred. Make it all seem trivial. If any admission is to be made. put the best possible spin on it. Manipulate it, massage it, get wordsmiths working on it. If you can't make it good by clever wording, then lie, misinform, obfuscate. Your gullible True Believers will swallow anything if you pat them on the back.
Bush people, probably by authority of the Supreme Being, have an untouchable status. They are above man-made laws. They can make their own rules and disobey them at will.
One of the first people Cheney called was not the local sheriff, or his boss, but the spin-master himself, Karl Rove.
I wish their conversation had been recorded, but the Bush people have learned from the Nixon debacle that recordings are taboo.
I'm sure fellow bloggers can suggest a plausible dialog in which Karl Rove might suggest that the shooting victim had a self-inflicted wound. "Take one for the Gipper." And when the words "shotgun" or "shooting" or "wound" came up that they would substitute some innocuous word to make everything seem like a harmless prank.
Alas, we may never know how the Whirling Dervishes of Spin agreed on a deniable scenario.
I wonder what influence they exerted on a small newspaper editor to change headlines from "DICK CHENEY SHOOTS LAWYER" to "CHENEY HURTS FRIEND."
I was once in the small newspaper game and if I ever ran across a shooting incident I would never ever report it as a kind of "tickling." But, of course, I would never report abuse or torture as some kind of fraternity prank either.
The Bush people have no such delicacy or compunction. They will crush truth until it bleeds a white powder. They will take any negative fact and strangle it, shoot electricity into its genitals until it declares everything to be greatly exaggerated, of no importance, or will certify that it is a Democrat device to weaken the imperial arrogance of the Bush cabinet.
Now perhaps the Bush supporters will suspect any utterances of the administration that "everything is going well in Iraq."
They may now suspect that when Bush says he is "bringing Democracy and Freedom" to small oil-rich countries that something is not quite right.
They might look twice at reports that Millennnium Corporation has "lost" several billion dollars. And they might even look at the reports of 2000 AD that Bush and company were interested in invading Iraq, Syria and Iran .. long before the 9/1l disaster.
So,`CHENEY HURTS FRIEND' is equivalent to `BUSH KILLS THOUSANDS OF MUSLIMS."
Lying by omission, by obfuscation, by Double-Think, must be recognized asa major strategy for the Bush Legacy.
Incompetence or malevolence is shielded by prevarication and the Emperor's new clothes fit him very well indeed.
Now, at last, the former status of "Warmongering Chicken-Hawk" may be modified to "Warmongering Quail-Hunter"