Today, a Washington Post Op-Ed columnist, Dave Ignatius said this of the Bush Administration:

There is a temptation that seeps into the souls of even the most righteous politicians and leads them to bend the rules, and eventually the truth, to suit the political needs of the moment. That arrogance of power is on display with the Bush administration.

Of course, Mr. Ignatius is referring to the latest MSM obsession, the unfortunate accident in which Vice President Chaney peppered a friend with shotgun pellets while on a hunting trip. While the Vice President's friend is expected to fully recover, the mainstream media has so far spent the entire week obsessing over the 24-hour delay in the announcement of this incident. And, while part of the media frenzy is justifiably related to the unusual nature of the accident, the 24-hour delay has rankled the Washington media beyond all understanding.

I'm a little surprised that disgraced CBS producer Mary Mapes hasn't drawn a little more blogger interest for her (okay, tired and bitter) latest appearance on the Pacifica Radio show "Democracy Now." It was a two-part interview. Last Thursday, she was reliving her downfall after her Bush-bashing October Surprise as those obsessive bloggers took over: "in fact, by the time our story was off the air on the west coast, I mean, the moment it went off the air, it was -- it went nuts. From attacks on the authenticity of the documents, typeface and proportional spacing and all kinds of stuff that no sane person would obsess themselves with." Certainly, Mapes didn't obsess enough over her documents' authenticity. The first half of the interview ended with Mapes mauling Little Green Footballs as a hate site:

According to the website of the Media Giraffe Project -- "a non-partisan, interdisciplinary research initiative housed with the Journalism program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst" -- former New York Times ombudsman (or as they call it, "Public Editor") Daniel Okrent stated Monday night that "the general rolling over on the part of the American press allowed the [Iraq] war to happen." (Hat tip: Romenesko.)  

Since Sunday, Vice President Cheney has been accused of trying to cover up his hunting accident, since the media establishment wasn’t notified right away about the mishap; he has been fodder for late night comedians, and today on the Early Show on CBS, he had his manhood questioned by super liberal Katrina vanden Heuvel: "...I’m not sure real men hunt..."

Vanden Heuvel was on the program with Bay Buchanan. For viewers, this would be a balanced perspective on Mr. Cheney’s hunting incident, right? Wrong. Hostess Hannah Storm asked pointed questions of Ms. Buchanan, even following up on a few, but tossed slow pitch softballs at Ms. vanden Heuvel, allowing her to take political shots at the Bush administration and spout talking points one would expect to find at Moveon.org with impunity, as Storm allowed the comments to go unchallenged. For instance, take the following exchange between Hannah Storm and Bay Buchanan:

It was open season on Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC's Today this morning as Katie Couric opened the show over a What's the Wait? graphic, continuing the media elite's whining that they aren't being spoonfed information from the White House: "Good morning, shooting itself in the foot? More fallout over Vice President Cheney's hunting accident as the victim suffers a minor heart attack. And once again the Bush administration delays telling the press."

Couric and Matt Lauer teased the upcoming segment with Tim Russert. Couric: "But first off still some rough sledding for the Bush administration over Vice President Cheney's hunting incident, right?" Lauer: "Yeah that's right Katie and we should also tell you that the man Vice President Cheney accidentally shot suffered a minor heart attack while still in the hospital on Tuesday. President Bush's press secretary knew about that before his news conference that same day but he didn't tell anyone. The administration was already under fire because it waited a day to tell the press when the accident happened. So what's going on? And is Vice President Cheney making a bad situation even worse by keeping silent about it? We're gonna have much more on that, Katie, with Tim Russert in just a couple of minutes."

It may not be much, but the mainstream media appear dedicated to beating the Cheney hunting accident story into the ground. On CNN's American Morning today, anchor Miles O'Brien interviewed New York Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove about it. O'Brien wanted to make sure viewers realized the delayed reporting on the misfortune is all part of a much bigger scheme: "And setting this all in the context of the issues that the Bush administration has been dealing with, the wiretapping issues, the CIA leak case, all of this I think raises some serious credibility issues among people."

Naturally, Grove agreed, saying that Cheney's "gone into the bunker" and that the relationship between the president's staff and the vice president's staff "goes downhill." O'Brien completed the segment by asking Grove to provide guidance to Mr. Cheney: "If you were offering advice right now, would you say get before the cameras as soon as possible, Mr. Cheney, and make a statement?" Grove wants considerably more than that: "Get out there yesterday. Do an interview with -- if not someone from CNN, with Barbara Walters and cry."

Fire away.

In David Sanger’s “Political Memo” for the New York Times on Wednesday, “Handling of Accident Creates Tension Between White House Staffs,” Sanger predictably uses the incident to symbolize what he sees as the unprecedented secrecy of Vice President Cheney.

“When the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, came to the press room just before 10 a.m. Tuesday and suggested he was wearing an orange tie to avoid a stray shot from Vice President Dick Cheney, it seemed to signal an effort to defuse the accidental-shooting story with a laugh.

“But by midday, it was clear that the staffs of the president and the vice president had failed to communicate. Just after arriving at work around 7:45 a.m., Mr. Cheney learned that the man he had shot, Harry M. Whittington, was about to undergo a medical procedure on his heart because his injuries were more serious than earlier believed, Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman said.

Good Morning America's third day covering Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident was its biggest to date. On Monday's show, the 7:00 half hour started with three straight Cheney stories, followed by two more on Tuesday. This morning, GMA devoted its first four items to the hunting accident. At one point, viewers were shown live video of the four reporters as Diane Sawyer informed, "Our reporters, our team standing by to cover all the angles this morning from the medical condition to political and even potential legal fallout."

In the third story, Claire Shipman's hot pursuit of Cheney led to bizarre lecturing from Senator Hillary Clinton and Joe Lockhart, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton. Despite their affiliation with a presidency known for its own cover-ups and practice of releasing information on late Friday afternoons, Shipman treated both Clinton and Lockhart as paragons of forthrightness.

Once it was clear that the man sprinkled with birdshot would survive, Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident was widely expected to become a late-night comedian’s bonanza, a frenzy like Wal-Mart shoppers scrambling for $29 DVD players.

As “Today” replayed the comedian clips on Tuesday, NBC’s Matt Lauer asked, “Had a feeling that was coming, didn’t you?” Katie Couric replied: “Well I mean when you heard the story you just knew they were gonna go crazy with it, so they did.”

With apologies to the Cheney friend who received the pellet facial, the incident was funny. Now we learn the vice president received a warning citation from a Texas Ranger for not buying a $7 hunting stamp in advance. As a friend e-mailed me, “Where else can you shoot a lawyer in the face with a shotgun and get off with just a warning?”

America’s media have been falling all over themselves with outrage concerning this weekend’s quail hunting accident involving the vice president. Yet, when a van containing Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) rolled through a checkpoint at the Westchester County airport in 2001 injuring a policeman, the press paid virtually no attention. A LexisNexis search identified only six reports on this subject in the two weeks after it happened, with one being an October 16, 2001 Journal News (Westchester County, N.Y.) article:

“A Westchester County police officer was treated for a minor injury after a Secret Service agent with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's motorcade tried to cruise past a security checkpoint at the county airport. The incident - which police and Secret Service chalked up to miscommunication - happened at 10:30 a.m. Sunday as Clinton was headed to an airport hangar to catch a flight for a Democratic rally in Syracuse.”

The article continued:

Maybe you've heard about former Vice President Al Gore accusing the United States of "terrible abuses" that include "indiscriminately round[ing] up" Arabs and holding them in "unforgivable" conditions. Oh, yeah: The remarks were made on Sunday on foreign soil in Saudi Arabia. If you have heard about this story, it wasn't from a print edition of the Los Angeles Times, who has failed to publish even one word about the episode (as of February 14, 2005)!

Yet the Times has found room for two front-page, above-the-fold headlines in the last two days on the Cheney hunting story. Get this: The headline in today's print edition (Tuesday, February 14, 2006) is, "Cheney Lacked $7 Hunting Credential." That's right. "Cheney Lacked $7 Hunting Credential" merited an above-the-fold headline on page A1 of the LA Times. Yet there is nothing on a former Vice President (who came awfully close to becoming President) criticizing his country on foreign soil? Yikes.

John Dickerson of the Washington Post-owned webzine Slate wrote a piece, posted Monday night, about the Dick Cheney shooting incident. Here's one of Dickerson's paragraphs:

And at some point Cheney's starchy behavior is also insulting. Shouldn't there be some minimum level of explanation he's willing to offer as the second-highest ranking public official? When you nearly commit manslaughter as a public official shouldn't the honor of your office compel you to stand up and explain yourself in some fashion, at least say something in a press release and not just whisper it to a Texas rancher? [Emphasis added.]

Keith Olbermann’s first question to his first guest on Tuesday’s Countdown: “Do the changes in his [Harry Whittington’s] health alter how the event is viewed legally and, under the worse case scenario, could negligent homicide actually come into play?" The guest, Texas Monthly magazine Executive Editor Paul Burka, rejected the supposition: “I would doubt it, because a hunting accidents are seldom treated as homicides.” Olbermann proceeded to suggest Vice President Cheney may have been drunk at the time of the accidental shooting. Olbermann pointed out how the local sheriff's office “issued a statement last night” and it “said no alcohol had been involved.” The MSNBC host ruminated: “But how would they know that? The sheriff's office did not interview the Vice President until 14 hours after all this happened. And the lower ranking sheriff's officers who did not know about the scheduling of that interview for Sunday morning, had been turned away when they tried to talk to Mr. Cheney on Saturday night." (Transcript follows)