From Yahoo.com/AP wire:

WASHINGTON - Vice President
Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was "alert and doing fine" after Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets on Saturday while the two were hunting at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.

Armstrong said Whittington was mostly injured on his right side, with the pellets hitting his cheek, neck and chest, and was taken to the hospital by ambulance.

Whittington was in stable condition Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System.

Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said the vice president was with Whittington, a lawyer from Austin, Texas, and his wife at the hospital on Sunday afternoon.

Armstrong said she was watching from a car while Cheney, Whittington and another hunter got out of the vehicle to shot at a covey of quail late afternoon on Saturday.

Whittington shot a bird and went to look for it in the tall grass, while Cheney and the third hunter walked to another spot and found a second covey.

Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," Armstrong told the Associated Press in an interview.

"The vice president didn't see him," she continued. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."

The shooting was first reported by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

She said Whittington was bleeding but not very seriously injured, and Cheney was very apologetic.

"It broke the skin," she said. "It knocked him silly. But he was fine. He was talking. His eyes were open. It didn't get in his eyes or anything like that."

She said emergency personnel traveling with Cheney tended to Whittington, holding his face and cleaning up the blood.

"Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been," she said. "The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came."

Armstrong said Cheney is a longtime friend who comes to the ranch to hunt about once a year. She said Whittington is a regular, too, but she thought it was the first time the two men hunted together.

"This is something that happens from time to time. You now, I've been peppered pretty well myself," said Armstrong

"The vice president has got an ambulance on call"

Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon.

"This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals," states Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States. "If the Vice President and his friends wanted to sharpen their shooting skills, they could have shot skeet or clay, not resorted to the slaughter of more than 400 creatures planted right in front of them as animated targets."

The Humane Society of the United States deplores the shooting of captive birds and animals where traditional "fair chase" hunting ethics are discarded and kills are guaranteed. We are campaigning to outlaw canned hunts through federal and state legislation and our opposition is more thoroughly delineated in an opinion page essay by Pacelle in today's edition of The New York Times. See the essay at www.nytimes.com/2003/12/09/opinion/09PACE.html.

Any word yet as to whether Whittington was concealing WMD?

Coincidentally, Howard Dean compared Cheney to Aaron Burr today on Face the Nation, but he was talking about the treason thing. Now you could also add the shooting someone thing.

So, now we're going to care about that?

Psst...it was a joke.

I could have made a Bob Knight reference, I guess.

Psst... he's gonna throw chairs into the audience?

No...this is what I meant:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/aug01/b...sp?format=print

Dana Milbank's take on the fact that this wasn't reported for hours, not reported by the White House, and Cheney still doesn't have anything to say:

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004550.htm

Cheney’s got a gun
Cheney’s got a gun
Quail season's just begun
Now everybody is on the run

She said Whittington was bleeding but not very seriously injured, and Cheney was very apologetic.

"It broke the skin," she said. "It knocked him silly. But he was fine. He was talking. His eyes were open. It didn't get in his eyes or anything like that."

Are you kidding? It's a clear cut case of self-defense.

i'll just take your word for it, sin.

next time, can you add some pretty pictures?

I agree with whoever said that this is pretty much a non-event from a political standpoint. But it's cumulative, as in 'what else is left for these guys to screw up?'

February 15, 2006
Political Memo
Handling of Accident Creates Tension Between White House Staffs
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — 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.

No one in Mr. Cheney's office passed the word to Mr. McClellan, senior officials at the White House said, adding that the press secretary would never have joked about the shooting accident if he had known about the turn of events involving Mr. Whittington.

It was the latest example of the degree to which Mr. Cheney's habit of living in his own world in the Bush White House — surrounded by his own staff, relying on his own instincts, saying as little as possible — had backfired since the accident in Texas on Saturday. Mr. Cheney's staff members have kept their comments to chronological details and to repeating the vice president's written statements.

The tension between President Bush's staff and Mr. Cheney's has been palpable, with White House officials whispering to reporters about how they tried to handle the news of the shooting differently. Mr. McClellan, while being careful not to cross Mr. Cheney or his aides directly, has made a point of reminding reporters of how he dealt with Mr. Bush's bicycle accident last summer, when the president collided with a Scottish policeman at the G-8 summit.

"I immediately briefed the press on how the accident had happened, and the condition of the police officer," who was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, Mr. McClellan said.

His message was clear: There was a procedure for conveying this kind of news, and it was not followed in this case.

The past three days have underscored, in public, what has always been clear in the Bush White House: Mr. Cheney plays by rules of his own making. It is the freedom that only a political figure who knows he is in his last job — he often says he will never run again — can get away with.

"What he did was not an irrational thing," said Mary Matalin, Mr. Cheney's former communications adviser, who spoke to him Sunday morning. "This was a very close friend this happened to. Everyone was shaken up about it. When I spoke to him, it was all about Harry, worrying about him," not whether he should get a statement out, or let his South Texas host tell a local newspaper.

To others, though, it is a telling example of the cocoon Mr. Cheney has created within the White House.

Even at the most secure meetings in the White House situation room, Mr. Cheney tends to ask questions but leave the participants guessing about his own views — largely, his colleagues say they suspect, for fear of leaks. His movements, once hidden for security reasons, are now often cloaked out of habit. Several senior members of the administration said they were not told of the shooting accident until late Sunday.

Several White House officials said no one among the White House staff, including the chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., felt empowered to dictate how news of the accident would be handled.

Presumably Mr. Bush could have declared how the news would be disseminated, something he does often on policy matters. Until this week, the periodic disconnect between Mr. Cheney's office and the rest of the White House has been the source of grumbling, but rarely open tension. The most notable exception came in August 2002, when Mr. Cheney, delivering a speech about Iraq, spoke so disparagingly about the utility of past United Nations weapons inspections that he left the impression that the administration would never again use inspections in an effort to assess the threat of Saddam Hussein.

In fact, Mr. Bush had decided to try to send inspectors back in, at least for a while, and it was left to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, to call Mr. Cheney and get him to strike that wording from a speech he was giving a few days later.

In the past five years, Mr. Cheney has grown accustomed to having a power center of his own, with his own miniature version of a national security council staff. It conducts policy debates that often happen parallel those among Mr. Bush's staff.

But the team Mr. Cheney relies on has changed in recent months. The departure of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was indicted late last year on charges stemming from the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. officer's name, left Mr. Cheney without one of his chief confidantes. His most recent communications chief, Steve Schmidt, also departed, to run the re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.

It was unclear if their presence would have made a difference last weekend, when the accident was not disclosed publicly for more than 18 hours. Some former White House officials put the blame for that squarely on Mr. Cheney.

Marlin Fitzwater, who was press secretary to the first President Bush (when Mr. Cheney served as defense secretary), said he was "appalled" at how the vice president handled the news of a serious accident.

"The responsibility for handling this, of course, was Cheney's," Mr. Fitzwater was quoted as saying in the online edition of Editor and Publisher. "What he should have done was call his press secretary and tell her what happened, and she then would have gotten a hold of the doctor and asked him what happened."

A full account could have been put out "in about two hours on Saturday," he said.

Ari Fleischer, Mr. McClellan's predecessor, said Tuesday that he suspected the reason Mr. Cheney failed to say anything publicly was because he viewed the hunting trip and the accident as part of his private life, not his public one.

"If this had been a question of fundamental policy," Mr. Fleischer said, "the president's staff and the veep's staff would have gotten together."

What happens if this guy dies? I mean, I know nothing is going to happen, but what should happen? Manslaughter?

Cheney takes responsibility for shooting
In Fox News interview, VP calls incident 'one of the worst days of my life'
BREAKING NEWS
The Associated Press
Updated: 3:43 p.m. ET Feb. 15, 2006

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday accepted full blame for shooting a fellow hunter and defended his decision to not publicly disclose the accident until the following day. He called it “one of the worst days of my life.”

“I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry,” Cheney told Fox News Channel in his first public comments since the shooting Saturday in south Texas.

Fox’s Brit Hume, who conducted the interview, said Cheney told him he had “a beer” with lunch hours before the accident. Hume said Cheney told him “no one was drinking” while hunting.

Cheney described seeing 78-year-old Harry Whittington fall to the ground after he pulled the trigger while aiming at a covey of quail.

“The image of him falling is something I’ll never ever be able to get out of my mind,” Cheney said. “I fired, and there’s Harry falling. It was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life at that moment.”

Cheney was soft-spoken and somber during the interview.

'It was not Harry's fault'
“You can talk about all of the other conditions that exist at the time but that’s the bottom line and — it was not Harry’s fault,” he said. “You can’t blame anybody else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend.”

Texas officials said the shooting was an accident and no charges have been brought against the vice president.

A report that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department issued Monday said Whittington was retrieving a downed bird and stepped out of the hunting line he was sharing with Cheney.

“Another covey was flushed and Cheney swung on a bird and fired, striking Whittington in the face, neck and chest at approximately 30 yards,” the report said.

Cheney said he fortunately always has a medical team with him, and members of that team responded to Whittington immediately after the accident.

“I ran over to him,” Cheney said. “He was laying there on his back, obviously, bleeding. You could see where the shot struck him.”

He said he has no idea if he hit a bird because he was completely focused on Whittington.

“I said, ‘Harry, I had no idea you were there.’ He didn’t respond,” Cheney said.

Cheney criticized for response
Whittington was reported doing well at a Texas hospital Wednesday after doctors said that a pellet entered his heart and that he had what they called caused “a mild heart attack.”

One pellet from Cheney’s shotgun — just under one-tenth of an inch in diameter — traveled to Whittington’s heart. Hospital officials said the Texan had a normal heart rhythm again Wednesday afternoon and was sitting up in a chair, eating regular food and planning to do some legal work in his room.

Cheney has been roundly criticized for failing to tell the public about the accident until the next day. He said he thought it made sense to let the owner of the ranch where it happened reveal the accident on the local newspaper’s Web site Sunday morning.

“I thought that was the right call,” Cheney said. “I still do.”

Agreed with Armstrong's decision
Cheney said he agreed that ranch owner Katharine Armstrong should make the story public, because she was an eyewitness, because she grew up on the ranch and because she is “an acknowledged expert in all of this” as a past head of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He also agreed with her decision to choose the local newspaper as the way to get the news out.

“I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knew and understood hunting and then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the Web site, which is the way it went out and I thought that was the right call,” Cheney said.

“What do you think now?” he was asked.

“I still do,” Cheney responded. “The accuracy was enormously important. I had no press person with me.”

'Doing extremely well'
Whittington was still in intensive care Wednesday, but only for personal privacy reasons, said Peter Banko, administrator of Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial.

“He’s doing extremely well right now,” Banko said. His doctors have said they are highly optimistic about his recovery.

Through hospital officials, Whittington has declined to comment.

“He still kind of wonders what all the hoopla is about,” Banko said. He said Whittington sees it as “much ado about nothing.”

Cheney was using No. 7½ shot from a 28-gauge shotgun. Shotgun pellets typically are made of steel or lead; the pellets in No. 7½ shot are just under one-tenth of an inch in diameter.

The pellet that traveled to Whittington’s heart was either touching or embedded in the heart muscle near the top chambers, called the atria, officials said.

It caused inflammation that pushed on the heart in a way that temporarily blocked blood flow, what the doctors called a “silent heart attack.” This is not a traditional heart attack where an artery is blocked, and doctors said that Whittington’s arteries were healthy. It invading pellet also irritated the atria and caused an irregular heartbeat.
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

“The image of him falling is something I’ll never ever be able to get out of my mind,” Cheney said. “I fired, and there’s Harry falling. It was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life at that moment.”

The indignity with which the press is reacting to this is hilarious. They are acting like spoiled, petulant children because they weren't told about this immediately, and The White House controlled how info got out.

Its too bad the old coot got plugged, but it was a hunting accident. Not to cheapen the severity of what this guy is facing, but unfortunately these sorts of accidents happen fairly frequently. It was an accident for christ's sakes - not a preemptive strike. The perplexing and unstoppable uproar by the press for the accident itself, which in turn has been overshadowed by the press' petulant reaction to being put on hold for 24 hours, is more the story than the actual story itself.

Here's how this story should have been reported:

"Cheney accidently plugged his buddy with birdshot over the weekend."

"Really? Is the guy o.k."

"Don't know yet. He's in the hospital."

"Damn, that's too bad. Hope he's o.k."

- - - - - -

The end. This is a non-story.

In another related story, I had quail last night for dinner. First time ever eating the little suckers. Damn tasty. I highly recommend, although they're so small they're kinda hard to eat.

No avatar and you still haven't changed your name?

Quail-eating candyass.