Bartlett Targets Deadeye Dick
Remember when Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face and then attempted to cover it up by reporting it through the local press? Well, Dan Bartlett wants you to know that that whole cover-up was Dick’s idea demand.
Then there was the time Cheney shot his pal during a hunting accident in Texas."We couldn’t get hold of him for quite a bit of time," Bartlett said."They were strategizing on their own, which as always got me worried. Icalled down there, and I finally get ahold of some of the peopletraveling with him and they kind of laid out their strategy.
" ‘We’re not going to talk about this. We’re going to give it to theCorpus Christi Caller-Times in the morning,’ " Bartlett said. He wasstunned. This little paper couldn’t even find the reporter because itwas the weekend.
"So finally, I said, ‘I have to talk with the vice president directly.I have to intervene in this.’ I get him on the phone. ‘Mr. VicePresident, I know you don’t have any traveling press with you, but weneed to pull together a pool, either get them down there, get you onthe phone with them. We need to work this out.’
"Dead silence." Then: " ‘This is how we’re going to handle it.’
"’Okaaay, Mr. Vice President.’ Hang up the phone and the rest is history," Bartlett recalled.
Then of course, we knew that Cheney was the one behind the cover-up. He seems to be the one behind all the cover-ups in this Administration. Just so you know, though, it wasn’t Dan Bartlett’s fault.
OT – Here is a new one by AT&T. Subscribers are contractually obligated not to say anything bad about the company.
http://www.latimes.com/busines…..ome-center
dead last
See this post.
Seems to me the president could have said, â€Dan, last time I looked I am still the number one guy, so we are going to do it my way.â€
Hypothetically, you know, on paper it looks that way….
Great catch, emptywheel.
Perhaps Cheney’s cover-up explains why the White House Med team there with shooter sent the victim overland by ambulance to a nearby hospital where the Er took one look at the patient – and had him flown to the nearest trauma center.
Cheney was â€hunting†on a mega-ranch with a runway big enough for jets. The Veep’s aircraft and the medics were there.
The White House Med team was obviously competent enough to stabilize a badly wounded elederly man after a severe gunshot wound – if anyone knows about the imporatance of haste after gunshot wound (GSW), it ought to be the White House Med team.
Yet the White House Med team’s stabilized patient was sent via ground – the slow painful way – to a hospital obviously unable to deal with is injuries.
Like the White House (and their med team) don’t know where the closest major trauma center is at any momment?
This wasn’t an error – someone chose to send Shooter’s victim on the path of care most likely to bring about the victim’s death.
Oh – and even after the victim had been medevaced to a proper trauma center (from the local hospital), the next day the White House Med team was still caring for him.
WTF?
We had plenty of GSW victims at UCLA, but we never had the shooter’s pals in to care for them – our doctors did just fine on their own.
Why were Shooter’s Med Team allowed anywhere near their bosses’ victim after he was medevaced to the Trauma Center they failed to send him to when they had the chance?
Jeebus, even in texas one can’t walk through the hospital doors, announce â€hi, I’m a doc†and just get on staff. Hospitals are rather picky about that stuff.
So why the â€evacuation†to nowhere? Who ordered it? And who ordered the local hospital to let the White House Med Team butt into their professional staff?
kirk james murphy, m.d.: Just a thought, but it would not surprise me if DeadEye Dick didn’t sent his good friend Harry Whittington to a â€local†facility first to see if they could get him fixed up without too much fanfare. Sounds like Cheney just wanted to sweep it all under the rug… and too bad about Harry.
I would still like to know how much alcohol was involved…
Dr. Murphy – it would seem to me that the last thing Cheney would want is for the victim to have died – in the event of a death, I don’t think even Big Time could have avoided having this turn into a Republican Chappaquiddick. But your points about keeping the victim away from medical attention that could not be controlled or intimidated are well taken.
Hunting in Texas, in the heat of the day. You know alcohol was involved. Absofreakinlutely.
Dan Bartlett is a first class SOB, as bad as any of the crooked operators in the White House. He was the one holding Stephen Hadley’s leash when Hadley got trotted out to take the blame for including the â€16 words†— a press conference that is a tangle of lies and obfuscation so deep about something so serious it stands for me as one of the worst moments of the administration.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news…..22-12.html
This is the story that should have done Cheney in. But it didn’t. So I guess he handled it pretty well.
sojourner
I was just wondering to myself whether Bartlett talked to Dick before or after he sobered up.
dipper
Yeah, going back to the Watergate thread of the other day, they’ve been doing a great job of cover-up in this Administration. Dick sure learned his lessons with Watergate and Iran_Contra.
In the hunting world, an ’accident’ like Cheney’s is considered an Extreme Red Flag, and cause for an official investigation. If alcohol is determined to be a contributing factor, then it can get very serious. At the least, what Cheney did usually brings a shunning and relegation to â€not fit to handle firearms†status.
Without even taking drinking into consideration, it’s considered extreme recklessness to not â€positively identify your target, what’s around it, and most especially what’s behind it†before you commit to pull the trigger.
The Camp Rule in most hunting clubs that allow alcohol (and more don’t than do) is: Once you drink, no more hunting for that day. So, if Cheney drank at lunch (rumored,) then he shouldn’t have gone on the afternoon hunt.
Which might also explain the initial response to ’lay low’ on the situation before getting the authorities involved at the Armstrong Ranch.
In any case, Cheney handled the whole thing like he was a guilty man trying to hide his actions…even from Bartlett, who got to see all the teeth behind the growl for asking about it.
Whatever the facts may be, it was certainly all about Big Dick’s Big Ego.
As Dipper said, Cheney survived this and even was blessed with an apology from his shooting victim.
(A ’thank you’ from his victim would have been more polite, however).
EW — I had the same thought you did (before or after?) Since no one seems to want to touch that subject publicly, we are left with a vision of a Vice President of the United States who accidentally shoots his â€good friend†and panics. He orders the available medical team to fix him up and take him to a local emergency room and keep it all â€hush-hush†so he won’t look like the idiot he is (for instance, he violated the first rule of gun safety, which is to know what you are shooting at before you pull the trigger). Never mind what it does to good old Harry… Anyway, he proceeds to throw his weight around and take over the trauma center with his medical team, and to heck with what Texas law says (a gunshot wound, as I understand it, requires an official investigation). But, it all worked out in the end — the VP was probably back in front of the fireplace at the end of the day, sipping his favorite libation, and swapping stories.
That is how it would have been reported if the VP in question had been a Democrat… I was just putting a little extra spin on it! (I know, I am evil…)
Such wonderful people we have in public office! On second thought, though, maybe Dick was giving Harry a sporting chance with a few yards’ head start…
Great story, EW… And I am glad that Mr. Whittington recovered with no permanent damage.
Goodness! I think I wrote some â€snarkâ€! (Is that the right word?)
I’ve always wondered if the meds that Dick is on for his various heart issues carry with them an inherent warning about use with alcohol. Do the meds enhance or decrease the effects of alcohol and/or do they increase the duration of the effects? Just thinkin…
This country is in tremendous peril so long as Cheney remains in office. Why are we not impeaching this guy? Bush would be much more malleable with this guy out of office. Cheney must have something big on Bush, elsewise, why would Bush attach his legacy to him? For that matter, he must have had it a long time ago to be able to select himself for the VP post.
…the invisible vice president ….who?
Oh, come on now. My goodness gracious! (grandmom says)
Talk about the war or something. Don’t go off into these dribblings about triple layer conspiracies on minor minor things.
I would never argue with emptywheel’s conclusions that Bartlett is in CYA mode and Cheney’s the cover-up king. But to this retired Psychiatrist, the essence of this story, like almost all Cheney stories is that Dick Cheney is a very paranoid man. Like many paranoid people before him in history, Cheney’s mental illness has been a disaster for the country as he plays it out from a real position of power…
Don’t go off into these dribblings about triple layer conspiracies on minor minor things.
Posted by: Jodi | October 10, 2007 at 17:37
Aren’t they ALL minor minor shit stain shit stain, aren’t they? I looked in on Grandma for you. You really really should visit her in person, the gram-cam just isn’t the same.
â€Hey, I mean, whaddya gonna do? Yeah, I’m da Prezidint’s counselah, I act on behaf of da Prezidint, but ya know, whaddya gonna do when Dick Cheney don’ wanna listen to what da Prezidint wants’im ta do? I mean, da only thing I could pull outa my ass was the Prezidint himself, and that wasn’t gonna do nuthin’.â€
As the Daily Show says this story is not yet over.
We still haven’t heard from Cheney whether he’s accepted Whittingdon’s apology.
This past weekend, Mr FreePatriot.
My two cents worth of a partial explanation for some of this is as follows. Kirk is right about the fact that the slow, painful way to a podunk medical center, as opposed to med helievac or flight from onsite aircraft, is correct; but not because they wanted good ole Harry to die. I think they stabilized him on site and made the determination that death was unlikely and, at that point, the coverup was on. They did not want Harry to die, but they did want to buy as much time as possible….. because drinking was involved and Sojourner is correct that a proper med center or hospital is obligated to notify law enforcement on all gun shot wounds for an immediate investigation. If Harry is airlifted to a proper trauma center/hospital, which would be in a bigger city, the investigation initiated would happen to fast and would be initiated by a much larger and less controllable law enforcement agency. By trucking poor ole Harry over the buckboard pothole trail, they bought invaluable time and insured that the local sheriff, very friendly with and intimidated by the Armstrongs, was the one doing the investigation. Here is why stringing the time frame out is so important: ethanol half lifes, ie is eliminated from the body at a given rate in individuals depending on body characteristics and stomach contents, but at a general assumed average of .015%-.018% per hour. For an older person with a lot of body fat, like Cheney, it would be on the slower end, i.e. .015% or less. The more time is taken before any real investigation, the less chance there would be any alcohol left in Cheney’s system were he to actually be tested. And with friendly and compliant local insider cops, there is less chance of even being tested. If this was their logic, and I think odds are pretty good it was, at least in part; it worked perfectly.
The very first thing Shooter did when he got back to the ranchhouse was… get a drink. THAT told me he was guilty of hunting while drunk, and just needed more alcohol to cover it.
Having all law enforcement, even the friendly local sheriff, kept at bay until the next day told me that he was guilty. If *I* shot somebody, drunk or not, could I tell the police to come back tomorrow? Yeah, sure.
Having the paid ranchhands perjure themselves by amending their sworn statements to write that Cheney had not touched alcohol told me that he was guilty, guilty, guilty.
If Cheney had not been drinking (a real accident), he could have flown with his victim to the hospital. After all, he went running across that field with a tricky heart and ought to have been checked out also. Given his gout, he must have had an adrenaline surge in order to run at all. A paranoid hypochondriac who always keeps a hazmat suit and doctor at hand would have wanted tests as soon as possible. Not just for the pacemaker, he could have jogged loose a blood clot or injured a knee.
There is one law for Cheney and one law for the rest of us.
Don’t go hunting with a man who thinks that laws don’t apply to him.
Meanwhile, hunting while drunk and shooting somebody is at least a misdemeanor, even in Texas.
Hi folks – in reading your thoughtful comments, I’m realizing mine was rather imprecise.
Since the night the news broke, I’ve questioned the slow, painful transfer precisely because of the delay. Who needed the delay? Not the patient? Who had the power to quite literally tell the White House Med Team where to get off?
And who had the power to assure the White House Med Team was there when the patient came out of the major surgery (his GSW clearly required) and started talking?
Even I don’t think Cheney wanted Harry Whittington dead, especially after he shot him.
Sorry I didn’t do a better job of explaining what I meant by the following:
â€This wasn’t an error – someone chose to send Shooter’s victim on the path of care most likely to bring about the victim’s death.â€
With the Med Team’s skills, even though the patient clearly needed the highest level trauma center, a ghoul like Cheney could order the slower route knowing the Med Team could still keep Harry alive. Who would else would have had the motive and power to order the Med Team to avoid the best possible care?
Of course, you smart folk worked it out despite my sloppy writing.
I suppose I’m just re-commenting to clarify that even though I think Cheney’s evil, I didn’t think he was trying to murder Harry Whittington.