That Son of a Gun: After 5 Years, You’d Think Darth Vader Could Offer Up So Much as a Lousy Apology for Shooting & Seriously Injuring a Fellow Hunter.

A story in today’s Washington Post is shedding new light on the February 2006 incident in which then-vice president Dick Cheney shot another hunter on a South Texas ranch. The Post reports that Cheney has never bothered to apologize to the shooting victim, 82-year-old Harry Whittington (pictured immediately above), which sounds like an emotional issue for Whittington. Indeed, new facts disclosed in the Post’s story make it clear that a simple apology is the least that Cheney could do.

First, the Post debunks the prior claims of Cheney and his defenders that Whittington was an “old friend” and “hunting buddy” of Cheney’s. Whittington tells the post that in reality, the two “barely knew each other and had met briefly just three times since the mid-1970s.”

Next, the Post reports that Whittington’s injuries were “more dire than previously disclosed” by Cheney and the Bush administration. As a result of the shooting, Whittington reportedly still has approximately 30 pieces of birdshot inside his body. It’s also reported that some of that birdshot is near his heart, which caused him to suffer a mild heart attack (sending him to the local intensive care unit) in the days that followed the shooting.

The Post also reports that Whittington suffered a collapsed lung and had to have invasive exploratory surgery “to check his vital organs for damage.” Moreover, says the Post, the shooting was very nearly fatal, as “the load from Cheney’s gun came close to, but didn’t damage, the carotid artery in [Whittington’s] neck.”

As the media has reported previously, Cheney did his best Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick impersonation following the shooting. As the linked story details, Cheney didn’t speak to police investigators until the morning following the shooting, and he didn’t inform the media about the shooting until a local Texas newspaper reported it. Just for good measure, Cheney refused to speak to the media about the shooting for days. The only thing missing from that equation was Mary Jo Kopechne and a dead body.

And apparently all of that delay with the police and the media was so that Cheney could get his story straight and, possibly, so that he could fully sober up. In short, the Post’s story raises new questions about Cheney’s conduct on the day of the shooting. The Post questions “whether the circumstances of the accident ‘may have pushed the limits of safety,’ because the group was hunting at dusk and visibility may have been poor; Cheney may not have had a clear line of fire before shooting, and there may have been alcohol involved.”

Of course! We can’t have a Chappaquiddick without some boozin’, now can we? And Cheney’s never denied that he drank that day, instead giving the classic drunk driver response in the days that followed the shooting and claiming that he only “had one beer at lunch” that day. That from a deranged Neo-con whose administration had no trouble deceiving us about the pretext (WMDs) for entering a costly and bloody war in Iraq.

So are you really going to believe the ol’ “I just had one beer, officer” routine? I sure as hell don’t. That story’s about as probable as the chances of Cheney acting like a man one of these days and apologizing to an individual whom Cheney seriously injured and almost killed.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/10/texas-man-shot-by-vice-president-cheney-in-2006-still-waiting-for-apology.html