By Miguel Murado

PRESIDENT Bush sent a warning not long ago: The White House was going to take a much more aggressive stance. You bet: To begin with, Vice-president Cheney has just shot a guy in Texas. The hardening of the stance is quite apparent. What we didn’t expect was that the House officials themselves would have to preach with their own example, nor that Dick Cheney would become the first US vice-president to shoot someone since Burr killed Treasure Secretary Hamilton in a duel some hundred years ago.

Luckily, Cheney’s marksmanship doesn’t match Burr’s and his victim has only injuries (not light, though). Besides, everything seems to point (unfortunate choice of words, I know) to an accident rather than to a terror attack. What happened is that the VP was out hunting quail in Texas with some wealthy Republican supporters when, according to the official version, Mr. Whittington interfered between hardliner Cheney and his prey, something you must never do--especially when it comes to Cheney. The end result is that Whittington was hit by a pellet shot, to the horror of the vice-presidential entourage and, I assume, a general rejoicing of the quails.

Alright, let’s admit that there is no criminal intent in this case, since Whittington happens to be an important fund-raiser for Cheney’s campaigns (a different matter is whether he will vote for him or his acolytes in any future election). What interests me about this whole business is the self-exculpatory reasoning emerging from the White House. It is just a pure, perfect political metaphor. The hunters I know tell me that whenever you shoot somebody, it’s always your fault. Yours alone is the responsibility of making sure that you’re not hitting anyone (excluding the quail, needless to say). However, Cheney, consistent with his idea that innocents are simply in the wrong place when they find themselves under a bombing raid, is applying the same logic here. And with similar results, it seems: The quail flew (and is probably now safely hiding with Bin Laden) and a republican voter landed in the ICU, where doctors say he is “out of danger”, either referring to his medical condition or to the fact that Cheney is now miles away in Washington.

Without a doubt, Cheney, who has always been a supporter of a “shoot first, ask later” policy, as illustrated by his backing of the death penalty and guns-for-all, seems to have found here, unwittingly, an efficient way to combine those three beliefs in a single act of his private life; a private life that looks more and more like his public one.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 16 February 2006