Vice President Cheney’s accidental shooting on a south Texas hunting trip has all the makings for a radioactive half-life — and it may possibly produce toxic chatter about the president’s right-hand man for months to come.
Blame it on the lag time between the shooting of Cheney’s friend, Harry Whittington, and the reporting of it to the police. It reeks of the same dynamic Ted Kennedy plunged into when he failed to report his deadly 1969 car accident at Chappaquiddick in a timely manner. Speculation, loony and otherwise, continues to grind away.
Throw in the fact that local police were slow to investigate the Cheney shooting, and you have a recipe for a story that will drift into years of idle conjecture. The stalling just makes people wonder about a cover up of Cheney possibly being drunk on his bird hunt.
As one prominent and very mainstream DC journalist remarked to me today: “And remember that Whittington was shot by low fire — strictly verboten in a quail hunt.”
Of course, this is all a tempest in a teacup, unless you consider a possible propensity for cover ups might also cast its dark shadow over the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby affair. Then it gets more interesting.
And so, Capitol Blue reports thusly:

Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was “clearly inebriated” at the time of the shooting.

The Capitol Blue Web site sometimes makes good news, so the possibility that the sources know what they are talking about is far from remote.

We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to inside information on the Vice President’s shooting “accident” and all admit Secret Service agents and others say they saw Cheney consumed far more than the “one beer’ he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.
“This was a South Texas hunt,” says one White House aide. “Of course there was drinking. There’s always drinking. Lots of it.”

Then again, maybe the story is just blowing smoke up a Grassy Knoll in Dallas where a mythical “second shooter” is said to have helped assassinate JFK.
The Smoking Gun now posts witness statements taken by the Texas sheriff who investigated Cheney’s shooting of his quail hunting buddy. “And while there seems little doubt about how Cheney mistakenly plugged poor Harry Whittington, there still seems to be some disagreement over whether alcohol was consumed by the hunting party.”