Dick Cheney Shooting Mishap

Relax? This isn't some partisan screed where I try to link dick Cheney's misuse of a shotgun to our invasion of Iraq. One was an accident, the other was deliberate.

But that's not the point.

As the world now knows, last Saturday, the vice president shot a guy named Harry instead of a bird called a quail.

That by itself -- Cheney shooting a man -- is a big news story. No matter how it happened, where it happened or when it happened.

Shortly after the shooting though, common sense and minimal human curiosity became casualties. And that, I would submit, did more to create frenzy than anything else.

Try this one on for size: two hours after the shot was fired, Andy Card, the White House chief of staff and a nice man too, told the president about the hunting accident in Texas.

But Card didn't know Cheney had done the shooting and apparently Bush never asked.

What's up with that?

Are both men so lacking in curiosity that they didn't ask the Secret Service basic questions, like: what happened? Who got shot? Is Dick OK?

Then, Sunday, Cheney couldn't summon the common sense to say exactly what he said to Brit Hume last night on Fox: it was a terrible thing. An accident. He felt awful. And he was worried sick about his friend.

Had he done that, this tsunami of a news story would have been a one day ripple and the media would have looked even more foolish, mean-spirited and agenda-driven than usual chasing it.

It makes you wonder how truly isolated, ideologically driven, paranoid and partisan things are in Washington when a guy -- even a seriously secretive vice president -- can't admit to a human mistake without measuring it in terms of politics rather than a ruler most of us are forced to employ every day: good, old fashioned common sense.