NEW YORK--If you haven't anything done wrong you have nothing to hide. Or does that only apply to victims of government wiretapping?

On February 11 Dick Cheney shot one of his quail hunting companions, 78-year-old lawyer Harry Whittington, in the face, neck and chest on the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas. What happened next was astonishing. What happened next was nothing.

No public statement, no press conference, no mention that the world's most powerful politician had blasted a guy with more than 250 shotgun pellets--for nearly 24 hours. Finally Katharine Armstrong, part owner of the ranch and a participant in the hunting party (though not a witness to the shooting), called Cheney for directions.

"Mr. Vice President," she told him, "this is going to be public, and I'm comfortable going to the hometown newspaper."

"You go ahead and do whatever you are comfortable doing," she says he replied. Remember, Cheney is the man 2000 Bush supporters counted on to be the grown-up.

Armstrong reported the incident to the local Corpus Christi Caller-Times, whose story became national after being picked up by the Associated Press wire service.

Talking to the media doesn't come naturally to a vice president who hasn't held a press conference for the last three and a half years, but what about the White House PR machine? Why did they wait so long to let the news out?

Attorney Alan Dershowitz speculates that Cheney may have stalled to cover up drunkenness. "One possibility is that it takes approximately that period of time for alcohol to dissipate in the body and no longer be subject to accurate testing," Dershowitz writes. "It is fairly common for people involved in alcohol-related accidents to delay reporting them until the alcohol has left the body." Cheney has a history of public intoxication, having been twice convicted of DUI.

Sirius Radio's Alex Bennett says that "Cheney and Whittington went hunting with two women (not their wives), there was some drinking, and Whittington wound up shot." Bob Cesca alleges that one of the two women, U.S. ambassador to Switzerland Pamela Willeford is rumored to be "Cheney's Lewinsky." (Major difference: Lewinsky is hot.) Cesca elaborates: "The vice president's Secret Service detail had to decide what to do with Willeford by way of perhaps covering up her relationship with Cheney, and thus the delay in reporting the news."

Or maybe the cover-up was motivated by something more prosaic than getting plastered or getting laid: Cheney knew the shooting was his fault. Statements that he was "focused on the quail" indicate a phenomenon hunters call "target fixation"--when a shooter is so concentrated on shooting his target that he loses awareness of what's going on around him. Moreover, quail hunters are supposed to wait until the birds take flight before firing their guns. Cheney's victim was about 30 yards away, indicating that he shot his 28-guage straight across the ground.

Cheney probably didn't blow away his friend on purpose (although, without an investigation, we can't know for sure). But the story still matters, particularly because he waited so long to tell it. In 1969 Senator Ted Kennedy drove Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, near Martha's Vineyard. The fact that Kennedy waited nine hours to report the accident to the police, more than the accident itself, prompted the endless speculation that ensured that he will never become president. Cheney should be held to the same standard.

What should we do? What should we say? They're typical questions after things go wrong. Logic dictates that, if he had nothing to hide, Cheney would have told his companions to tell the truth. There's only one reason to let hour after hour slip away, knowing full well that your delay will add chum to the media feeding frenzy: you need time to make sure everyone gets their story--your story--straight.

As usual for the Bush Administration, the Cheney shooting raises more questions than answers. The Secret Service wouldn't let Cheney run down to Connecticut Avenue to buy pizza. So why do they let him play with guns? If he likes killing things, why did he apply for five draft deferments during the Vietnam War? And most pressing: how stupid does White House press secretary Scott McClellan think we are?

"Why is it that it took so long for the president, for you, for anybody else to know that the vice president accidentally shot somebody?" asked a reporter.

"You know what [Cheney's] first reaction was? His first reaction was, go to Mr. Whittington and get his team in there to provide him medical care." McClellan went on to suggest that the media focus on Bush's healthcare savings account plan.

If a millionaire like Whittington was forced to wait 24 hours to see a doctor, our healthcare system is in even bigger trouble than I thought.

Ted Rall, Is America's hardest-hitting editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is an award-winning commentator who also works as an illustrator, columnist, and radio commentator. Visit his website http://tedrall.com

At dusk, Whittington, a 78-year-old Austin lawyer and local Republican fixer, shot a bird and went to retrieve it behind the others. Hearing rustling in the bushes, Cheney, who has lately been using a cane in public and wearing two different shoes for comfort, reportedly quickly swiveled 180 degrees, 28-gauge shotgun in hand, and fired at what he believed were quails, but instead hit Whittington, 30 yards distant. "He got peppered pretty good," Armstrong said. "There was some bleeding, but it wasn't horrible. He was more bruised." The circumstances of this hunt were different from Cheney's previously celebrated 2003 hunt at the Rolling Rock Club in Pennsylvania, where he, Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and eight others killed 417 pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks specifically raised for the purpose of being herded before the hunters to shoot. At that time, Cheney released to the press the information that he had personally killed 70 pheasants. In the less controlled environment of the Armstrong Ranch, the only known target he hit was Whittington.

"There may have been a beer or two"

The details of the story related by Armstrong, however, defied practical experience and were contradictory. Armstrong told NBC News that while she believed that no one was drinking alcohol, beer may have been served at lunch. "There may have been a beer or two in there," she said, "but remember not everyone in the party was shooting." Armstrong's statement about beer appeared on the MSNBC Web site, but was subsequently and inexplicably scrubbed. Dr Pepper replaced beer in later versions of Armstrong's telling. On the Hunting Accident and Incident Report Form of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the shooter, Richard B. Cheney, checked the "No" box for the question, "Under the apparent influence of intoxicants or drugs?" But in an interview with Fox News Wednesday, Cheney admitted to having a beer earlier in the day, contrary to his statement to Texas officials.

The murky method by which Cheney decided to handle the disclosure of the shooting was guaranteed to raise questions about the incident. He behaved secretly, evaded standard protocol and brushed aside his obligations to the law. Unless Whittington dies, precipitating a grand jury probe, requiring witnesses to testify separately under oath, the true story may never be known, despite Cheney's Fox interview.

Whether or not the exact facts of the case are ever conclusively established, what happened at twilight in the south Texas brush has revealed the hierarchy of power within the Bush White House and the interests of those who wield that power. The surreptitious handling inside the White House of the shooting, moreover, cannot be understood apart from the society of Texas royalty and the ambitions of those, like Cheney and Karl Rove, who aspire to it. None of it is metaphoric.

Managing Bush

About an hour after the shooting, an unidentified traveling aide of the vice president's called the White House Situation Room, which put him in touch with Chief of Staff Andrew Card. Why a call would be routed through the Situation Room, which receives and transmits only national security information, rather than the very capable and secure White House switchboard, remains mysterious. Card was deliberately misled, told only that there was an accident in Cheney's party, not that Cheney was involved. The vice president's staff obviously felt no need to inform the president's chief of staff of the true facts of the matter. Why Card was deceived is also mystifying, except insofar as it reflects the vice president's instinctive view of him as someone to be routinely stepped over and around. Card, acting responsibly, promptly called President Bush, who as a result was momentarily kept in the dark. Confusing Card was a way of managing Bush, and yet ...

Enter Rove. Within minutes of the call to Card, the president's chief political advisor and deputy chief of staff spoke with Katharine Armstrong, an old friend of his, who told him that Cheney had shot Whittington. Who initiated this conversation is unknown. In any case, Rove, not the duped Card, informed the president of what had actually transpired.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan was left out of the loop until the next morning. Instead, Armstrong, not anyone from the White House, disclosed the news that the vice president had shot Whittington to her local newspaper. It seems fair to infer that Cheney left Rove the task of coaching her. Twenty hours after the accident, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times printed its report; then it slowly filtered to the national press corps, which was never alerted by the White House.

Armstrong's account blaming the victim bore the mark of a classic Rove-engineered statement. No one at the White House had yet to say a word. The president, though he was well aware, made no query that would have ensured that in this extraordinary event the White House was operating properly and according to the letter of the law. Whether ignorant or informed, he remained passive, deferring to Cheney and Rove.

The royal family

Both the vice president and the deputy chief of staff, as it happens, owed their previous, lucrative jobs in the private sector to their relationships with the Armstrong family. Anne Armstrong, Katharine's mother, was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick Cheney its chief executive officer. Tobin Armstrong, Katharine's father, had financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove's political consulting firm. Katharine herself is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts, a major Texas power broker since it was founded in the 19th century by the family of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and close associate of George H.W. Bush's.

Katharine Armstrong took up lobbying after her recent divorce. Her contracts include Parsons, a construction firm that has done work in Iraq, among others. Her business partner, Karen Johnson, a close friend of Rove's, does extensive business with the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and defense contractors. But Armstrong's protestations to news media that she does not lobby Cheney should probably be taken at face value given her background.

Katharine Armstrong is linked to two family fortunes -- those of Armstrong and King -- that include extensive corporate holdings in land, cattle, banking and oil. No one in Texas, except perhaps Baker, but certainly not latecomer George W. Bush, has a longer lineage in its political and economic elite. In 1983, Debrett's Peerage Ltd., publisher of "Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage," printed "Debrett's Texas Peerage," featuring "the aristocrats of Texas," with the King family noted as the "Royal Family of Ranching." The King Ranch, founded by Richard King in 1857, is the largest in Texas, and its wealth was vastly augmented by the discovery of oil on its tracts, making the family a major shareholder of Exxon. The King Ranch is the model for Edna Ferber's novel of Texas aristocracy, "Giant."

John B. Armstrong, a Texas Ranger and enforcer for the King Ranch, founded his own neighboring ranch in 1882, buying it with the bounty of $4,000 he got for capturing the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. In 1944, almost inevitably, the two fortunes became intertwined through marriage. Tobin Armstrong's brother John married the King Ranch heiress, who was also a Vassar classmate of Tobin's wife, Anne, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family.

"Royalty relief" for oil

The Armstrong Ranch developed far-flung holdings in Australia and South America. Meanwhile, President Ford appointed Anne, a major Republican activist, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, and President Reagan appointed her a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is reportedly Anne's best friend, and Anne was instrumental in launching her political career. Tobin, for his part, worked as an advisor to Texas Republican Gov. William Clements, where he first encountered the young Karl Rove and decided to give him a helping hand when Rove struck out in the political business on his own.

The Armstrong family's Republican connections have continued and strengthened down to the latest generation of Bushes. Gov. George W. Bush appointed Anne a regent of Texas A&M University and Katharine a commission member of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the agency that filed the report on the Cheney shooting. At Tobin's funeral last year, Cheney delivered the eulogy.

While the incident continues to unfold, the Bush administration is pressing a new budget in which oil companies would receive what is called "royalty relief," allowing them to pump about $65 billion of oil and natural gas from federal land over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government, costing the U.S. Treasury about $7 billion. For Texas royalty like the Armstrongs, it would amount to a windfall profit.

The curiosities surrounding the vice president's accident have created a contemporary version of "The Rules of the Game" with a Texas twist. In Jean Renoir's 1939 film, politicians and aristocrats mingle at a country house in France over a long weekend, during which a merciless hunt ends with a tragic shooting. Appearing on the eve of World War II, "The Rules of the Game" depicted a hypocritical, ruthless and decadent ruling class that made its own rules and led a society to the edge of catastrophe.

Did it look suspicious to me that these four were together? Sure - I admit it. All the secrecy and evasion about the event, and about who was there, couldn't help but raise suspicions. But if the facts show that there was no funny business between Cheney and either of the women, that's fine with me. This Administration has already generated so many scandals it's exceeded my absorptive capacity.

There were more important factors than sex behind my Chappaquiddick analogy. (That analogy seems to drive conservatives insane, by the way. The hate mail and even threats I've received are beyond anything I've ever seen. I guess the word's been such a treasured icon of hate for them that the possible loss of it drives them into a frenzy.)

Here are some of the "C" (for Chappaquiddick) factors in the Cheney shooting:

1. Someone with a documented history of drinking problems causes a serious accident, and then avoids the authorities for a period of time - one that happens to be long enough to get the alcohol out of his system.

2. The first stories of the accident are confusing and self-contradictory. (In this case, since Cheney didn't speak himself, the most glaring inconsistencies are Armstrong's. Specifically, she - and now Cheney - describe her as an eyewitness, although she told the Associated Press she thought at first Cheney had suffered a heart attack. That would mean she never saw the shooting.)

3. A powerful figure holds himself out as being above the law, and - at least for a time - appears to get away with it.

4. When the powerful person finally speaks, allegedly to 'come clean,' there are still inconsistencies and glaring contradictions in his story.

It's about power, drinking, irresponsibility, and dishonesty. If there was no romance going on, the issues are still the same. As the song says: What's love got to do with it?

I had a little off-the-air discussion with Tucker about whether this story is important. He, along with many conservatives and a few liberals, have said it's been overblown. I disagree.

I think conservatives got one thing right during the Clinton years: Character matters. Not as in "let's spend $40 million to investigate a sex act," but as in: Are the people running the country honest? Will they lie to officers of the law? Break the rules? Mislead the public? And - most critically in this case - is someone with an active drinking problem helping to lead the most powerful nation on earth?

I don't know all the answers, but I consider them damned good questions. It's time the press took them more seriously.

The suggestion's also been made that I and others are trafficking in "unfounded allegations." Unfortunately, it's the local Sheriff's Office and the national media that have been caught trafficking in unfounded allegations.

On Cheney's say-so alone, the Sheriff's Office issued a report saying no drinking was involved in the incident. Now the Vice President allows that he had "one beer" a few hours earlier. One is not none - meaning that by Cheney's word alone the Sheriff's report is wrong. (And we just have his word about the "one beer" - that being one of the liquored-up world's most notoriously untrustworthy phrases.)

As Talk Left has reported, the Kleberg County DA says he may have to convene a Grand Jury should Mr. Whittington die. What would he have for an accident report now, should that unfortunate need arise? He'd have a partially discredited work product from investigators who didn't see the shooter until the next day.

As for the media, they repeated the words "pepper" and "spray" so much it sounded like they were ordering a steak salad at the Ivy. That, and "superficial wounds" - until the heart attack, that is. They insisted that no drinking was involved, too - but today the Vice President said otherwise.

Now we have Cheney's Brit Hume interview. Have our questions been answered? About as much as the questions about Ted Kennedy were answered when he first described the swimming he did that night. To be fair, Hume was a little tougher than I - and probably Cheney - expected. Yet he never asked him the most critical question of all: Why the delay in meeting with law enforcement?

Tucker wanted to know if I regretted the Chappaquiddick analogy, now that they've said that the Ambassador's husband was in town. My answer: I regret that there's been so much evasion, deception, and covering up over this incident that any of us have been forced to collect the facts on our own. America deserves better from its leaders. And I regret bringing up painful memories for the Kennedy and Kopechne families.

Ted Kennedy eventually came clean on his accident, and by all reports he's straightened his life out. All of our leaders should do the same. It's about character. It matters.

THE SHOOTER

Hunting, for Dick Cheney, is more than an idle pastime. It's usually a chance to get together with high-level friends and fundraisers and do so on exclusive private estates where there is no danger of contact with the great unwashed public.

Unfortunately for him, it's also rapidly turning into a political liability - and not just because he was unable to shoot straight last weekend.

In December 2003, animal rights activists and conventional hunters were incensed when he participated in a kill of pen-raised pheasants at the Rolling Rock Club in Pennsylvania. Up to 500 birds were released directly in front of the Vice-President and his 10-strong party. Together, they shot 417 of them in minutes - including 70 reportedly shot by Mr Cheney.

Then, while the hunters moved on to duck and other fowl, underlings plucked and vacuum-packed the pheasant for Mr Cheney to take them back on his flight to Washington. "We're appalled so many animals were killed - for target practice essentially," the Humane Society said. The following month, Mr Cheney was in trouble again - for taking Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on a waterfowl-hunting expedition to Louisiana at a time when the Supreme Court was ruling on whether Mr Cheney could keep secret the names of the energy lobbyists who visited him while he was drawing up a major new energy policy initiative. Both men denied any impropriety but the episode did no good to either of their reputations.

The whole style of hunting favoured by the Vice-President has been ridiculed as a rich man's parody of what hunting is supposed to be. Granted, Mr Cheney has to travel with a security detail and a large staff of medical personnel watching for signs of recurring cardiac trouble. That makes it hard for him to brave the great outdoors, even if he wanted to.

But the notion of driving around a private estate in four-wheel-drive cars and emerging periodically to fire off a round or two of shotgun pellets has opened Mr Cheney to widespread ridicule.

Andrew Gumbel

THE VICTIM

Harry Whittington is, pardon the expression, a rare bird: a liberal Texas Republican. He is not a religious fanatic, nor is he a "string-'em-up" law and order man. On the contrary, he's been campaigning for years to clean up the Texas prison system and prevent the execution of the mentally disabled. He's a reformer all round - an old-fashioned social activist whose distaste for government corruption crosses the usual party lines.

From his law office on the top floor of an office building next to the state capitol in Austin, he has been dispensing advice and serving on state boards for decades. He was a Republican already at the tail end of the racial segregation period when Texas was a de facto one-party state run by the Democrats. His politics were defined, in fact, by his visceral mistrust of the Democratic establishment. And he has remained a Republican even as the state party has been taken over by the Christian right.

So what was he doing out shooting with Dick Cheney, an altogether harder brand of ideologue? Mr Whittington's links to the Bush administration go back to 1999, when George Bush was governor of Texas and Mr Whittington was appointed to service on the state Funeral Services Commission - another opportunity to sniff out official corruption. He then became a fundraiser in Bush's two presidential election campaigns.

The extent of his friendship with Cheney is hard to assess - especially now - but the two have moved in very similar elite circles in Texas for several years. By all accounts, Mr Whittington, 78, was in good shape, keeping trim, eating plates of vegetables for lunch every day, and sticking to his old-fashioned habits. Not only does his office not run on computers but he still hasn't got used to the idea of lawyers billing their clients by the hour.

It is not known what he has said to Cheney or how he feels about the incident. Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the ranch where the shooting occurred, assured the local paper a lawsuit was out of the question. "I bet this would deepen their friendship," she gushed.

Andrew Gumbel

THE RANCH

The Armstrong Ranch, a 50,000-acre spread in a remote part of the Rio Grande River Valley, was founded in the 1880s by John Armstrong III, a lawman most famous for bagging the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. Since then, the Armstrong family has mingled the rough ways of Texas ranch life with elite university educations, high-flying corporate careers and high-level Republican Party politics.

Tobin Armstrong, who died last year, was one of the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign's top fundraisers in 2004. (Dick Cheney delivered the eulogy at his funeral.) His widow, Anne Armstrong, served as Ambassador to the Court of St James under President Ford - making friends with Prince Charles, who has played polo at the ranch. Their daughter Katharine, who first broke the news of the shooting, is a lobbyist who has quickly climbed the ladder of her chosen profession thanks to her impeccable high-level contacts in Washington.

She has slept at the White House and was at President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, last summer while Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, and her anti-war protester friends were camped outside.

Hunting is a big ritual at the Armstrong Ranch, one of a number of exclusive private properties where hunting for birds and game has increasingly become restricted in recent years. We don't know exactly how the ranch operates, but birds are typically raised in pens and then released for special occasions - such as last weekend - so visiting luminaries can descend from their four-wheel-drives and start shooting pretty much immediately.

For quail hunting, Katharine Armstrong explained that the protocol is for hunters to move in groups of three, keeping track of each other at all times. Harry Whittington appears to have fallen behind at one stage to bag a bird he had shot. But hunting rules also make it clear - as Vice-President Cheney himself has acknowledged - that the shooter needs to know what he is aiming at all times.

Ironically, the hunting party could hardly have found itself in a spot with fewer people around. Kennedy County is larger than the state of Rhode Island but has a population of barely more than 400 - an average of 0.3 people per square mile. It is, in fact, one of the 10 most sparsely populated counties in the whole of the United States.

Andrew Gumbel

THE COVER-UP

When Dick Cheney repaired to Republican-friendly Fox News to publicly take responsibility for the shooting slip-up, he said he was sorry, defended the delays in informing the press of the shooting and said no one had been drinking. Then he let slip one small detail: he had consumed "a beer at lunch".

The beer revelation doesn't mean Cheney was inebriated. (Though we don't know whether mixing beer with all the medicines he takes is a good idea.) But, yet again, the impression was left that, aside from Mr Whittington, the other victims of this have been candour and truth.

First there was the 20-hour gap between the time of the shooting and the news reaching the American public.The White House was told the same night but said nothing the next morning. Cheney had agreed to allow his host, Katharine Armstrong, to disseminate the news. She called her local paper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. It put the news on its website only on Sunday afternoon. On Monday, there was uproar in the White House press corps. Nobody could accuse Cheney of a cover-up exactly but there was outrage that mainstream news organisations had not learned of the accident immediately. The conclusion many reached was that Cheney was, at best, hoping to downplay the accident.

Two more things came to light on Monday, which kept this story alive for the best part of a week. Cheney's office revealed the Vice-President had not paid for a $7 "upland bird" stamp required. And asked in an interview if alcohol had been served, Ms Armstrong said flatly, "No, zero, zippo." Really? And then, at about 9.30am on Tuesday news arrived at the White House that Whittington had suffered a minor heart attack. Again it was hours before the rest of America knew. Scott McClellan, above, was informed before his noon briefing to White House reporters. Did he tell them of it? Somehow, he omitted to.

David Usborne

THE PREY

In his novel, 'A Man in Full', Tom Wolfe describes quail as "the aristocrat of American wild game ... what the grouse and the pheasant were in England and Scotland and Europe only better." His protagonist, wealthy Atlanta businessman Charlie Croker, goes on: "With the grouse and the pheasant you had your help literally beating the bushes and driving the birds toward you. With the quail, you had to stay on the move. You had to have great dogs, great horses, and great shooters. Quail was king. Only the quail exploded upward into the sky and made your heart bang away so madly in your rib cage."

That may not be an entirely accurate description of what Dick Cheney and friends were experiencing last weekend - it appears they were driven to areas where the quail were pleasantly thick on the ground - but that pulsing sensation of seeing them spread out in the air for a few crucial seconds certainly squares with descriptions of the ill-fated hunting party. The impulse to fire impulsively in all directions is a big part of the reason why quail hunters usually wear bright orange jackets to identify themselves. Accidents are now relatively rare, thanks to toughened hunter training rules in Texas but the risk is still ever-present.

It used to be that quail were relatively abundant in Texas, and across much of the American South. Over-hunting has cut those numbers drastically. The Texas Parks and Wildlife department's forecast puts the average number of bobwhite quail in the region around the Armstrong ranch at 4 per route - the number a hunting party is likely to see in a day - down from 19.5 in the 1980s. The numbers for scaled quail, which appears to be what Cheney was hunting, are even lower - no more than 1.55 birds per route.

The sport is almost entirely restricted to private ranches that can raise birds and hold special weekends. At 50,000 acres, the Armstrong Ranch is therefore one of the few locations in the US fit to serve a Vice-President and his friends pretty much any time they want.

Andrew Gumbel

THE JOKES

For the Vice-President, it was "one of the worst moments of my life." But for comedians, Democrats and legions of Cheney-haters, the "shot heard around the world" made it one of the best in a long while. Of late, there hasn't been much to laugh about in Washington but the winging of the unfortunate lawyer changed that. "Good news, ladies and gentlemen," said David Letterman, right, on CBS: "We have finally located weapons of mass destruction: It's Dick Cheney." The bad news though for Whittington: "Donald Rumsfeld didn't issue him with body armour."

On the late night shows, the blogs, on Capitol Hill and around the legendary office water-cooler, it was open season on "Deadeye Dick." Hunting small wild animals, noted one Washington Post blogger "is what passes for military service in the top echelons of the Bush administration".

"You know who's doing a 'there but for the grace of God go I'? Scalia," the comedian Al Franken wrote on his website, referring to Cheney's duck-hunting pal, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

There were jokes against Mr Whittington too (at least until it was disclosed on he suffered a minor heart attack). "Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer," said Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show. "In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 per cent." The next day, even the White House tried to get into the act. For safety reasons, hunters normally wear bright orange jackets. That morning, the University of Texas football champions were invited to drop in by the president, wearing their orange colours. "But that's not because they fear Dick Cheney is in the audience," quipped Mr Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan. Republicans have sought partisan advantage in the affair. T-shirts are available bearing the logo "I'd rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than driving with Ted Kennedy."

Rupert Cornwell

They were on a 50,000-acre ranch, one of the largest private properties in Texas. Katharine Armstrong, who owns the ranch, said Harry Whittington, who was shot in the face, did not announce, did not say, "Hey, it's me, I'm coming up." Which is protocol. So as the lawyer stepped out of the brush the birds flew and Dick Cheney turned and fired. There was no time for diplomacy, no time to wait, take a good look at the vest, colored by blood lust and spackled in sunlight. Because if you wait too long you don't get the bird. There are consequences for not firing your weapons; those tasty little beasts might fly away.

If Cheney is right, and he shoots the bird, there are feathers and pieces of beak and the stringy innards caught in the branches, but that's not what happened. He did not achieve his objective.

Here's the weird thing. Katharine Armstrong is presenting the evidence that Harry Whittington didn't follow protocol. But how the hell would she know? Who told Katharine that Harry didn't announce? Who is complicit in this narrative? Why would we take her at her word without knowing where she received her information? Harry leaves the group. He is between the other hunters and the vice president. Maybe Cheney hears him, maybe he doesn't. Only Harry knows whether he announced or did not. It seems unlikely that he didn't.

There was an ambulance there and medical technicians. They were with the vice president. They always are. Harry was airlifted to the Christus Spohn Memorial Hospital where he is listed in stable condition but housed in intensive care.
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It's scary and obvious how similar this is to America's invasion of Iraq. We had to go into Iraq immediately because they could mobilize their nuclear weapons within hours and their secret programs were moments away from completing an arsenal of radioactive invasion deterrent. When it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction it wasn't our fault. After all, everybody thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. After all, Harry didn't follow protocol. We had to go in right away. There was no time to let the weapons inspectors finish their work. Guide those missiles into Baghdad, burn down the sky, turn quickly and fire or you will miss the bird. And when tens of thousands of people die because of a mistake don't ever take responsibility for it. After all, he didn't follow protocol. How were we to know Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction? Saddam was not cooperating. Harry brought it on himself.

Let's say you are responsible for more than 2,000 American casualties; should you be allowed to walk armed through the woods? At what point do you lose your hunting license? The worst thing is that a person who has responsibility for a blunder that has already caused so much death is allowed to carry a shotgun. A shotgun! I don't believe that Harry didn't follow protocol. I see no reason why I should. I won't accuse Harry of not following protocol. But I will accuse him of not reading the news. Did he have any idea the danger he was in? He was wearing a bright orange vest. He was in the woods with Dick Cheney and Dick Cheney had a gun.

Can media bias be detected in the endless coverage? Sure, always. But it's also a great story. A vice president of the United States shot a guy in a hunting accident, and no one on his staff told the press. That's a story.

But as a scandal I'm not sure it has a big future. The vice president yesterday offered the facts as he observed and experienced them. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry" is a pretty direct statement. His recounting of the decision on how to handle it in the press seemed to reflect only incompetence, not malevolence.

Right now in the White House they're discussing how to help the vice president get through his problem. They've already tried the wearing of orange ties, an attempt to take the sting out of the incident by showing they don't feel the sting. Duck! Ha ha!

But what are they thinking that they're not saying? Here's a hunch, based not on any inside knowledge but only on what I know of people who practice politics, and those who practice it within the Bush White House.

I suspect what they're thinking and not saying is, If Dick Cheney weren't vice president, who'd be a good vice president? They're thinking, At some time down the road we may wind up thinking about a new plan. And one night over drinks at a barbecue in McLean one top guy will turn to another top guy and say, "Under the never permeable and never porous Dome of Silence, tell me . . . wouldn't you like to replace Cheney?"

Why would they be thinking about this? It's not the shooting incident itself, it's that Dick Cheney has been the administration's hate magnet for five years now. Halliburton, energy meetings, Libby, Plamegate. This was not all bad for the White House: Mr. Cheney took the heat that would otherwise have been turned solely on George Bush. So he had utility, and he's experienced and talented and organized, and Mr. Bush admires and respects him. But, at a certain point a hate magnet can draw so much hate you don't want to hold it in your hand anymore, you want to drop it, and pick up something else. Is this fair? Nah. But fair has nothing to do with it.

This is a White House that likes to hit refresh when the screen freezes. Right now the screen is stuck, with poll numbers in the low 40s, or high 30s.

The key thing is Iraq. George Bush cares deeply about Iraq and knows his legacy will be decided there. It has surely dawned on the White House that "Iraq" will not be "over" in the next two years. Iraq is a long story. What Dick Armitage or Colin Powell said about the Pottery Barn rule was true: If you break it, you own it, at the very least for the next few years.

George Bush, and so the men and women around him, will want the next Republican presidential nominee to continue the U.S. effort in, and commitment to, Iraq. To be a candidate who will continue his policy, and not pull the plug, and burrow through.

This person will not be Dick Cheney, who has already said he doesn't plan to run. So Mr. Bush may feel in time that he has reason to want to put in a new vice president in order to pick a successor who'll presumably have an edge in the primaries--he's the sitting vice president, and Republicans still respect primogeniture. They will tend to make the common-sense assumption that a guy who's been vice president for, say, a year and a half, is a guy who already knows the top job. Anyway, the new guy will get a honeymoon, which means he won't be fully hated by the time the 2008 primaries begin.

This new vice president would, however, have to be very popular in the party, or the party wouldn't buy it. Replacing Mr. Cheney would be chancy. The new veep would have to get through the Senate, which has at this point at least three likely contenders for the nomination, at least two of whom who would not, presumably, be amused.

Plus there's more quiet anti-administration feeling in the party than is generally acknowledged, and the president's men know it. A lot of people would find such a move too cute by half. The contenders already in line--and their supporters, donors, fans, staff and friends in the press--would resent it. Big time.

People wouldn't like it . . . unless they liked it. How could they be persuaded to like it?

It would have to be a man wildly popular in the party and the press. And it would have to be a decision made by Dick Cheney. If he didn't want to do it he wouldn't have to. If he were pressed--Dick, we gotta put the next guy in here or we're going to lose in '08 and see all our efforts undone--he might make the decision himself. He'd have to step down on his own. He's just been through a trauma, and he can't be liking his job as much now as he did three years ago. No one on the downside of a second term does, hate magnet or not.

Of course, all this is exactly like the sort of thing people blue-skied about in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was in trouble and a lot of people urged him to hit refresh by dumping Dan Quayle. He didn't. George W. Bush loves to do what his father didn't.

Who would it be? Someone who's a strong supporter of Iraq, and, presumably, the Bush doctrine.

Who would that be? That's what I suspect the president's men are asking themselves. But silently.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.