There is a lesson for all politicians who love wild gaming: When in doubt, shoot thyself.

HUNTER SHOOT THYSELF.

BY JOHN NARAYAN PARAJULI

WHEN YOUR BAD TIME COMES, as one saying in Sanskrit goes, your own judgment works against you, Vice President Dick Cheney’s ill fortune might have just begun with that big bang that was heard all over the world.

It’s hard to gauge the exact ferocity of the thud that nearly killed a man, and threatened to implicate America’s second most powerful politician, who Newsweek calls the “new avatar of the executive power,” in a legal battle. Judging by the media coverage, the Veep’s one hunting misadventure was bigger than any other national event—coming close to hurricane Katrina, in airtime minutes coverage per day at least.

A mere hunting trip-turned-tragedy may have been at the eye of the storm, but there are bigger things at play and it will be a long time before the controversy actually dies down. It has been weeks since Cheney took the fatal aim, yet the story still occupies a chunk of American media coverage.

Cheney is the most powerful vice president in American history. Commentators and critics have often wondered if he is the real guy pulling the strings behind this administration. On the day of 9/11, Cheney reportedly ordered the shooting down of the hijacked jets without a prior authorization from the president. Although these details may seem beside the point, they are indeed relevant to weave together the threads that are connected to a man who operates in highest secrecy.

Cheney’s skulking secretiveness makes the liberal media detest him. By refusing to hold press conferences since 2002, he has already angered journalists assigned to cover him and his part of the administration. Secrecy and media don’t go together; that’s not surprising. What is surprising is how the hosts of media outlets have turned Vice President Cheney into an embodiment of everything wrong with this administration. The anti-Bush commentaries in the media have overnight become anti-Cheney.

Why has Cheney suddenly become the scapegoat for the Bush administration? Someone who believes in astrological truthfulness might say: “Your bad time has come, pal.” That’s not all. A lot of things have been going wrong around him. He’s having a rough second term. Even before he earned the title of “shooter-in-chief” he had to fire his buddy Scooter Libby amid a media uproar over the Valerie Plame leak case. The “Iraq democracy project” that is often attributed as Cheney’s brainchild is going terribly wrong.

The Shia-Sunni sectarian violence is threatening to blow out of control. Cheney’s bad aim couldn’t have come at a worse time. It has been aptly used as a political and personal metaphor for Cheney’s judgmental error and insularity that the press sees as something that defies the notion of accountability. Accountable or not, Cheney has been the least media-savvy politician of recent memory.

Cheney never had a good relationship with the media establishment. He is known to have asked his men to kick out reporters covering him. According to Newsweek, after seeing journalists escorted out, Cheney often quipped: “This always makes my day.” He causes visceral dislike in the national press corps. That hatred in itself didn’t mean much, except for a few angry commentaries on press and occasional overly editorialized news item surrounding Cheney—and that in itself may have done little harm to him. But the discovery of the shooting has provided the press a smoking gun against Cheney: This incident capsulizes all Cheney’s faults in one attractive package. The shooting epitomizes all vices in this Vice President, at least that’s the impression I get from all the media coverage.
That one bang might have just provided a big opening for Cheney’s unending troubles too. The press is unlikely to stop demonizing him; his other bungling will only add insult not to the gunshot victim Harry Whittington’s injuries, but to Cheney’s. It was worst than shooting himself. He may already be wondering as to why he wasn’t at the receiving end of the bullet that killed no one except his credibility. That might have saved him from his troubles and the scouring press. There is a lesson for all politicians who love wild gaming: When in doubt, shoot thyself.