Citizen Dick

Imagine this: You're out in the woods with a friend, and all of a sudden there's a rustling. A bunch of quail come flying up right in front of you. Your highly refined instincts take over, and you raise your weapon and fire without thinking. You bag a quail, but inadvertently fill the side of your buddy's face with buckshot. What do you do now?
I'm no hunter, but I suspect that the first thing to do is check and see if my friend is okay. Then I'm hoping that I can get a signal on my cell phone to call 911. Once the bleeding is contained, if not stopped, the ambulance has sped away into the distance to deliver expert medical care, and I'm standing there talking to the game warden and I can only assume a varying number of the local constabulary.
Dick Cheney hasn't said much about this so far, but he did accept full blame for his little mishap. "You can't blame anybody else," Cheney told Fox News Channel in his first public comments since the accident on a private Texas ranch Saturday. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend." Whoops.
On this same day, Michael Chertoff was delivering his own mea culpa in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "There are many lapses that occurred, and I've certainly spent a lot of time personally, probably since last fall, thinking about things that might have been done differently," Chertoff told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Aug. 29 storm. He called the hurricane "one of the most difficult and traumatic experiences of my life."
Across town, Dick revealed that Sunday was "one of the worst days of my life," but he was defiantly unapologetic about not publicly disclosing the accident until the next day.
Meanwhile, back in Texas (home of free-range quail), Dallas defense attorney David Finn, who has been a state and a federal prosecutor, said Wednesday that a Texas grand jury could bring a charge of criminally negligent homicide if there is evidence the vice president knew or should have known "there was a substantial or unjustifiable risk that his actions would result in him shooting a fellow hunter." Whoops.
Heart specialists kept a close watch on Austin lawyer Harry Whittington, who had a mild heart attack early Tuesday after a shotgun pellet migrated to his heart, a complication of the accidental shooting by Vice President Dick Cheney. Whoops again.
Back in the rough and tumble days of The Untouchables, Elliot Ness finally brought Al Capone down on charges of tax evasion. What an ugly irony if things were to continue to spiral out of Dick's control until he was locked up for killing a man "just to watch him die." (That last bit is Johnny Cash, but it just worked so well...)