National Press Corps feathers Rustled over Cheney

Fire of Liberty

Wesley Pruden, editor in chief over at the Washington Times has a pretty good take on the whole kerfuffle within the Washington Press Corps over VP Cheney in his most recent edition of Pruden on Politics. In a nutshell, Pruden notes that while this was not really a national or pressing story(Due to the fact the VP had not been shot and his friend's health is far more important than giving a presser in the field.) but became one due to the fact that the story was given to a local media outlet thus wounding the egos of the city reporters, who lounge in the White House room waiting to disseminate their stories. I guess that old saying "Hell hath no fury like a women's scorn" applies to the covey of White House reporters as well. I think Pruden hit the target when he noted the following(I kind of like these paragraphs as well. Pretty darn funny):

But being calm is not what such worthies are paid to do, and this looked like the smoking gun, so to speak, that the pursuers of Dick Cheney have been looking for. Peter Baker, the White House reporter for The Washington Post, chatting online, tells how he and his fellows were "flabbergasted" by news of such titanic import breaking out on such a snowy day. Nothing so flabbergasting had happened to a vice president since Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in 1804, but that was in a duel "and that was actually intentional and in that case the victim died."

By day's end, some of the White House press worthies were trying to get a Texas sheriff to open an investigation. But Mr. Whittington is recovering, rotten luck, and making a murder charge stick would be difficult. (Only a corpse could give this story legs.) The Texas authorities are more bemused than interested, since such accidents are commonplace in bird-hunting country. Birdshot wounds are rarely serious, and many a good ol' boy has been peppered in an unmentionable place, climbing out of a lady's boudoir at 4 in the morning. Your best friend on that occasion is someone with a soft pillow and a pair of tweezers, but it smarts.

Hopefully the VP's interview with on Special Report with Brit Hume over at FoxNews will soothe the egos of the ninnies in the press corp but they're probably more pissed of because it was a private interview with FOX and not a live presser. Well you can't please them all.