Rule Of Law?

"For thee -- not for me!"
--Sufficiently-connected Republic Party member

As hilarious as this whole Vice President Cheney Shoots A 78-Year Old Man In The Face With A Shotgun thing is being made out to be (and, I have to admit, seeing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart's take on the incident was, in fact, pretty funny), it's actually pretty serious stuff. It's serious from two perspectives:

• Mr. Whittington is 78 years old, and may well die from his injuries -- and at the very least, may be debilitated and disfigured as a result. NOTE: I composed this post early this morning, before learning of Mr. Whittington's heart attack.

• How Dick Cheney is treated due to his negligence in this matter will, once and for all, clearly and unambiguously demonstrate to the American people whether the Bush administration values the Rule of Law.

Already, we have reports of the Secret Service denying a sheriff's deputy access to Mr. Cheney on the evening of the incident. As I understand it, whenever there is a hunting accident involving injury with a firearm, the local authorities are required by law to test for the presence of alcohol in both the victim's and the injurer's bloodstreams. Clearly, delaying access to one of the parties involved shows a clear lack of regard for the law. If Mr. Cheney had in fact been drinking, delaying his contact with authorities would allow his body time to metabolize the alcohol in his system before a BAC test could be administered.

Granted, most people can't be bothered to keep up with the details of the outing of a covert CIA operative, who was working on WMD counterproliferation, or the whole Bush circumvention of FISA to conduct domestic surveillance on God-knows-who (due to lack of oversight). But the average voter is going to understand that if they had pulled that fateful trigger, and injured a friend while quail hunting, they would not be treated so deferentially.
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