Who Ya Going to Call? Karl Rove!

In a statement released Monday by the White House said. "[Bush] did not know the vice president was involved at that time. Subsequent to the call, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with Mrs. Armstrong. He then called the president shortly before 8 p.m. to update him and let him know the vice president had accidentally shot Mr. Whittington."



Why Rove and not Andy Card or David Addington?

Well, for one, the Armstrong's have long standing ties with the Republican Party.

Anne Armstrong, the matriarch of the family that owns the ranch, is a Republican Party stalwart who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and also as ambassador to Great Britain. When her husband, Tobin Armstrong, died in October, Mr. Cheney and James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, spoke at the funeral.

New York Times 2/13/06

In addition, Rove also is an old family friend of the Armstrong's as the New Yorker chronicled in 2003.

"Rove had the imprimatur of Texas’s Republican aristocracy from the beginning, through his connection to the Bush family and to Clements. An early financier of Karl Rove + Company [a direct mail business] was Tobin Armstrong, the owner of a Texas ranch (it was on land leased from Armstrong Rove and Bill Frist were planning to go hunting) and the husband of Anne Armstrong, a former Republican Cabinet officer."

Katharine Armstrong's influence in the White House is apparently lucrative as well. In 2004, Katharine Armstrong was paid $160,000 by the powerful legal firm Baker Botts to lobby the White House, according to records she filed with the U.S. Senate as required by lobbying disclosure rules, reported MSNBC.

In a phone interview, she told NBC News that in return for the money in one case, she set up a meeting at the White House for a Baker Botts client, although she said she felt she could not release the client’s name.

"A meeting for doing something with one of their clients," she said, describing the event. "I’m not at liberty to say which." She says she cannot remember which White House official the meeting was with. She also said that during the inauguration proceedings, she got Karl Rove to speak at a Baker Botts function. ""I got them Karl Rove," she said.

It is these ties that allowed Cheney to trust Armstrong to agree with his strategy "in which she was to call a trusted reporter at the local paper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, to disclose the news" many hours after the incident occurred. Time

It is these ties which place into question her credibility of the version of events. As the former Chair of Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission (appointed to the commission by then Gov. Bush in 1999) it would seem that she would have better understanding of the importance of getting an immediate and thorough investigation.

As a property-owner and friend, she apparently thought that wasn't the course to take; call it "Pioneer judgment"

Where is Whittington's statement or Pamela Willeford's, former Texas education official and the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, statement. Not that I expect much from them; a lot of "I didn't see"s and "It happened so fast"'s.



Apparently, we'll hear from Cheney tonight but it will be on FAUX NEWS. In a preview, Cheney took the "blame" ("my bad") but hasn't been exactly detailed:

"THE VICE PRESIDENT: I turned and shot at the bird, and at that second, saw Harry standing there. Didn't know he was there --

HUME: You had pulled the trigger and you saw him?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I saw him fall, basically. It had happened so fast.

...

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Ran over to him and --

Q And what did you see? He's lying there --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was laying there on his back, obviously bleeding. You could see where the shot had struck him. And one of the fortunate things was that I've always got a medical team, in effect, covering me wherever I go. I had a physician's assistant with me that day. Within a minute or two he was on the scene administering first-aid. And --

Q And Mr. Whittington was conscious, unconscious, what?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He was conscious --

Q What did you say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I said, "Harry, I had no idea you were there." And --

Q What did he say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn't respond. ...

Salon reported that O'Reilly had the interview but it's Brit Hume doing the questioning.

"The truth is, this is much ado about not really much. The VP might be able to dispel this a little bit if he came out and said something, but there's no other reason for him to do so, but he may anyway."

"Changing the tone in Washington has been the goal, for example, of this president since he was first elected. It has not changed, its worsened. One might have thought that the sense of national unity that occurred after the September 11th attacks would have lasted a while. It didn't. It lasted about a year, and now the partisan atmosphere is more fierce than ever and the acrimony between the body politic nation-wide is the worst I've ever seen."

Brit Hume, FAUX NEWS, 2/14/06

So we have four people with close ties to Bush, Rove, and the Republican party, none of which were interviewed by competent law enforcement officials at the scene.

It never sounded like it was any more than an accident with maybe some civil liability. The issue is, we'll never know if it would rise to the level of criminal negligence.

When Gary Condit appeared on Connie Chung to explain the circumstances surrounding Chandry Levy's disappearance, I thought: "If this is how he acts when he's innocent, I'd love to see how he acts when he's guilty."

The shooting of an old man by the Vice President has been handled like a cover-up; even if there's nothing to cover-up.