The MSM goes off the deep end

Not sure how I missed this …

Here's David Ignatius opining about the Cheney hunting mishap in last week's Washington Post:

Nobody died at Armstrong Ranch, but this incident reminds me a bit of Sen. Edward Kennedy's delay in informing Massachusetts authorities about his role in the fatal automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969.

Okay, now there's a brilliant analogy. As Mark Steyn analyzes it:

Hmm. Let's see. On the one hand, the guy leaves the gal at the bottom of the river struggling for breath pressed up against the window in some small air pocket while he pulls himself out of the briny, staggers home, sleeps it off and saunters in to inform the cops the following day that, oh yeah, there was some broad down there. And, on the other hand, the guy calls 911, has the other fellow taken to the hospital, lets the sheriff know promptly but neglects to fax David Gregory's make-up girl!

One can only hope others agree with Ignatius' insightful analogy, and that the reprehensible Cheney will be hounded from public life the way Kennedy was all those years ago. One would hate to think folks would just let it slide and three decades from now this Cheney guy will be sitting on some committee picking Supreme Court justices and whatnot.

The MSM seems to be working itself into quite a lather about the "arrogance of power" in the Veep's not promptly alerting the White House press corps of the accident. As with so much of their fault-finding with this administration, they may have started with a semi-valid point, but by the time they've finished with their slings and arrows, they'll have turned Dick Cheney into the Republican Party's Saint Sebastian.

Look for Cheney's approval ratings to akyrocket in the next month or two.

UPDATE: Paul at Wizbang is predicting a nine percent bump. I say he's being too conservative.

UPDATE: The  MSM's emerging meme about the Cheney controversy seems to be the notion of an "excessively secretive" White House:

Newsweek cover story: "Cheney's Secret World"

Baltimore Sun headline: "Cheney's secretive behavior follows pattern of others"

Los Angeles Times headline: "Straight shooter? Not with public"

Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline: "A missed lesson in transparency"

Guardian headline: "Bush denies secrecy over Cheney shooting"

Newsday headline: "The secrecy approach"

New Zealand Herald headline: "Shooting highlights Cheney's secrecy"

Miami Herald headline: "Vice president's secrecy is no laughing matter"

Bill Clinton: "The White House should have said something about it sooner. I think that it's gotten a little more light than it would have because the administration has an enormous penchant for secrecy, for not telling anybody anything about anything."

Harry Reid: "I think the reason it took the vice president a day to talk about this is part of the secretive nature of this administration. The American people's not entitled to know what's going on in their mindset. They keep things pretty close to the chest."

Joe Biden: "The way they're going about this thing just sort of reinforces this whole notion that this administration, particularly this vice president is incredibly secretive about everything."

Makes you wonder who's writing the talking points.