Ballistics and the vice president

Alex Jones is convinced that Dick Cheney is not telling the whole truth about the accident in which he shot a friend, Harry Whittington.

Dan Gillmor has been thinking about what might have happened if Al Gore had shot someone.

"Suppose Al Gore, back in 1998, had shot someone in the face and chest in a Tennessee hunting accident. Suppose, further, that he had a) not told authorities (or President Clinton) promptly; b) kept the news from the American people for a day, letting word leak out via contradictory stories, initially through a small local newspaper; c) stonewalled for another several days until Gore sat for an interview with a hand-picked journalistic pal; and d) Clinton had pronounced the entire affair totally fine in retrospect.

We all know what would have happened. The right wing noise machine would have gone ballistic. Several Congressional investigations would already be in the works, not least a probe into why the local authorities had behaved as they did.

But at least some Democrats -- and lots of left-leaning commentators -- would have agreed, publicly, that such behavior was outrageous."