TIME: Inside The Shooting At The Ranch

[PhilipShore]

TIME
Inside The Shooting At The Ranch
Feb. 18, 2006

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1161178,00.html

What really happened in the brushy South Texas wild that day? How one shot turned a genteel quail hunt into a political crisis

The delicate and the dangerous meet in the ranch lands of South Texas. In the winter, quail gather in the soft gold of prairie sedge, but snakes, scorpions and wild-boar-like javelina lurk too. In 1999 a fourth-generation South Texas rancher named Tobin Armstrong testified before Congress that he sometimes found illegal immigrants dead of dehydration in the unforgiving brush of his 49,300-acre ranch. It was there that Vice President Dick Cheney, out with a hunting party that included Tobin's daughter Katharine, accidentally sprayed attorney Harry Whittington with birdshot. What took place in the hours before and after the Feb. 11 shooting is a largely mundane tale that became extraordinary when, for days, Cheney seemed unwilling to tell it. The Internet is still excreting rumors.

Katharine Armstrong initially told a Texas reporter that there had been "zero, zippo" drinking that Saturday. But Cheney later said on Fox News that he had had "a beer" at lunch....

[Vanje]

1. NPR says America wants to move on from the Cheney hunting story

The head of NPR news says we dont want to hear anymore about it.
I think Karl Rove called himup and told him so.