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Hoist On Her Own Petard.

Jimmie | February 18, 2006 | Comments (0)

The nitpicking from the left on the Cheney/Whittington hunting accident has reached ludicrous proportions.

Harry Whittington was clearly blasted on the right side of his face, neck and torso by a drunken Dick Cheney’s shotgun.

So how come the official Texas Parks & Wildlife Department accident report on the shooting shows Whittington’s injuries on the left side of his body (diagram, mid-right of first page)?

Actually, the diagram shows Whittington sustaining the shotgun blast to both his left and his right side. The diagram of the front view of the body shows injuries sustained on the left side, while the portrait view shows injuries to the right side.

That’s some thorough reporting!

If those diagrams were all the indication we had, this blogger might have a point. Luckily for everyone, there’s a little block right next to the diagram marked “Description of Injuries”. In that block is a pretty plain…well…description of the injuries. It reads, “Shotgun wound to the right side of face, neck, and chest”.

A right/left transposition is pretty understandable under the circumstances. An officer, sketching from memory and working under a deadline might well look at the figure, think “right” and sketch the right side of the body, as he’s looking at it. Let’s call it a rookie mistake and take the two instances where the wounds are where they should be and go on from there.

Oh, but we can’t. Not with axes to grind.

And look who shows up with a suitably dull axe! Leading lefty blogger Jane Hamsher calls this error “gross mistakes” made by the police. Not just mistakes, but gross ones. Oh dear! What are we to do?

Of course, it would be crass of me to point out that there was only one mistake noted by the post and one does not quite get us to “mistakes”. It would be doubly crass of me to ridicule Hamsher for making what no doubt was an elementary mistake on a blog post conflating an elementary mistake by a police officer to the level of “gross”.

That would be crass indeed.

Then again, if she were to misstate the point of two posts in a row, that wouldn’t quite be an elementary mistake, wouldn’t it? We’d then have mistakes, with an “s’, and one might even characterize the mistakes as “gross”.

Well, what do you know? She did misstate the point of another quote! In the very next paragraph, she claims that this post has Mr. Whittington thanking the media and describes that as “most telling”.

What is “most telling” to me is that Whittington didn’t thank the media, he complemented them. Here is his quote:

I compliment you on what you’ve done-I’ve read and seen many of your reports and I know your job isn’t easy.

I don’t see “thank you” anywhere in there, do you? I do see a gracious and mannered man delivering a mighty meager complement which, given his statement of sympathy to the Cheney family for all they’ve been though (which came complements of the aforethanked media, though he did not say so), strikes me as a nicely-said bit of understated sarcasm.

So, two mistakes in two paragraphs from Hamsher. I’m not sure she should be the one pointing out “gross mistakes”, given her track record here. Then again, perhaps she should. It seems she’s fairly familiar with them.