Month: August 2006

Some expert opinions on this:

I am not a ballistics expert but what was said on the video makes sense, even if you account for the differences in chokes, etc. The presenter’s spin was that there was a "cover-up" for some nefarious reason. Most likely the reason was embarrassment rather than a cover-up, but he has a point that Cheney took advantage of his position to make sure that the least nasty report would come out. He shot Mr. Whittingon due to stupidity and lack of common sense, but that does not make him a felon. I have been the physician for the US Shooting team and am still a writer for Shotgun Sports Magazine so I do have some practical experience. The kind of penetration noted in the police and medical reports does indicate a closer shot.

Another hunter weighs in:

Anyone experienced shotgunner/hunter could see that the story was weird from the beginning. The original story said Whittington was hit by as many as 250 pellets. A 28 gauge only has 250 pellets (a 12 gauge has 450 by comparison). It is inconceivable that at thirty yards he could had been hit by more than a third or fourth of the pellets. Second, when I accidentally shot a hunting guide at about 12-15 yards, my victim only had deep skin penetration of the pellets, almost all removable by tweezers and scalpels. Whittington was shot at very close range to have the level of penetration that was reported.

Here’s the one piece of data that might affect this assessment:

"One thing to remember: the only thing that is consistent about shotguns is that very few things are consistent. Identical guns with the same degree of choke and using the same shell may not pattern the same. The same load between various brands of shells can pattern differently. Patterns will change when changing from  hard to soft shot. Patterns can change when anything in the shell changes such as different wads, powders or primers. What I am trying to get across is that when you change anything such as brands, shot size, or components you will need to check the pattern as it could have changed, sometimes by an extreme amount."

Another reader argues that we cannot know from the data we have:

I’m no fan of Cheney and I think the responsibility for what happened rests squarely on his shoulders, but I think it is reasonable to believe that he shot Whittington at 30 yards.
It is also reasonable to think that he shot him at half that range, too. But I don’t think there is any way to establish this given the variables and the unknowns.

Just fleshing this out. I feel bad giving Jones any air now I know who he is. But I see no problem with hashing this out some more.

Soaring debt, massive expansion of federal entitlements, and airbrushing hard, fiscal reality:

The federal government keeps two sets of books.
The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005.
The set the government doesn’t talk about is the audited financial statement produced by the government’s accountants following standard accounting rules. It reports a more ominous financial picture: a $760 billion deficit for 2005. If Social Security and Medicare were included ‚Äî as the board that sets accounting rules is considering ‚Äî the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion.

We should definitely include Medicare and Social Security in the numbers. The Bush administration isn’t the only administration to have fiddled with fiscal numbers. But the crisis is growing; and their obliviousness is unnerving. This isn’t conservatism. It’s big government recklessness. It needs to be stopped.

How was it that TMZ.com scooped the Los Angeles Times on the Gibson story? Bill Powers wants to know.

It’s already started, and looks like it will escalate. Only by annihilating the Jews can the Shiite Islamists in Iran realize their dream. And so the war begins. It will end only in either the destruction of Israel and Iran’s major populations, or in the demise of the Ahmadinejad-Khameini regime.

Baltimore, Maryland, 9.15 pm.

As pro-Hezbollah rallies overwhelm parts of Baghdad, two of the most influential centrist columnists in America just essentially gave up on Iraq. Tom Friedman (TimesDelete) wants one last chance for an Iraqi national conference, then withdrawal; David Broder thinks it’s time to cut our losses. He makes this critical point:

If Hezbollah in Lebanon and the insurgents in Iraq really are deadly threats to Israel and the United States, respectively, then those nations should have used their full military might – which is overwhelming – to deal with the menace.

President Bush never took this war seriously enough. That is why we have all but lost it. We failed to find WMDs; we failed to stop the Sunni-Jihadist insurgency; we failed to stop a civil war. We may, however, have helped incite a broader Sunni-Shiite war in the entire region. What’s needed now is a long-term strategy to exploit these sectarian divisions in order to weaken Islamism. In the short-term, redeployment of troops into Kurdish areas is one option. I’m afraid anything more ambitious would be irresponsible, given the gross incompetence of the political leadership (now on vacation).

To put it more bluntly: It is simply impossible to believe we can succeed even in pacifying parts of Iraq with Rumsfeld still managing the war. Senator Clinton got it perfectly right yesterday with this rhetorical question to the Pentagon’s macher:

"Yes, we hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration’s strategic blunders and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy. Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?"

Rumsfeld had no answer. I guess Bush has to wait for Tuesday’s primary before plonking Lieberman in the hot seat. Senator McCain also had a priceless on-the-record exchange:

Senator McCain: "You said there’s a possibility of the situation in Iraq evolving into civil war. Is that correct?’

General Pace: ‘I did say that, yes, sir.’

Senator McCain: ‘Did you anticipate this situation a year ago?’

General Pace: ‘No, sir.’

Others did. And nothing was done.

(Photo: Kareem Raheem/Reuters.)

Did I get the little critter wrong? A reader writes:

I think what you have there is what we call a Phoca vitulina or harbor seal. All this reminds me, more or less unfortunately, of my old recordings of William Walton’s Facade, settings of verse by Edith Sitwell:

He called across the battlements as she
Heard our voices thin and shrill
As the steely grasses’ thrill,
Or the sound of the onycha
When the phoca has the pica
In the palace of the Queen Chinee!

I apologize for any excessive sharing.

Apology accepted.

My YouTube video of the day has some dubious authorship, as a reader writes:

You do realize that Alex Jones is a conspiracy nut nut who thinks the Jews did 9/11 and not a ballistics expert, yes?

Er, no. Actually, I didn’t. I just watched the video sent by a reader and found it persuasive. It’s unfortunate that the guy is a crazed nut, but I’d still like to know why he’s wrong in this case. One reader argued that different shotguns, even of identical manufacture, can have different dispersement, a fact that would undermine Jones’ case. Maybe other readers can help debunk this theory – or not. 

There are legitimate debates to be had about the relationship between carbon dioxide and global warming (although I think the debate is now overwhelmingly in favor of those arguing for a close and increasingly dangerous connection). But I know of no one who has any clue about the issue saying something like this:

Just as you shouldn’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry, you probably shouldn‚Äôt discuss climate policy during a heatwave … Because the thing about this global warming thing is that it’s [sic] effects aren’t global. The Southern hemisphere, for instance, is having a pretty frigid time right now, with snow in South Africa (as Kathryn pointed out yesterday) and some real ‘brass monkeys’ (as we’d say in the UK) in Argentina and New Zealand.  And even in the US, a friend of a friend in Alaska on a fishing trip says it is so cold and stormy out there they can’t get out on the water.

I would have thought that even a minimal understanding of global warming would grasp that indeed it will result in many parts of the earth getting much colder. No: increasing heat-waves in the US do not prove anything as such (they’re just the latest in a mass of data pointing in one direction). But the idea that because there’s a cold snap in South Africa, global warming is a hoax is, well, the kind of thing you now read at National Review.

Between them, Bush and Rove have managed to eviscerate what was left of conservative coherence. E.J. Dionne gets a whiff of the stench around the corpse.