An Apology Takes More Than 5 Years to Catch Up with Cheney’s Birdshot

According to this story from ABCnews.com, five years after the most famous hunting accident in American history, the man who took Dick Cheney’s shotgun blast to the face is still waiting for an apology. Or not. Or maybe. Or who knows?

_Nearly five years after being shot by Vice President Cheney on a hunting trip, Harry Whittington is still waiting for an apology. Now 82, Whittington tells The Washington Post’s Paul Fahri in an extensive interview that he still has about 30 pieces of birdshot inside him, remnants from the Feb. 2006 shooting incident that happened on a south Texas ranch. Fahri reports that Whittington’s injuries were “more dire than previously disclosed.” Four days after the shooting, the birdshot near his heart cause it to “beat erratically” and Whittington was admitted back into the intensive care unit. Whittington’s doctors said he suffered a mild heart attack, but he downplayed it as a heart “event.”
__He also suffered a collapsed lung and doctors performed invasive exploratory surgery to check his vital organs for damage. “The load from Cheney’s gun came close to, but didn’t damage, the carotid artery in his neck,” Fahri reports. “A rupture could have been fatal, particularly since it took the better part of an hour to transport him from the vast Armstrong ranch to the Kingsville hospital.” But perhaps the most stunning revelation in the article is that nearly five years later, Whittington is still waiting for an apology from Cheney. When asked if Cheney ever said sorry to him, Whittington “who has been talking about his life and career for hours, suddenly draws silent.”

“I’m not going to go into that,” he says sharply after a short pause. Fahri writes that Whittington is “too gracious to say it out loud, but he doesn’t dispute the notion, either.”

_So here’s the “Ethics and Etiquette in Hunting” question of the day: If you’re a powerful public figure and you shoot your hunting partner in the face while quail hunting, should you:

A. Apologize privately

B. Apologize publicly

C. Apologize privately and publicly

D. Crawl on your hands and knees into his hospital room begging forgiveness for the astounding stupidity and lack of judgment you displayed…or

E. Claim executive privilege while blaming the liberal media for everything?