All of you are going to be seeking that information

I was going to ask if Cheney spoke to the local cops before fleeing the scene back to Washington, but silly me: in Texas when someone gets shot while hunting there’s no requirement even to inform the authorities unless they actually die.

Still less is there a legal requirement to inform the press. White House press corps to McClellan: “Why didn’t you tell us Cheney shot a guy?” McClellan: “You didn’t ask.” (I wrote that before seeing his actual words: “Well, I think we all know that once it is made public, then it’s going to be news, and all of you are going to be seeking that information.”) Ten bucks to the first reporter who asks just how many other people Cheney has shot over the years that they failed to tell us about. Remember all that construction work a couple of years ago at Blair House (the Veep residence)? Installing giant freezers to store all the bodies.

Rumsfeld has been visiting North Africa, citing Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia as positive examples for dealing with “the problem of extremism.” Here’s how he describes his conversation with Algerian President Bouteflika:

He described it from the inside, as to what took place and how they fought off the terrorism problem and the problem of extremism, and the numbers of people who were killed or beheaded, and the task of persuading the Algerian people that their future was in a forward-looking, economically prosperous, democratic system, as opposed to violence and extremism.

Or to put it another way, how the Algerian government refused to implement the results of elections won by Islamists, banned their parties, then massacred many thousands of people and threw tens of thousands into prison.

And I was musing as he talked about the fact that so many people looking at it from the outside had so many ideas and critiques, and opined on this and opined on that, and it was very different from where he was.

Different still from a dungeon or a mass grave.