If you are the sort of person who gets their news from the television, or from mainline news sources, this may come as a shocking story. However, if you spend much of your time online, you may have heard about the rumor that Vice President Dick Cheney has been in the hospital. Now there’s a funny thing right there; this is one of the 50 most talked about things on the internet right now according to the resources that measure these things on a daily basis. Yet you won’t catch so much as an “unsubstantiated report” story on any of the major news outlets, including the ones that have to fill 24 hours a day with newsspeak, including the ones that manage to make “missing white girl of the week” or anything done/said by Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton into news. This is the Vice-President of the United States of America we are talking about. This is potentially news.
The Administration doesn’t want to so as much “confirm or deny.” The hospital can’t really say much of anything because of privacy laws.
Even if Mr. Cheney was hospitalized for, um, heart related troubles, his timing could not be better. It could be announced that due to the recent recall of implantable defibrillators, doctors wanted to act with an abundance of caution and make sure Mr. Cheney’s unit was in good operating condition. That is a believable story, regardless of it’s veracity.
This is arguably the second most important man in the most important nation on earth. Silence only allows rumors to fester. Let’s have some straight talk about what is really happening.
In closing: Just Say No to Chinese interests buying American oil company Unocal. It’s bad for security, inasmuch as oil is a strategic resource. It’s bad for our economy and the economy of the world. I could probably have beefed that out, but the succinct version says it all.