Columnist Peggy Noonan speculates in today’s Wall Street Journal that the White House is secretly wishing it could replace Dick Cheney. The reason, she suggests, is that Cheney has become too much of a hate magnet and that Bush may want to give a handpicked successor a running start on the next election. “This is a White House that likes to hit refresh when the screen freezes,” she wrote. “Right now the screen is stuck, with poll numbers in the low 40s, or high 30s.” She also notes that “all this is exactly like the sort of thing people blue-skied about in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was in trouble and a lot of people urged him to hit refresh by dumping Dan Quayle. He didn’t. George W. Bush loves to do what his father didn’t.” I’ll believe that when I see it.
Also: Conservative media are making hay about how the liberal, mainstream press has gone into a feeding frenzy over a nonstory — even though Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others have talked on and on about the hunting accident. Here is Noonan’s take: “Can media bias be detected in the endless coverage? Sure, always. But it’s also a great story. A vice president of the United States shot a guy in a hunting accident, and no one on his staff told the press. That’s a story.”
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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