A case of rabies.

IF the vice president of the United States shoots someone, it is a story. This was true when Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton at Weehawken, and it remained true when Dick Cheney shot Harry Whittington at the Armstrong Ranch. Hamilton died, Whittington lived; Burr took lethal aim, Cheney was aiming at a quail. The modern event is nevertheless news. Vice presidents have been accumulating responsibilities--campaigning in off years, conducting state visits, running policy task forces--for the last half-century. With these assignments comes visibility. Like it or not, those are the modern rules of the office. If Dick Cheney valued his privacy above all else, he could have stayed home in 2000.

Once Cheney understood the bad impression created by the initial 18-hour delay in telling the press, and by his subsequent three days' silence, he went on television to accept full responsibility. "You can't blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend." When Mr. Whittington was released from the hospital, he said that "accidents do and will happen," and sent his "love and respect" to the vice president as he deals "with situations that are much more serious than what we've had this week."

The press, meanwhile, has been obeying its own dynamic, which has led it to dementia. NBC's David Gregory screamed at White House press secretary Scott McClellan as if Gregory was possessed, or McClellan was concealing a coup. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post and CNN commentator Paul Begala appeared on TV in orange hunting gear, in order to show that--what, Cheney shouldn't shoot them too? Bob Herbert of the New York Times called on Cheney to resign, "for the sake of the country and for the sake of the Bush administration" (a new object of his sympathies). Maureen Dowd was Maureen Dowd, but for a while there all her peers had Dowd-rabies.

The media were responding to a convergence of ideology, aesthetics, and self-love. Liberals dislike Cheney and the Left detests him as a corrupt warmonger, the lackey of Halliburton and the patron of neocons. Now he even shoots his friends (what might he do to his enemies?). Cheney looks the part the liberals have written for him--solid, stolid, gruff with enemies. The fact that Cheney and Whittington came to grief bird shooting, on a rich Texan's ranch, doubled their strangeness, and Cheney's sin.

The press, finally, wants what it wants, when it wants it. They are ever measuring their subjects and themselves against the golden age of the early Seventies, when they toppled Richard Nixon and South Vietnam. How dare Cheney hold the story of a hunting accident overnight from the people who destroyed a president and a nation!

When Harry Whittington left the hospital, he said he was sorry for all that Cheney "had to go through." Odd words from the man Cheney had shot. But then, Whittington had not been peppered by the press.