The greatest story ever told: (they wish).

IF only wishing it were so could make it so. If the cosmos worked that way, the sharks of the mainstream media and their remoras in the liberal blogosphere would have uncovered that Dick Cheney did in fact drunkenly shoot that Texas lawyer for threatening to expose the administration's plan to abolish the Constitution, take over the world, and then drain away all of our vital bodily fluids. They would also have learned that Cheney shot the aged would-be whistleblower Annie Oakley-style, reserving his other hand for an amorous grope of a woman other than his wife in the unforgiving Texas brush. Had justice been served he would have been arrested, shirtless and screaming, at a Motel 6, like one of the perps on Cops. All of these things and so much more would have proven true if only NBC's David Gregory could click the heels of his ruby slippers together.

Alas, it was not to be. You have to pity the poor SOBs. Conservatives seem to have a lot more success at wishing the seemingly outlandish into reality. We claimed that Bill Clinton was playing baron-and-the-milkmaid with an intern, and despite months of denials it turned out to be true. Of course, conservatives--at least some of them--also claimed that Bill Clinton was smuggling drugs into Mena airport and had had countless people, including Vince Foster, killed. These fantasies didn't pan out (and sensible conservatives never indulged them). But all in all, we have a pretty good record of connecting the dots.

The best recent example is, of course, the Greatest Story Ever Told, in which Dan Rather claimed to have proven that George W. Bush had done something or other while in the Texas Air National Guard. The problem was that Rather's proof lay in a bunch of made-up documents, their inauthenticity demonstrated largely by hordes of right-wing bloggers who took the time to sleuth out the typestyles of 30-year-old government-issue typewriters. Soon, the story fell apart like a road apple in a blender, as Dan Rather himself might say. But instead of admitting his mistake and begging for forgiveness like Henry in the snows of Canossa, Dan Rather, the Dean of Smug Liberal Journalists Who Refuse to Admit They Are Liberal, handcuffed himself to the drowning story and tried to swim to the sunny shores of FakeButAccuratonia. He was last seen on late-night C-SPAN pretending that the story was true because no respectable news outlet had proven it false (a standard which also proves that Dan Rather buggers goats and eats baby hamsters). One is loath to overstate the importance of Memogate, but even four out of five dentists agree this was simply the best thing ever to happen, ever.

Of course, conservatives don't always put the dots together. Sometimes the dots just fall like manna from heaven. Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, Steve Glass, Sleepy, Snoozy, Bashful et al. on occasion just wander into our line of sight like a Texas lawyer coming up behind the vice president. Like Whittingtons in a barrel, the MSM have made themselves an easy target. And unlike poor Mr. Whittington, they've made themselves a deserving one as well.

Meanwhile, the Left's pursuit of big game has mostly turned out to be a snipe hunt. There was that gay-escort guy who worked for the Talon News Service and who, we were told, would prove to be the Deep Throat of the Bush impeachment (we'll stop that metaphor right there). There was the payola scandal which lost Armstrong Williams and Doug Bandow their syndicated columns. One isn't slighting these men when one observes that their loss was hardly a crippling blow to the conservative media.

Against this backdrop, you can understand why the liberal bloggers were desperate not only to make hay out of Cheney's misfortune but to spin that hay into gold. So for days on end, everyone--from the normally sober-sounding eminence grise of blogdom Josh Marshall to the jabbering Jacobins of the Huffington Post--mounted his own freelance Warren Commission investigation, studying the ballistic signatures of expensive Italian shotguns the way we all once mastered the arcana of the superscript "th" on the old IBM Selectric.

The mainstreamers behaved little better. MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell lit a prairie fire of speculation that the veep is a drunkard who shoots at lawyers the way Elvis shot at TVs. Maureen Dowd and others insisted that Cheney had blamed Whittington for stupidly walking in front of him while he was yee-hawing with his shotgun. But this case could be made only if you deliberately, tendentiously, and dishonestly read every disclosed statement and fact in the most damning way possible. Which, of course, is the perfect job description for Maureen Dowd. When White House press secretary Scott McClellan noted that Cheney's host, Katharine Armstrong, "pointed out that the protocol was not followed by Mr. Whittington when it came to notifying the others that he was there," Dowd took this as obvious evidence that "the usual sliming" had begun. She then proceeded to argue that Cheney's fowl-hunting techniques were directly analogous to his foreign and domestic policies. Seriously.

But why was the press so eager to leap to the most evil interpretation possible? Part of the story is the obvious Cheneyphobia poisoning the minds of liberals everywhere. For example, Robert Kuttner recently wrote a column about the Internet and civil liberties in the Boston Globe in which he matter-of-factly said, "Google plus Dick Cheney is a recipe for undoing the liberties for which the original patriots of the American Revolution bled and died." Before the hunting story hit, Dowd had proclaimed that Dick Cheney was trying to impose a "police state." To those who feel such animus, giving Cheney the benefit of the doubt must be like seeing Mephistopheles give candy to children and assuming he does it out of the goodness of his heart.

Another reason for the hysteria, as many have noted, is the narcissism of the "imperial press." The story was released on Cheney's timetable, not the White House press gaggle's. David Gregory's hysteria (he called McClellan a "jerk" and later apologized for it) could only be born of a profound sense of entitlement. Giving the story to the Corpus Christi newspaper was an affront to the papal authority of the MSM. This rage was only amplified when Cheney offered his explanation to Brit Hume, which Jack Cafferty likened to "Bonnie interviewing Clyde."

The complaint, while predictable, is certainly hilarious to those who've witnessed the sycophancy of mainstream journalists toward liberal politicians. Dan Rather told Bill Clinton at a CBS affiliates meeting in 1993: "If [co-anchor Connie Chung and I] could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been together in the White House, we'd take it right now and walk away winners. ... Thank you very much, and tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her, and we're pulling for her." When Carole Simpson, ABC's former weekend anchor, interviewed Bill Clinton in 1999, she cut actual news from the interview in order to include her lengthy preamble: "I have to bask in this moment, for a moment, because I am here talking to the most powerful man on the planet, who was a poor boy from Arkansas. ... I am an African-American woman, grew up working class on the south side of Chicago, and this is a pretty special moment for me to be here talking to you. How does it feel talking to me? That I made it, too, when people said I wouldn't be able to?"

But there's another explanation that few people have considered. We are accustomed to the charge--often legitimate--that politicians want to "change the subject" when the subject is politically inconvenient. But the press does it too. This is certainly the case when it's a "slow news week" and the media create a pseudo-event out of shark attacks or batty left-wing activists camped out at the president's ranch. Perhaps it's also true when the imperial press doesn't like an important news story that makes it look bad. In a normal time, the Cheney episode would have been relegated to the interior pages of most newspapers. But it just so happened that the story broke amidst the media's fetal crouch in response to the Danish cartoon controversy. That story revealed the bone-deep hypocrisy of a press that is eager to publish images or stories that damage the White House and America while inflaming passions around the world think Abu Ghraib or the Koran-flushing fiasco--but also has deep misgivings about being offensive to "oppressed" minorities when the narrative isn't so clear-cut. The beauty of the Cheney story, or so it seemed, was that it shifted attention to a storyline in which the press was the aggrieved party. Of course, it takes a lot of wishing to make that interpretation plausible. But as we've seen, there is no lack of wishful thinking in the press today.