| Sunday, February 19, 2006 |
| Ranchaquiddick, take 6: Fun with Dick and Pam |
 So who is this Pamela Willeford, anyway?
Well, since July 30, 2003, she's been the ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, a singular honor, I'm sure...
She's a Texan, and used to be chairman of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, after being appointed to that board by then-Governor George W. Bush. According to her bio, "She has been an Executive Committee Member of the Texas Book Festival since its inception in 1996, and served as Advisory Committee Chairman for The Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries."
She is married to Dr. George Willeford, III., and he was on that little hunting trip, too (although Lynn Cheney was not...). BTW her husband's nickname is "Boots," which presents a whole other host of comedic possibilities... and it seems that Boots and the other members of the hunting party weren't around when the Whittington turkey shoot occurred. But Ms. Willeford apparently was. In fact, it's not clear why Vice President Cheney represented Mrs. Armstrong as the witness, when to hear Ms. Willeford tell it, it was she who witnessed the quail pop gone wrong...
"We really thought he [Mr. Whittington] was way back behind us," said Pamela Willeford, the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland since October 2003.
She was on a brief vacation visiting her husband, Dr. George "Boots" Willeford III, a gastroenterologist in Austin. Dr. Willeford was also hunting at the Armstrong Ranch but in a different field at the time of the shooting about a mile away.
Mrs. Willeford said Mr. Whittington was perhaps 90 feet away when the vice president, who was tracking a quail that had flown up and dipped back down, shot him. She said only she, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Whittington were hunting at the time.
Two others were waiting in a car nearby – Ms. Armstrong and her sister, Serita Hixon – in keeping with a safety rule that limits the number of hunters to three at a time, she said.
"The three of us were out of the vehicle hitting a covey," she said. "Harry Whittington dropped back to pick up a bird he'd shot. The vice president and I moved on to shoot another covey, and unbeknownst to us, Harry had picked up a bird and caught up with us. He had walked up, and we didn't realize that he had caught up with us," she said.
"He was back behind us, and we turned off to the left to shoot another covey. ... The bird came up and was going back down, and you know how you swing on it, with your gun, following a bird," she said.
Mrs. Willeford said she'd hunted once before with Mr. Cheney and would do so again.
"Absolutely," she said. "He's a great shot. He's very safety-conscious. This is something that unfortunately was a bad accident, and when you're with a group like that, he's safe or safer than all the rest of us. He feels terrible about it." [Dallas Morning News, Feb. 14] Hm. Sounds like she's the one who should have been designated to called the press. ...
Oh, and rumors are flying that she's having a fling with the veep. Now get that picture in your head and let it marinate for a while ...
So the idea is that the "real" reason Cheney waited so long to tell the press, or the president, about his little hunting mishap wasn't because he was drunk (or wasn't only because he had been on the sauce), or because he was worried Whittington might die (which he had to have been) but rather to scuttle Mrs. Willeford out of the eyes of curious news types before they got the wrong idea... ahem...
So is Mrs. Willeford Cheney's Monica? Who knows. Ultimately, who cares (hell, I'm not gonna speculate -- she's got a rifle and I don't...) But she sure does know a lot about how Mr. Cheney feels...
Tags: politics, News, Cheney, Dick Cheney, Shooting, Hunting, Pamela Willeford |
posted by JReid @ 1:34 AM   |
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