In principle yes I do indeed agree with you. Here’s the problem: If the Vice President tells the General Council of a hospital in Corpus Christi to shut the **** up, then by gosh they’re gonna shut the **** up.
Additionally, you paint the Press quite unfairly here. " hounding the docs every 30 seconds" ? Surely if you have information proving that members of the media are penetrating the security of the hospital in Texas, accessing the ICU Floor and are in fact hounding his doctors nonstop, you might want to tip off the authorities. Otherwise, that’s a bit of a stretch. The press learns things about patients when Docs and Hospital Admin and PR Types ( and, the General Counsel when need be ) decide to sit in the glaring light of the cameras and talk. And not until then.
What if this poor gentleman were to die? ( god forbid ) No obit? No announcement? No funeral? No memorial service? No grave marker? Hide his body at Area 51? Exactly how far will Mr. Cheney go to make sure we don’t know anything at all about this gentleman’s condition?
I would respect the man’s privacy. Every 30 seconds, an update? No, not hardly. Nobody has that kind of right of access- heck, unless you are a sitting head of state. This man is not. Once he is released and stable? Yeah, I think we might have a right to know he’s out of the hospital.
If he were to pass away? I dunno, do we have a right to know that the Vice President killed a man with a gun*******? How do we balance the rights of the individual and his family to privacy with our right to know what our elected officials have done, and what the ultimate ramifications of those actions may or may not be?
******* There may be those conservatives who will argue that if this man dies, Mr. Cheney did not kill him. The pellets killed him, and Mr. Cheney is immune from guilt. It puts me in mind of a hilarious - because it is so inane - quote from Jimmy Breslin’s “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight”. He described a character as having " Died of natural causes when his heart stopped because someone stuck a knife into it".
Would anyone, no matter what their political bent, argue that if this man does suffer permanent injury or disability or death, that Mr. Cheney is not solely and completely responsible for this? If so, please explain why?
