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Pending any further developments, the Washington Post today may have the last word on the Dick Cheney affair.

It turns out that a Post staff member, the aptly named Stephen Hunter, is himself an experienced bird hunter. He’s not entirely unsympathetic to Cheney, as he acknowledges how easy it is to be so focused on your prey that you lose sight of your surroundings. But Hunter makes two important points about Cheney:

1. Yes, folks, the accident was Cheney’s fault. Incredibly, the White House spinners are still trying to blame this on the victim, Harry Whittington. But Hunter writes:

The fundamental etiquette and safety device of bird hunting is: Obey the line.

The line is between you and the game ahead of you, and by you I mean everybody in your party. The line is invisible but should exist in the imagination as powerfully as the Great Wall of China. It is the simple geography of safety that determines that we are here and we only shoot there — that is, ahead of us. It has certain mandates. One is that at any given moment, one should know where everybody in the hunting party is. You have to keep those images in mind as you move over the ground. It has to be second nature….

It appears the vice president lost contact with the line.

2. Whittington is very fortunate to be alive. According to Hunter, if Cheney were not such an expert shot, he would likely have been firing heavier, cruder ammunition. Hunter explains:

He [Cheney] was lucky to be so superb a wing shot that he carried a shotgun in 28-gauge rather than 12-gauge. That probably saved Harry Whittington’s life. The 28 is for advanced bird hunters who’ve killed their thousands with a 12 — the common hunting shell of America’s shotgunners — and want something more refined, lighter, more beautiful. With the 28 you have to get closer, shoot faster and more accurately. The little pieces of shot break their cluster sooner, spray more widely, lose velocity faster.

Incredibly, the White House and its partisan allies continue to attempt to minimize this and to shift the blame to the victim. Here is how Anne Kornblut ends her New York Times account today:

Ms. Armstrong and Ms. Willeford said the accident was largely the fault of Mr. Whittington, who had reappeared alongside two of his hunting companions without giving proper warning. Mr. Cheney, who was carrying a 28-gauge shotgun, had already begun to fire and sprayed Mr. Whittington.

“He got peppered pretty good,” Ms. Armstrong said. “He fell with his head toward me.” She said she ran over to Mr. Whittington, who had fallen, but stayed out of the way while Secret Service agents tended to him.

“There was some bleeding, but it wasn’t horrible,” she said. “He was more bruised.”

Ms. Willeford, whose husband was also at the ranch, said in an interview after visiting the victim at the hospital that Mr. Whittington accepted responsibility for the accident. “He understands that he could have handled it better,” Ms. Willeford said. “Harry should have let us know he was back there.”

This is bogus, and Stephen Hunter has exposed it as such. “He got peppered pretty good.” Please. The bottom line remains the same: The vice president shot a 78-year-old man in the face, putting him in intensive care for several days, and let nearly a day to pass before allowing the news to become public. That’s kind of important, isn’t it?

Katharine Armstrong’s spin has given way to reality. The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reports:

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s incident report on Vice President Dick Cheney’s accidental shooting of a hunting partner Saturday pins the blame largely on Cheney….

In evaluating “contributing factors,” the game warden checked off the box: “Victim covered by shooter who was swinging on game.”

The game warden’s report contradicts earlier claims from the White House and Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the Texas ranch where the shooting occurred. Earlier Monday, the White House cited Armstrong’s view that Whittington was at fault.

Here are the documents, from (of course) The Smoking Gun.

On the plus side for Cheney, it does appear that he stuck around until the local authorities had completed their investigation.

Not to mention the fact that his reputation as the baddest veep ever has been enhanced considerably. (Via Wonkette.)

John Dickerson, writing in Slate:

When you nearly commit homicide as a public official shouldn’t the honor of your office compel you to stand up and explain yourself in some fashion, at least say something in a press release and not just whisper it to a Texas rancher?

You would think so.

I’m slightly embarrassed at not having weighed in on the Muslim cartoon controversy in any significant way. The Boston Globe and the MetroWest Daily News spoke with me, but if you read my comments, you will see that I — like a lot of people — am having a hard time figuring out just what to think.

So let me recommend two op-ed pieces from yesterday’s New York Times that are brilliant, nuanced and — best of all — freely available, and not hidden behind the TimesSelect wall.

The first, by Emran Qureshi, a fellow at Harvard Law School, takes his fellow Muslims to task for the violent protests that have broken out over the depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. And he sees a motive, writing:

Within the Muslim world, the cartoon imbroglio has given ammunition to the two entrenched forces for censorship — namely, authoritarian regimes and their Islamic fundamentalist opposition. Both would prefer to silence their critics. By evincing outrage over the Danish cartoons, authoritarian regimes seek to divert attention from their own manifold failures and to bolster their religious credentials against the Islamists who seek to unseat them.

But Qureshi adds:

[T]he answer is not more censorship. But it would be nice if Western champions of freedom of speech didn’t trivialize it by deriving pleasure from their ability to gratuitously offend Muslims. They view freedom of speech much as Islamic fundamentalists do — simply as the ability to offend — rather than as the cornerstone of a liberal democratic polity that uses such freedoms wisely and responsibly. Worse, these advocates insist on handing Muslim radicals a platform from which to pose as defenders of the faith against an alleged Western assault on Islam.

The second, by law professor Stanley Fish, portrays the controversy as a clash between religions — with the West, and particularly Europeans, finding comfort and solace in the religion of liberalism. Fish writes:

Strongly held faiths are exhibits in liberalism’s museum; we appreciate them, and we congratulate ourselves for affording them a space, but should one of them ask of us more than we are prepared to give — ask for deference rather than mere respect — it will be met with the barrage of platitudinous arguments that for the last week have filled the pages of every newspaper in the country.

As a nominal member of the religion of liberalism, I found Fish’s analysis both counterintuitive and bracing.

Anne Kornblut’s New York Times account of Dick Cheney’s Excellent Misadventure contains a fascinating passage. The interviewee is Katharine Armstrong, a member of the family that owns the Texas ranch where Cheney was hunting on Saturday. Whittington, of course, is Harry Whittington, who’s in intensive care after being shot by the vice president.

“This all happened pretty quickly,” Ms. Armstrong said in a telephone interview from her ranch. Mr. Whittington, she said, “did not announce — which would be protocol — ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m coming up,’ ” she said.

“He didn’t do what he was supposed to do,” she added, referring to Mr. Whittington. “So when a bird flushed and the vice president swung in to shoot it, Harry was where the bird was.”

Mr. Whittington was “sprayed — peppered, is what we call it — on his right side, on part of his face, neck, shoulder and rib cage,” she said, noting that she, too, had been sprayed on her leg in a hunting accident.

Apparently the lesson here is that Cheney did do what he was supposed to do by blasting Whittington in the face.

So not only did Vice President Dick Cheney shoot a hunting buddy, but he apparently tried to cover it up, at least for a while. The Associated Press account includes this: “The vice president’s office did not disclose the accident until the day after it happened.”

This isn’t a matter of intent, obviously. It’s a matter of an out-of-control hunter blasting away at a quail and placing a 78-year-old fellow hunter in mortal danger. Is there anyone outside a small circle of elite politicians who could do this without getting taken into custody?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Last week I took New York Times columnist Joseph Nocera to task for falsely claiming that (1) you can’t move your music from your iPod to another portable music player and (2) you’ll lose all the music from your iPod if you send it to Apple for a battery replacement.

Today Nocera comes half-clean, writing (sub. req.):

Many readers chided me for writing last week that if you send an iPod to Apple to have the battery replaced you lose all your data. They noted, correctly, that so long as your music is stored in iTunes, you can easily download it onto the new iPod Apple sends you. When I wrote that line I was thinking of situations — which happen more often than you’d imagine — where your computer has crashed, and the iPod is the only place your music is stored. But when I pointed this out to a few of my correspondents, their rejoinder was swift: you should always back up the data on your computer. In the modern age, a computer crash is as inevitable as death and taxes.

Better than nothing. Although I’m scratching my head over his alibi.

I have an article (free reg. req.) in the new issue of CommonWealth Magazine on the citizen-journalism movement as exemplified by H2otown, a weblog covering Watertown. The piece focuses on Lisa Williams, who started the site about a year ago, and who covers town-council meetings by TiVoing them on the local-access channel and then taking notes after her kids have gone to bed.

Among other things, Williams tells me:

I don’t see H2otown as a newspaper, but it’s important to me that it add up to something. I’m not a professionally trained journalist. My coverage is limited by my babysitting coverage. I’m perfectly willing to be humble about that. But volunteer media is a heck of a lot better than no media. I’m angry at the economic realities of media consolidation. This is an extremely widespread problem.

Other folks I interviewed include Christopher Lydon, host of the blogified radio program “Open Source”; citizen-journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor; Universal Hub impresario Adam Gaffin; the Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain; the Poynter Institute’s Steve Outing; Baristanet founder Debbie Galant; and Greg Reibman and Dan Atkinson of Community Newspaper Co., which publishes the Watertown Tab & Press.

From today’s Boston Globe:

A campaign to build a wireless data network in Boston picked up momentum yesterday as Mayor Thomas M. Menino said he would mount an effort to spread wireless Internet access across the city.

From today’s Boston Herald:

Hub grudge politics may be delaying free Internet access in Boston as critics charge a power grab by Mayor Thomas M. Menino is stalling the spread of coveted free Wi-Fi.

*With apologies to Boston Magazine, which posted an update yesterday for the first time in months.

Give Media Nation credit. I believe I’ve come up with the least interesting sidebar to the violent international dispute over those cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Simply put: Why does the Boston Globe spell it “Mohammed”? I remember that spelling from childhood. But, at some point, “Mohammed” became “Muhammad” and “Moslem” became “Muslim,” apparently out of some language expert’s desire to make the English versions of those words conform more closely to the Arabic.

The Associated Press Stylebook specifies “Muhammad.” The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.), and the Los Angeles Times have all been going with “Muhammad.” Yet the Globe steadfastly renders the name as “Mohammed,” as it did in this Colin Nickerson piece today.

Of course, the Globe is free to develop its own house style and to go with spellings that other publications spurn. But the paper hasn’t been especially consistent. I did a LexisNexis search that showed the Globe has referred to “the prophet Muhammad” on at least a half-dozen occasions since November 2004. Granted, it has gone with “Mohammed” far more often. But the whole point of having a stylebook is to eliminate such disparities, which can be confusing to readers.

I realize that, while I’m obsessing over trivia, people are dying. Thus I offer you Mark Jurkowitz’s thoughtful commentary on the larger issues surrounding this.