Quell the Quailgate

February 17, 2006
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
WASHINGTON --

I'm just glad he didn't shoot Scalia.
Well, everyone's entitled to one Quailgate joke, so that's mine. Although the best one, occurring at the Monday White House news briefing, was only inadvertently funny: Reporter's question to Scott McClellan, ``Would this be much more serious if the man had died?''
This news briefing got famously out of control (as a psychiatrist, the groups I ran for inpatient schizophrenics were far more civilized) over the new great issue of our time: Why was there a 14-hour delay in calling the press?
Let's pose a hypothetical. You're at a gathering at a friend's house in the country. You're all playing touch football and, as you lunge to tag someone, you stumble and accidentally barrel into a would-be receiver running a crossing pattern and you knock him down, breaking a few of his ribs, maybe puncturing a lung and who knows what else.
What do you do? You get him immediate help. Then you notify and tend to his family. Then you try to calm the host and the guests and try to mitigate the damage you've caused...
...If there was a sin against the public interest, it was in the desire to retain control over what was a still-chaotic situation. But it is a minor sin. There was no cover-up, nothing to cover up. There was no scandal. It hardly merited the quite overwrought charges of excessive secrecy, imperial arrogance, abuse of power and other choice selections from the lexicon of Nixoniana...

(continue article by clicking title)