Was Larry O'Donnell drunk?

Lawrence O'Donnell came unglued in an interview with Hugh Hewitt yesterday. He posted on Huffington Post, "Was Cheney Drunk?" and tried to bolster his statement that "Every lawyer I've talked to assumes Cheney was too drunk to talk to the cops after the shooting."

Now, what he doesn't seem to get is that this incident wasn't the equivalent of a car crash where the law requires a person to notify the police and remain at the scene. There are no similar laws governing hunting accidents, especially minor ones like this.

The really amazing thing to me was this statement:

When I raised this question, many people thought it was absolutely outrageous to even consider the possibility that Dick Cheney would have any trace of alchohol in his system. We now know that he did, and we have his word that it was one beer. I don't know what his word is worth on this subject. It isn't worth much to me, because he did everything he possibly could to avoid us being able to know the truth about that.

Hugh asks him who the lawyers were who told him Cheney must have been drunk. Then he loses it. His anger and combativeness suggest to me that he regrets raising this whole meme, but he's too vain to admit that it was outrageous and irresponsible for a journalist to do so.

One thing that I noticed practicing as a public defender was that cops seemed to resent the evidenciary rules that apply to their interrogations of suspects but when they get in trouble, they invariably start asserting their rights like a Columbian drug lord. It's not particularly counterintuitive, but it is amusing. O'Donnell's yelling strikes me as ironic, given how loudly journalists tout the presumption of innocence when it applies to some convicted cop-killer who has written a book of poetry in jail. Being a good writer seem to be for the literati like being born again is for protestant evangelicals.

This hostility from liberal reporters toward Bush just keeps spiraling upward over every trivial thing that occurs. This Cheney hysteria, over a accident common in upland game hunting, reminds me of travails of Ralphie in A Christmas Story.
It's like the media are all yelling, "You could shoot someone's eye out!"

Hugh's next interview with Helen Thomas was a hoot. She spoke down to him as though he were some kind of con man or insolent dog. She is so rude, and insistent in inflicting her nastiness on others, but she obviously doesn't think the same standards she operates by as a journalist have any application to her or her fellow elites. If you dish it out like she does, shouldn't you be able to deal with someone treating you the same way? Hugh Hewitt was far more polite and respectful to her than I've ever seen her be to anyone she was talking to. She gives substance to the cliche of an "old bat."