Stay frosty, you mooks! We keep our stories straight and the heat won't get wise, see?

The Cheney shooting incident is beginning to get a little old as the initial comedic euphoria wears off and the depressing fogbank of right-wing spin rolls in. Aside from comedians, most liberal pundits are paying a whole lot of attention to the story. I certainly haven't heard any serious calls for Cheney to step down. But to listen to the righties, you'd think that we had our torches out and were heading for the castle. Instead of dealing with it and moving on to other issues, there's the usual manufactured outrage over how 'crazy liberals' are foaming at the mouth and blowing everything out of proportion. Tiresome stuff.

But one thing the story continues to point out is how incapable the entire admin seems to be of doing anything these days. Haven't these guys ever seen a gangster movie?

Vice President Dick Cheney said he didn't immediately disclose his hunting accident because he wanted the confusing details to come out right. Instead, authorized accounts came out slowly — and often still wrong.

The result: a week of shifting blame, belatedly acknowledged beer consumption (not "zero" drinking after all) and evolving discrepancies in how the shooting happened, its aftermath and the way it was told to the nation.

"There's a reason they call this crisis management," said corporate damage-control specialist Eric Dezenhall, "and that's because it's a mess."