Thompson writes that a written report by the Vice President’s Secret Service detail says that Cheney was “clearly inebriated” when he shot Mr. Wittington. According to Thompson’s column the delay in admitting law enforcement personnel to the ranch was to give the people in the hunting party time to sober up. Thompson wrote that administration officials to whom he had talked admitted that Cheney had drunk far more than the one beer that he claimed he had had at lunch some hours earlier. One White House aide is alleged to have said, “This was a South Texas hunt. Of course there was drinking. There is always drinking. Lots of it.”

Last week I compared the “one beer at lunch” statement to the “two beer defense” with which any lawyer who has either prosecuted or defended a Driving Under the Influence charge is all too familiar. It is virtually impossible for the admitted drinking to account for the behavior that the arresting officer reports or the tested blood alcohol level. Visible signs of impairment invariably include slurred speech and erratic actions. Those are the very indications of impairment that are said to have been observed by the authors of the Secret Service report.

Thompson claims that the Secret Service seized all of the tests of Wittington’s blood performed at the hospitals and directed his treating physicians to make no statements about the case.

As I wrote last week this incident bears on the Vice President’s honesty, integrity, and competence. If there is a written Secret Service report in existence - and one is sure to have been written it is in the interests of the public, the Bush Administration, and the public that it be promptly released. If the Secret Service has possession of the tests of Mr. Whittington’s blood it is just as urgent that those results be made public. Anything less and Mr. Cheney is left with only his incredible “one beer” defense and that is just not good enough.