If You'll Lie About The Little Things...

Yesterday, during his interview with Fox News, the Vice President repeatedly called Katherine Armstrong an eyewitness to the shooting.  In fact, he said that was the reason he relied on her to make the incident public. 

But Ms. Armstrong's own statements make clear that she was not en eyewitness at all.  Which in turn begs the question, what does the Vice President have to hide?

Here's the first example of Vice President Cheney calling her an eyewitness:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I said Karl has hunted at the Armstrong, as well, and we're both good friends of the Armstrongs and of Katherine Armstrong. And Katherine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the announcement, that is that she'd put the story out. And I thought that made good sense for several reasons. First of all, she was an eye-witness. She'd seen the whole thing. Secondly, she'd grown up on the ranch, she'd hunted there all of her life. Third, she was the immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert in all of this. (emphasis added)

Again: 

And so we were confident that Katherine was the right one, especially because she was an eye-witness and she could speak authoritatively on it. She probably knew better than I did what had happened since I'd only seen one piece of it.  (emphasis added)

And again:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Exactly. That's what we did. We went with Mrs. Armstrong. We had -- she's the one who put out the statement. And she was the most credible one to do it because she was a witness. It wasn't me in terms of saying, here's what happened, it was -- (emphasis added)

And again:

And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible, and I think Katherine was an excellent choice. I don't know who you could get better as the basic source for the story than the witness who saw the whole thing. (emphasis added)

But here is how the "eyewitness" described how she reacted to the sight of Cheney's security detail rushing out to the hunters:

Armstrong said the shooting accident happened toward the end of the hunt on Saturday, when it was still sunny but as darkness was encroaching and they were preparing to go inside. She said Whittington made a mistake by not announcing that he had walked up to rejoin the hunting line, and Cheney didn’t see him as he tried to down a bird.

Armstrong said she saw Cheney’s security detail running toward the scene. "The first thing that crossed my mind was he had a heart problem," she told The Associated Press. (emphasis added)

Now explain to me again how she was an eyewitness to the shooting and was the only one qualified to give an accurate account to the media? Clearly she didn't even see the shooting.  So why does the Vice President keep saying that she did?

Hat tip to Emptywheel over at Kos for first catching this inconsistency.  And hat tip to Left Coaster for spreading the word.