Earlier this week, in an attempt to shift attention away from Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident, the right wing attacked former Vice President Al Gore for calling attention to the round-up of Arabs and Muslims that occurred in the days after 9/11. Labeling him “seditious,” Michelle Malkin said Gore “slandered” America for stating that Arabs had been “indiscriminately rounded up” after 9/11.

On Tuesday, Karl Rove’s White House deputy, Peter Wehner, emailed Gore’s comments on background to reporters urging them to editorialize on the issue. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Tim Russert gave airtime to Paul Gigot, editor of the Wall Street Journal, so he could say this:

I think the remarks were notable. Because I think when you go to a country like that, particularly in the heart of Wahhabi Islam, and say we have indiscriminately rounded up Arabs in this country after 9/11 — first of all, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t remember us doing that.

While the right has been quick to politicize Gore’s remarks, they haven’t had the time to do a fact-check. Gore was merely stating what has been reported and well-documented over the past few years:

Even some government officials are worried. In a secret meeting of top Justice Department officials hours after the attacks, then-immigration chief James Ziglar rebuked those in the room for proposing a “roundup” of Arabs and Muslims. “I’m not going to be part of this if we’re going to do things that blatantly violate the law,” Ziglar declared, according to people there. [Knight Ridder, 6/15/03]

The Census Bureau’s decision to give to the Department of Homeland Security data that identified populations of Arab-Americans was the modern-day equivalent of its pinpointing Japanese-American communities when internment camps were opened during World War II, members of an advisory board told the agency’s top officials Tuesday. “This for the Arab-American community is 1942,” said Barry Steinhardt, a civil liberties lawyer and member of the panel, the Decennial Census Advisory Committee. “Thousands of Arab-Americans have been rounded up and deported.” [New York Times, 11/10/04]

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Today on Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Cheney advisor Mary Matalin a reasonable question:

RUSSERT: Was alcohol in any way, shape or form consumed during the afternoon? And should we accept the [Vice] president’s “a beer” as literally one beer?

Matalin didn’t answer it:

MS. MATALIN: What Katharine Armstrong was answering is a literal fact going to the question she was asked, which is always the case on the Armstrong ranch, you don’t drink and hunt, and you don’t hunt with drinkers. And that’s what the sheriff reported, that’s what she reported. It is true that the vice president had a beer at lunch, and let me ask anybody sitting at this table who knows the vice president, has known him for many years, has seen him in social situations, he’s known not to be a drinker. But let me ask you a more logical question””you think the Secret Service would let the vice president out, tanked up, with a loaded gun, or let him be around anybody who’s drunk with a loaded gun? It just defies common sense that the press would even go there. And that’s why these adversarial question-and- answer periods set up the presumption that Cheney would be drunk, or having to deny that Cheney was drunk, as opposed to presuming what we all know, that he doesn’t drink, he wouldn’t hunt and drink, the Secret Service wouldn’t let anybody around him who is drinking and hunting.

Instead of answering the question, Matlin appeals to the ego of Russert and the other panelists. If you are in the know, if you’ve hung out with Cheney, you would know to stop asking these questions.

What’s puzzling is that Matalin insists its a “literal fact” that Cheney doesn’t “drink and hunt” even though he has admitted to drinking before hunting. She also says that the press should have assumed that Cheney “doesn’t drink” even though we know he had beer before and “a cocktail” immediately after the hunt.

The Vice President shot someone in the face, didn’t talk to the police until the next morning and then blamed the person who got shot. The American people, who pay his salary, have the right to know exactly how much Cheney was drinking and if that amount of alcohol would interact with his medications.

UPDATE: Crooks and Liars has the video.

Jon Stewart preparing for his big night. (via HuffPost)

for joke about Cheney. “[Washington Post reporter Dana] Milbank wore hunting gear — an orange stocking cap and striped vest and gloves — on Keith Olbermann’s show Monday night…Suffice it to say that he has been taken to The Post’s version of the woodshed and told not to do that again.”

“A month ago, Republican leaders in Congress called legislation on the topic their first priority, and promised quick action on a measure that would alter the rules governing the interaction between lawmakers and lobbyists. But now they do not anticipate final approval of such a measure until late March at the earliest.”