Analyze this!

Lyndon Johnson had a ranch in Texas, too. And, like the current president, he often invited folks to visit for a weekend. I don't remember hearing of any brush-clearing, but apparently there were plenty of barbeques and bourbon, and vigorous tours of the ranch by jeep.

Johnson hadn't been President for very long, of course, and the next election loomed almost from the time he took office.

I had a psychiatrist friend, who was as astute as all-get-out, who told me he couldn't support Lyndon Johnson and thought it would be a big mistake for Americans to put him back in office in 1964. I was taken aback, what with his being a good Democrat and all, and asked him why on earth he thought so.

Because, he said, he drives like a madman! When I pointed out that it was off-road, and only around his ranch, he replied that it didn't matter: The point was that it showed Johnson was reckless. And it was just a few months later that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution drove the Vietnam War to new ferocity.

"Reckless," indeed. Now, these 40 years later, it certainly seems relevant to our take on the Cheney hunting "accident."

I put "accident" in quotation marks because of the point: Dick Cheney has shown himself to be, if not reckless, then less than perfectly cautious — as we have a right to demand of a man who could be president of the United States at any moment.