I have to admit that I have no idea what to make of the "Dick Cheney shoots a man in the face with a shotgun and then the white house sort of delays releasing the story to the press and then the man has heart attack and Cheney might have been drunk and what's his relationship to that woman he was with anyway?" story that seems to be all the rage this week.

Really, I don't know what to make of it at all.

Molly Ivins, however, has some interesting comments in her column this week.

She mentions that Harry Whittington, the Republican lawyer Cheney shot in the face, was outspoken about the need to reform the prison system in Texas. Apparently he served on the Texas Board of Corrections and she quotes him as proclaiming that "prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants."

Ivins says that whenever a new overzealous "tough on crime" legislator got elected in Texas, the senior members of the party would make him or her meet with Whittington to get a lesson on the high costs of building prisons in order to curb crime.

Sounds like a drug policy reform ally to me! A Texas Republican ally no less!

Again, I don't have any grand conclusion about what this means.

Maybe Cheney can make it up to Whittington by supporting the repeal of the outrageous federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

Tags: Cheney, Texas, War on Drugs.