The Heart of the Administration

There's some scuttlebutt that Dick Cheney had some heart trouble when he was in Vail, Colorado, over the weekend. No, don't bother going to Google News. You'll only find denials there. Instead, you'll have to check out an entry in Arianna's blog from Friday. She also happened to be in Vail and discovered heavy security at the hospital and lots of "no comments," except for one person who claimed Cheney "was no longer there." She dug a little bit further and added an update to her entry detailing what she'd heard, that there had been some sort of cardiac incident. On Sunday, Arianna followed up with another post, pointing out that, although the hospital had officially denied Cheney had been there, Cheney's office said that he'd gone in to get an old football injury looked at. That's the story the AP's sticking to, at least for the time being. So far, I've only seen New York Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove going after the story, and he developed his own sources for today's item rather than simply parrot Arianna. He made an error in his headline, though (which, to be perfectly fair, was probably written by a copy editor rather than Grove himself): Cheney EKG? Media pulse quickening. Well, maybe not yet. Until that actually does happen, we'll just have to content ourselves with our celebrity blogger and the gossip columnist.