“It was one of the worst days of my life,” US Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News’s Brit Hume this week, in his first public remarks on the February 11 hunting accident that he had kept quiet for 18 hours.

I wonder if it wasn’t the very worst day for Harry Whittington, the 78-year-old lawyer and Bush supporter left hospitalised by the blast from Cheney’s shotgun.

Before granting an interview to friendly Fox, Cheney privatised the release of information. The first responders were the hostess, the doctors and Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator.

Simpson said it was all the media’s fault. The hostess said it was all Whittington’s fault. The doctors said it was nobody’s fault because the patient’s full recovery is apparently a slam dunk.

We don’t know what all the other people present not deputised by Cheney have to say. He’s kept the whole thing as secret as an energy task force meeting.

In a switch from blaming the victim for getting in the way, as hostess Katharine Armstrong had it, Cheney told Hume that he took responsibility and seemed genuinely shaken, as anyone would. No one thought he shot poor Harry on purpose, after all.

What Cheney didn’t do was admit he had any responsibility to inform the public through the usual channels, or why doing so would have conflicted with getting the victim medical care, notifying his family, going to bed and winging back to Washington. He also insisted the trip was private, despite the use of Air Force Two and an entourage of Secret Service, medical and communications staff paid for by taxpayers.

Cheney never has to worry what the deferential president George W. Bush might do or think. After barely hinting he would have handled the matter differently, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan swiftly moved to his default position, which is that the White House is “moving on”.

To make the point, he made light of poor Whittington’s plight by wearing a tie in a shade of hunting-vest orange. That would have been off-key, even if Whittington hadn’t had a heart attack, immediately termed “mild” by a hospital staff in close touch with a White House they say they communicate with only out of courtesy.

Whittington is expected to spend as many as ten days in the hospital. Does he have a time-share at Christus Spohn Hospital? Who in this day of managed care gets to spend ten days in the hospital when they’re doing just fine?

I, for one, am ready to take the White House advice to move on to more crucial business, despite the 18-hour gap, such as how Cheney withheld and disseminated information on weapons more important than his shotgun.

It’s an upside-down world. Cheney has gotten away with cherry-picking intelligence used to justify military action but couldn’t cherry-pick details of what happened stalking quail without an uproar.

Some Republicans circled the wagons, but many more were critical. Senator Trent Lott called Cheney shooter-in-chief and former Bush I press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, who noted there is a set procedure for getting such information out, told Editor & Publisher he was “appalled by the whole handling of this.”

In his next interview, it would be nice if Cheney took responsibility and retracted his claim that, “Simply stated, there is no doubt Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.”

Just this week, another respected CIA agent, Paul Pillar, who left the agency in the wake of its purging by new director Porter Goss, wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine that Cheney insisted Iraqis would greet us as liberators despite intelligence that Iraq would be ungovernable and dangerous. Shouldn’t the day we put more than 100,000 troops in harm’s way for a fiction be worse than that day on the Armstrong Ranch, especially if Whittington is as healthy as everyone insists?

Cheney has been conducting business this way for years with impunity. He does it his way, unapologetically and disdainfully, and without consequence, from keeping secret the names of oil company executives writing energy policy, to the outing of a CIA agent, to using 9/11 to justify everything from warrantless eavesdropping to throwing unaccounted-for billions of dollars in cash into Baghdad without anything to show for it, to torture.

After Senator John McCain, to Cheney’s particular dismay, got a bill passed outlawing torture, the administration attached a signing statement saying they can still torture if they want to anyway.

As the White House’s incompetence piles up, people are getting peevish — and not just partisan Democrats. It used to be the only reliable Republican critic was McCain, who once could fit like-minded colleagues in a broom closet but whose club could now fill a ballroom. Its members include Senators Specter, Graham, Sununu, Snowe, Collins, Hagel and outsiders like former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson.

All manner of frightened House Republicans would like to join. Representative Heather Wilson, the Republican chairwoman of the subcommittee overseeing the National Security Agency, emboldened others to join her in calling for a full-scale investigation of the programme.

This week, House Republicans issued a scathing indictment of the administration on its handling of Hurricane Katrina just as the Senate called Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to hearings to account for the unrefuted evidence that the Bush people did nothing for 12 hours after being informed that the levees in New Orleans had broken.

What Cheney has to worry about is that his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, as he fights his indictment in the leaking of the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame, may pull back the curtain on Cheney’s super-secret operation.

According to published reports, Libby testified that he was authorised to divulge the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate by his superiors anxious to defend the decision to invade Iraq.

Those superiors have to include Cheney, and even he can’t unilaterally declassify classified materials.

Virginia Senator George Allen, who is close to Bush, said a full investigation is necessary. He told Fox News, “I don’t think anybody should be releasing classified information, period.”

Cheney’s hunting accident is damaging precisely because it reminds even Republicans of how he and Bush have handled so many other crises. For five years, they have gotten away with it, in part because of the weakness of the opposition. Democrats should pay attention to the rising Republican criticism.

They might learn how to be the opposition party.

Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist.