Quite often, really.  Former Vice President Dick Cheney recently received a heart transplant after a 20 month wait.  It’s not like he went to the head of the line, now is it?  So what angle does ABC News want to play?

Is Dick Cheney Too Old for a Heart Transplant?

Translated, it means should Republicans receive heart transplants since they don’t have them anyway.  I’ll guarantee that if an aging Democrat party member received one, the media would be all gushy about it and never question if he or she were too old.  I’ll also guarantee that if a younger Republican received one, they’d just come up with another question asking if he or she should have received it.

This article is stupider than most because it answers the question in the third paragraph, saying that people Cheney’s age do get them.  But wait, it gets stupider than that.

Experts differ on whether the 20-month wait is longer than normal.

“Twenty months, as an outpatient, [is] not [an] unusually long wait,” Dr. Marrick Kukin, director of heart failure at St. Lukes Roosevelt in New York said.

But Dr. Keith Aaronson, medical director of the heart failure program at the University of Michigan said 20 months “is a relatively long waiting time for an LVAD recipient to wait for a heart transplant.”

Now how useless is this?  About as useless as Joe Biden, except Biden supplies entertainment value.  Theoretically, news stories should inform people, but presenting two different claims when there is a definitive answer to the question wastes space, energy, and isn’t very green.  So which is it?  A long wait, or a normal wait?  I don’t know, but there is an answer and a reporter should know how to find it.  I do, however, have a theory that might explain why this ambiguity exists.

The reporter contacted Dr. Aaronson first and didn’t want to report that Dick Cheney waited a long time.  It would have looked far better to report that he didn’t wait long at all, then interview a distressed liberal-approved victim group mother of a child waiting for a new heart.  That one’s coming, mark my words.  The reporter, not liking the answer then contacted more doctors hoping to find one that would say it was a short wait.  The best the reporter could come up with was Dr. Kukin, who said it wasn’t unusually long.  Sometimes you just don’t get dealt the hand you want.