AR-News: (U.S.) Dick Cheney's "lazy 'canned' pheasant slaughter"

[Mary Finelli]

DICK CHENEY KILLS BIRDS DEAD
SF Gate, The Morning Fix, Mark Morford, Jan. 23, 2004
The manly veep has himself a lazy, "canned" pheasant slaughter.
Aren't we all so impressed?
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/01/23/notes012304.DTL&nl=fix


So then about a month ago the vice president of these beautiful and
deeply confused United States, he of the struggling defibrillator and
the shockingly nefarious wife and the gnarled calluses from working
Dubya's puppet strings, he of the thin-lipped sneer that makes babies
cry and women wince and foreign policies crumble like feta cheese in
the freezer, well, Dick goes himself a-huntin'.

	http://counterpunch.org/jensen0703.html
	http://post-gazette.com/pg/03343/249105.stm

Not just any ol' regular, camouflage-wearing, man-versus-nature hunt
out in the wild, mind. Dick is far too fragile and unskilled and
spoiled and scared of the open woods and icky furry monsters for that.
Assumedly.

Nossir, our man Dick, he has himself flown over, in Air Force 2, on the
taxpayer's tab, accompanied by his most favoritest shotgun, to the
exclusive Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier, Westmoreland County, in rural
Pennsylvania, to have himself a nice, cushy "canned" pheasant hunt.

	http://fund.org/cannedhunts

This is what it was: Dick and about nine other overfed white guys
sitting in a comfy luxury blind with their manly shotguns, waiting for
the Westmoreland guy stationed behind them on a hill to release
clusters of stunned, fat, tame game birds from a net. Then they shoot
them.

Lots and lots of them. And then they slap each other on the back. And
they grunt and say nice shot as the birds drop like flies as dogs race
back and forth hauling dead or dying birds into huge piles. Whee what
fun.

More than 400 birds were killed in one lackadaisical afternoon. Dick
himself blasted the living crap out of 70 birds, all by himself. That's
right, 70. Plus an unknown number of mallard ducks. Then they had them
all plucked and vacuum packed and sent back home to show off to the
staff. Dick was driven back to the airport in a Humvee.

	http://hsus.org/ace/12017

Are we not all impressed? Are we not all sitting here saying, wow, that
Dick Cheney guy, he of the massive alleged Halliburton corruption
scandals, he is one studly dude, slaughtering a small mountain of
docile, stupefied birds that had no chance of escape. What a guy.

And what a display of prowess and skill, using his day off to kill
almost as many pheasant and duck in an afternoon as all those notions
of progress that have been slaughtered by his inbred cronyist
pro-industry energy policy since the beginning of this sentence. Gosh.

Even real hunters cringe at canned hunts. It is not a sport. It is not
man versus nature. There is no nobility, no honor, no sportsmanship, no
instinct, no luck, no tramping through fields and crouching in blinds
and waiting for hours as you coddle the barrel of your shotgun and
dream of J.Lo and tell jokes about homos and Hillary Clinton, just so
you can shoot a few wild birds.

In other words, Cheney's canned hunt had none of the ostensibly
sporting characteristics of true hunting. Cheney's was essentially a
slaughter, a bloody target practice for aging overpampered white males
who never have sex and have desperately zero outlet for all their
pent-up misanthropic energies. In short.

Yes, there are far more pressing issues for us to care about than a
bunch of dead birds. And, yes, there are roughly a billion chickens
slaughtered every damn day in this county by giant pollutive industrial
farms in far more inhumane and brutal and disgusting and inbred and
feces-thick and imminently liquefied and reconstituted and
resold-as-McNuggets ways than Uncle Dick's little afternoon birdie
bloodbath.

And, yes, indeed, canned hunts happen far more often than anyone
probably imagines. There are private ranches all over the country, most
offering manly trophy hunters a "guaranteed" kill of some overbred,
tame, exotic animal, such as antelopes, deer, cattle, swine, bears,
zebras and sometimes even big cats.

These ranches, most operating in -- you guessed it -- Texas, service
lazy fee-paying trophy hunters who want a giant stuffed antelope head
for the den but don't want to deal with any of that nasty nature or
travel to Africa. God bless America.

	http://fund.org/library/documentViewer.asp?ID=1085

So Dick's little hunt was not all that rare. Which of course makes it
no less stupid, no less of a brutal blood rush. It was a
taxpayer-supported trip taken solely for the sake of ... what? Not
sport. Not gamesmanship. Not food. Just the little thrill that comes
from killing something that never had a prayer? Is that it, Dick? Kick
up the defibrillator a notch? Must be.

Hell, we taxpayers could've saved a fortune in Secret Service time and
Air Force 2 gas money had Dick simply have one of his lackeys -- Colin
Powell, say -- tie long strings to the feet of 70 ducks and tether them
to the White House lawn. Then Dick could just sit in a nice leather
recliner and shoot them at will.

Simpler still, aides simply could've nailed the birds' feet to the
floor with a staple gun and Dick could've put on a pair of army boots
like the kind he avoided wearing during the Vietnam War, and as the
birds squawked Dick could've jumped around like a human pogo stick and
stomped on each bird, popping it like a balloon. Yay Dick!

And, finally, there is the patented Dubya hunting method, wherein you
make a little gun shape with your thumb and index finger and sit back
and "aim" at each bird and shout "Bang!" and someone smashes the bird
in the head with a baseball bat. Same difference, really.

You know what? It's not a big deal. It's just a bunch of dead birds,
right? Over 400 of them spread among 10 guys who simply could not shoot
fast enough to kill them all. Again, it happens all the time.

Except here, here in the land of obvious and tragicomic analogy, where
you simply cannot help but transfer Dick's little aggro mind-set --
this numbly violent attitude of "just line 'em up and shoot 'em and
pretend you're actually a manly hunter when all you are is rather
heartless and inhumane and small" -- over to the government itself.

Which is to say, this is the worldview we are up against. This is yet
another perfect example of the American agenda as set forth by the
CheneyRumsfeldRove Triumvirate o' Pain, very much the way this
administration attacks the world. No competition. No sportsmanship. No
fairness. Zero respect. No reverence. And no actual talent required.
Just kill at will.

Because it is, in the final analysis, all about how you approach and
engage the world, nature, yourself. It is all about with what degree of
sacredness and veneration you walk the planet, treading lightly or
stomping heavily, in awe of the interconnectedness or working to crush
the beautiful and the weak for profit and hollow thrill. It is, after
all, your choice.

Do you, as Dick Cheney obviously does, see the world as your personal
blood-sport playground, where you can take anything you want, kill
whatever you like, respect nothing nature has to offer, suffer no
ramifications, and do it all on someone else's tab? Well then. You have
made your choice. The GOP wants you.

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