November 9, 2007 at 10:25:50
Bedeviled by Bloodlust and Cowardice Cheney Goes Canned Hunting
by Martha Rosenberg Page 1 of 1 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com
While most people are lamenting the violence in Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan
and Iraq, apparently it's not enough bloodshed for Vice President *****
Cheney.
Last month in a caravan of 15 sport utility vehicles and an ambulance--no
jokes, please--Cheney made his way to Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club about 70
miles north of New York City, near Poughkeepsie, for a day of controlled
bloodletting.
Cheney landed at Stewart Air Force Base and took off the following day for
the upscale gun club at a cost of $32,000 for local law enforcement
officials who guarded his hotel, protected his motorcade and diverted school
buses.
Unlike Cheney's 2003 trip to Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, PA in
which he killed 70 pheasants and an undisclosed number of ducks (his hunting
party killed 417 pheasants), staff at the Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club
remained
tight lipped about the take. An employee who answered the phone would not
disclose which species was being shot--ads say pheasants, ducks and
Hungarian partridges--and kept repeating "I don't know anything about it,"
before hanging up. Like Cheney's last visit to Clove Valley in 2001, the
4,000 acre club which costs $150,000 a year to join was a fortress with
Blackwater style snipers "protecting" the Vice President's right to shoot
tame birds.
But a New York Daily News photographer did snap a picture of a small
Confederate flag hanging inside a garage on the hunt club property which
prompted civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton to demand that Cheney "leave
immediately, denounce the club and apologize for going to a club that
represents lynching, hate and murder to black people."
Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said neither Cheney nor anyone on his
staff saw such a flag at the hunt club. (Maybe the flag was on the women's
side of Clove Valley; only men are allowed in the clubhouse.)
Of course the nation is still amused about Cheney's 2006 hunting mishap in
which he shot 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington in the face in Texas
instead of a quail--and everyone from Letterman to the President Bush jokes
about it.
But canned hunting isn't funny.
Birds raised for canned hunts at gun clubs and in state "recreational" areas
are grown in packed pens--think factory farmed chickens--and fitted with
goggles so they won't peck each other to death from the crowding.
When released for put and take hunters like Cheney, pen raised birds can
barely walk or fly--or see thanks to the goggles. They don't know how to
forage or hide in the wild and sometimes have to be kicked to "fly" enough
to be shot.
Some hunters say shooting the pellet-ready tame animals who offer no
resistance is like having sex with a blow up doll.
But others say hunting itself is like sex with a blow up doll and that the
ten percent decline in hunters seen in the US since the late nineties--from
14 million to about 12.5 million--coincides exactly with the debut of
impotence drugs like Viagra.
Still for the Veep to pursue his addiction to the "programmed massacre of
scores of tame pen-raised birds" despite all the "negative publicity it has
generated for him" suggests a deep psychological disorder writes Gerald
Schiller in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Especially since criminologists have long recognized that premeditated,
sadistic treatment of animals is a strong predictor of criminal and
homicidal violence.
Sociopaths Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Speck were both big on animal cruelty.
And they weren't running foreign policy.
Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist for the Evanston Roundtable.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_martha_r_071109_bedeviled_by_bloodlu.htm
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