Amazingly Objective Reporting

[Jeff Higgins]

A hand-wringing ninnie liberal friend sent me this. I don't know what is more frightening; the knowledge that there are reporters writing (and media willing to publish) this kind of stuff, or the knowledge that there are people out there that buy it.

Dick Cheney's Sadistic Passion for Shooting Tame Animals

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet. Posted November 14, 2007.

Dick Cheney just spent a day shooting up pen-raised birds. Some hunters liken the sport -- killing tame animals that offer no resistance -- to having sex with a blow-up doll.
While most people are lamenting the violence in Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan and Iraq, apparently it's not enough bloodshed for Vice President Dick 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 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, which 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 10 percent decline in hunters seen in the United States since the late '90s -- 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.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

Why not just have Libby throw a bucket of KFC up in the air?

[Drago]

I'm guessing that your ninny liberal friend eats pen raised chicken but doesn't know it. This is different how?

[ronin]

that's not reporting. that's pure editorial

[BeyGon]

My dad used to raise Pheasant, Quail, and Chukar for places like that, the best thing about it was we got to eat them before they had the little holes in them.
Our holiday dinners were great.

[Superman]

Jeff, if I wanted that article posted here I would have done it myself instead of sending it to you.

My first thought when I read the opening post above was about the differences between politics and news reporting and hollywood entertainment. Can anybody help me? What are the differences? Any?

[Jeff Higgins]

The lines have definitely blurred in our lifetimes, haven't they?

Funny, I don't remember seeing you ring your hands, and don't think I wasn't looking.

[mattdavis11]

Personally, I'm not big on the canned hunts, but there is good that comes from it. The state gets license fees, the gun manufacturers sell weapons, and the ammo companies sell shells. Decent amount of money there that is spent which goes back into the economy. Blast away!!

[stevepaa]

what ever floats your boat


the only caveat being why is this pen hunting approved while cock fighting is illegal?

[DARISC]

So what do these "hunters? do after the "hunt"? Go to well stocked hooker bars to demonstrate their prowess in bagging women?

[Superman]

Originally Posted by DARISC

So what do these "hunters? do after the "hunt"? Go to well stocked hooker bars to demonstrate their prowess in bagging women?

LMAO. I've got to admit, I shake my head a bit at hunters these days. My guys were stolen a few years ago and for whatever reason, I have not resumed hunting. And......while I'm not saying I'm the World's Best Hunter, I think the sport has gotten a bit ridiculous. First of all, hunting with a rifle is a bit more like shopping than hunting. 4-wheel ATV's make it so you can hunt in your jammies and slippers if you wanted, I guess. I'll bet guys use infrared binoculars.

For me, hunting was not about killing. It was about playing hide-and-seek with them.........in their home stadium. Shooting birds like shooting trap......well.......whassup with that. do they shout "pull?"

[Racerbvd]

Well, I'm old school when it comes to hunting, a shotgun, our property in upstate NY (farm land, in the mountains, not stocked) and I don't see the fun or sport in canned hunting We may not always get a deer, but that isn't what the sport is really about (in my eyes) it is the hunt, no knowing where the deer are, using your wit & luck, getting back to nature.

[Jeff Higgins]

My German grandpa ("opa") was quite the hunter in his day. Wild boar were his favorite game, but he enjoyed picking up the odd bird now and again while walking into his boar stand. This was in btween wars Germany, and in post WWII Germany. He was only allowed one gun, so he had a beautiful Dreiling, often miss-translated as "drilling". It had three barrels; a pair of 12 gauge with a rifle barrel underneath, between them. It cost as much as his car, and his hunt club membership cost what most would consider a reasonable monthly mortage payment. He was fairly well-to-do, I guess.

His dire warning to me was to never let America turn into Europe, as far as the hunting situation. Well, sorry folks, but it has. The commercialization of hunting has taken root. While we can still hunt on public land, in many states it is just not worth it. Overcrowding, limited "public" lands, short seasons, heavy handed game departments, and on and on. Having access to quality hunting here in the U.S. now all too often entails joining a hunting club with a private lease. My opa had no choice; public land hunting died in Europe before he was born. I see the same thing happening here a generation or two down the road.

Eventually it will only be the Cheneys and the rest of the connected, monied elite that effectively retain their hunting rights. Sure, game departments will still sell licenses and tags, and there will be places to "hunt". But they will be the most uninhabitable, game poor sections of public land left. Much of Washington is like this already; our game department sells tags and operates hunting seasons in units where there simply is no game. On the flip side, it establishes hunts in units that are primarily private land, where the land owners have discovered the financial windfall of the "trespass fee". These fees can run into the $5k-$10k per season per person range in our more desirable areas.

And then there is the technology race. ATV's to carry those too lazy to walk deep into the woods. Range finders to tell you how far away the game is, and scopes with reticles designed to allow the "hunter" to hold precisely for that range. Now we have "hunters" shooting game at 732 LAZERED yards and riding over hill and dale to retrieve that game on their "Japanese mules". All the while bragging up what a "tough" hunt it was.

While my opa would never had predicted this, his warnings ring true about the privatization and dwindling access we see today. Combine the private hunt clubs with today's technology, and you have the modern "hunter" being driven around in specially built "hunting cars" by paid staff, who know exactly where the game is behind the high fences. They have thermal imaged them early in the morning, before the clients are up for the day. "Look, sir - there's one - he's a good one - about 568 yards away - hold two dots up - wind speed is 11 mph at 4:00 - the computer says hold one dot left..."

[Tobra]

there is no difference between the news and hollywood "entertainment", politics is a blend of the two

Don't get the allure of a canned hunt like this, but the author's trying to equate this with Speck or Dahmer is a bit of a ridiculous reach. Perhaps they don't get that when you make statements like this in a political hit piece, it is much less persuasive, though it sounds like the interested parties made up their minds long ago

[DARISC]

Originally Posted by Tobra

...there is no difference between the news and hollywood "entertainment", politics is a blend of the two...

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

Shakespeare

[tabs]

It all reminds me of Paddy Chayefskys prescient movie "Network."

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

And then there is the technology race. ATV's to carry those too lazy to walk deep into the woods. Range finders to tell you how far away the game is, and scopes with reticles designed to allow the "hunter" to hold precisely for that range. Now we have "hunters" shooting game at 732 LAZERED yards and riding over hill and dale to retrieve that game on their "Japanese mules". All the while bragging up what a "tough" hunt it was.

Too true. While I don't hunt anything other than dove, I let certain folks hunt deer on my property. I do, however, only let bow hunters and black powder guys hunt.

I also built a duck blind that I let a young man guide out of with paying customers. He has all the decoys. john boats, etc. We split the proceeds 55/45. You'd be amazed what people will pay for a day in a duck blind. The young mans father sets up breakfast. etc. They have a long waiting list.

For dove, my son and I will only hunt with .410s...