Dick Cheney Kills Birds Dead: Mark Morford
Dick Cheney Kills Birds Dead
The manly veep has himself a lazy,
"canned" pheasant slaughter, and
we are so impressed
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 23, 2004
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every
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