November 9, 2007
www.counterpunch.com
By MARTHA ROSENBERG
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.
punditman says...As if another reason was needed to loathe Cheney, witness how he gets his kicks. From the article: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.Such a big, tough, brave guy, that Dick--always slaughtering smaller creatures and countries. It is time that someone stands up to this psychopathic bully before he and his idiot-boy boss launch their third war, this time against Iran--guaranteed to be even more disastrous than their first two wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
