The Blood Sport of Vice Presidents

http://www.counterpunch.org/rosenberg11092007.html

November 9, 2007

Canned Hunts for Dick Cheney
The Blood Sport of Vice Presidents
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.

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.

canned hunting is for assholes.

Does he give them away to friends as gifts?

This is clearly sociopathic behavior. Sick.