How revealing it was last week when Vice President Dick Chaney took a shot at birds and accidentally shot his hunting companion on a Texas Ranch. The ranch was owned by the daughter of Anne Armstrong who was the director of Halliburton when Cheney was hired by the corporation.
It isn’t surprising that to relax, Cheney kills birds. Now the American public really knows just what thugs the Vice President and his friends are. How frustrating it must be for him to start wars and not get to shoot at the terrorists himself. So, instead, why not kill something as innocent, harmless, lovable, and free as a bird?
The Humane Society of the United States reported that on the Monday before the shooting, Cheney had been hunting at an exclusive country club in Pennsylvania where he shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks. These birds are pen-reared to be released to be shot by patrons on the country club such as Cheney. Sportsmen, who hunt only wild animals in their natural habitat, question the ethics of such canned hunts.
During that “hunt” the party of ten killed 417 of the 500 farm-raised pheasants. Wayne Pacelle, a senior vice president of The Humane Society of the United States stated, "This wasn't a hunting ground. It was an open-air abattoir, and the vice president should be ashamed to have patronized this operation and then slaughtered so many animals."
Men like Cheney don’t live by ethics. They live by death. For him, to relax is to kill. At work, his job is to kill people who the United States calls terrorists or to use torture on someone that they suspect knows something about terrorist activities. And at play, he kills nature. What a man of high principles and moral character he is!
In an interview with Fox News when asked if he would continue to hunt he said, "The season is ending. I'm going to let some time pass over it and think about the future." Perhaps that is the most intelligent statement he has ever publicly said. But I won’t be satisfied until he is in a prison cell with years of time ahead of him to reflect on all the deaths that have resulted from his bad policies and dastardly deeds.
When I heard of the news of the shooting, I thought of Cindy Sheehan and the pain she and the other mothers whose sons and daughters have died in a useless war have had to endure. Last month, the secret service arrested Cindy during the State of the Union address for wearing a T-shirt with the number of U.S. soldiers who have died thus far in the war in Iraq. These were not pheasants that lost their lives through the hands of Cheney, but America’s young peasants, kids that were too poor in spirit or finances to find work or education through any other way other than by joining the military.
In the State of the Union address, President Bush used the word “freedom” 17 times. But as Sheehan quickly learned, he and his Vice President know thing about what the word truly means. For them freedom stands for being able to go on the private property of some rich Texan rancher and shoot harmless captive birds as live targets. The birds were killed as they were set free. How symbolic it all seems. What these men hate most of all is something that it free. Such false, ignorance souls like Cheney and Bush, these American barbarians who spend their leisure time killing rather than cultivating themselves, choose to engage in blood sports rather than to seek to learn the reverence for life. For Cheney’s hunting teams there is no hunt, only slaughter just like bombing Iraq to stop the fictional weapons of mass destruction was not about liberating the Iraqi people, but it is was a massacre of innocent people.
If Gandhi is right that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” then last weeks report about the Cheney hunt is a sure indication that America has lost its greatness. As long as such men are in positions of power, we will continue to watch a nation be totally ruined by the guns of the morally bankrupt.
1 comment:
Dick Cheney is the typical atavistic, reactionary male chauvinist. Like his predecessors he is totally unenlightened,
not adhering to civilzed methods of solving international disputes,
but reying on flawed measures like pre-emptive military strikes on nations like Iraq owing to a perceived threat and not an actual one. His whole approach is counter-productive and was passe a century ago when another chauvinist, Teddy Roosevelt advocated "speaking softly and carrying a big stick", which only succeded in creating ill will. The time has come for enlightened female leadership to take the world away from the nuclear abyss.
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