Animal Cruelty by Romney, Cheney, Clinton, Huckabee, Cornyn : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

Animal Cruelty by Romney, Cheney, Clinton, Huckabee, Cornyn

(The dog who was forced by Romney to ride on
his car roof for 8 hours wants you to vote for an antiwar
candidate)
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Dick Cheney's love of bird killing

http://www.alternet.org
AlterNet
Dick Cheney's Sadistic Passion for Shooting Tame Animals
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
Posted on November 14, 2007, Printed on January 30, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/67663/

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.

Footnote: "In another year, Cheney accompanied by Senator John Cornyn
of Texas, in Rolling Rock Pennsylvania killed over 400 birds
raised in cages and released from nets directly in front of him.
The cadavers of the murdered birds were vacuum packed
and taken to their new freezer at taxpayer expense... Air Force
Two. These many trips to Louisiana, South Dakota, Wyoming,
Texas, New York, Pennsylvania have cost the birds their
lives and the tqaxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars."
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more on Huckabee's son hanging a stray dog

http://www.newsweek.com/id/78241
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Perhaps the ferret protectors on NYC radio abused
by Giuliani helped to defeat him

Cleveland Indy Media Center