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Tomgram: Shining a Quailish Light on a Cakewalk

War of the Quailhawks
By Tom Engelhardt

Over a week ago, Vice President Cheney managed to put a couple of hundred pellets of buckshot into his 78 year-old friend and Texas Republican Party builder, Harry Whittington. As the event turned into a national joke, edged with anger, and a late night spectacle, it was natural that the subject of Iraq would arise. After all, given the sorry state of affairs in that country, the thought that the Bush administration (like the Vice President in Texas) shot first and looked only later came quite naturally to mind; but there are other ways in which Dick Cheney's strange encounter of a quail kind on the 50,000 acre Armstrong ranch in Texas might help put the invasion of Iraq in a new light.

Let's start with the quail on what the New York Times calls that "game rich property." (How could it be otherwise when so much of the "game" is raised and released there?) Fragile looking little birds, usually with ET-like plumes dangling off their tiny heads, they hang out in flocks -- coveys, to be exact -- and, unlike the Republicans who bag them at the Armstrong ranch, aren't high fliers. Now, hunting is generally a highly ritualized activity, no small part of which should be consumed with finding your prey or waiting (sometimes fruitlessly) for it to appear -- but this doesn't apply to the fair-weather version of fowl hunting the Vice President tends to practice, as he did to a storm of criticism in December 2003 at a private game club in Pennsylvania. There, "more than 500 farm-raised ring-necked pheasants were released for the vice-president and companions. Cheney shot 70 of the birds, plus some mallard ducks and had them plucked and vacuum-packed before returning to work in Washington." A companion that day, Texas Senator John Cornyn described it as more "Tyson's" than hunt -- that is, a slaughter.

Due to the accident at the Armstrong ranch, a Mecca for top Republicans including the President ("rivaling Hyannisport, Kennebunkport, and the Hamptons as a setting where important relationships [among the corporate and power elite] have been nurtured"), we know a good deal about what this kind of hunting entails. The ritual seems to be that you spend your time with high-toned, well-connected friends (in Cheney's case, Party-builder Whittington, ranch owner and lobbyist Katherine Armstrong, a Bush-Cheney "Pioneer," which means she raised $100,000 for the last presidential campaign, and ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein Pamela Pitzer Willeford, old Bush family friend and a somewhat more modest contributor to Republican campaigns); you're served a catered lunch (sweetbreads, "charbroiled nilgai, an Asian antelope... raised and shot on the Armstrong spread," and jicama salad); you kick back with a beer or two, "freshen up" back at the ranch house, climb into a jeep or SUV, drive across the fields to the spot where you already know the birds will be located -- and you know because you're on a ranch that raises just these birds for you to kill and has two groups of "outriders on horseback" and "about a dozen American pointers and Labrador retrievers" already locating them for you. Some of the hunters remain in the vehicles; others step out for the "hunt." Eventually, the dogs flush the quail. They panic and fly -- not very high or very far -- and you blast away with your fancy gun (in Cheney's case, an Italian 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun). In fishing terms, imagine that someone put a bluefish on your hook just before you dropped your line over the side.

The Cheney threesome had already bagged some 40 of the 45 quail allowed by 5:30. They were following their final covey when the accident occurred. Normally, according to Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, hired crews would then be "paid to clean the dead birds and pack them in dry ice for the flight back to Washington." This experience, we're told, gives the Vice President his major release in life. In hunting terms, if you don't happen to shoot your friend instead of a quail, you might even think about calling this experience a "cakewalk" -- the term that some neocons used when describing what an invasion of Iraq might be like.

Let's also remember that among the earliest images to come out of George Bush's mouth after the 9/11 attacks -- along with his Wild West, vigilante-style, Osama "wanted, dead or alive" pronouncement -- were those of the hunt. He said repeatedly that we would "hunt down" the terrorists, that we were going to "smoke them out." And soon enough, the Vice President himself was out there (along with other top officials), vigorously and repeatedly connecting Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 killers, while pumping up his imminent threat to America, and next thing you know, in March 2003, the "hunt" switched to Iraq -- and, of course, we invaded.

Fighting a War against Sheep, Turkey, Fish, and Deer

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 1:48 PM