Day: October 30, 2007

Cheney Hunts at Club Flying Confederate Flag

Trish

The vice president of the United States of America is hunting at a private club that flies the Confederate flag, the symbol of a society built on the backs of enslaved people, the descendants of whom the vice president is supposed to represent.

But hey, Cheney’s minions are saying it doesn’t count because just like Texas lawyer Harry Whittington, who he shot in the face last year, Dick didn’t actually see the flag.

A Cheney spokesman said the vice president never saw the flag…

Deer hunter Bill Tryon, 48, who works on Clove Road, where Cheney’s motorcade sped by in the morning, said he had no problem with the veep taking aim at the local game.

“As long as he doesn’t shoot anyone in the ass,” Tryon said.

But simply showing up at a hunting club that flies the battle flag is egregious, according to usually self-aggrandizing but in this case totally correct Rev. Al Sharpton.

The flag fiasco is especially upsetting because blacks have recently been subjected to an upsurge of racial threats, including nooses left in Jena, La., and Columbia University, he said.

“This is an outrage – he ought to leave immediately,” Sharpton told The News. “He ought to apologize to the American people for being there in the first place.”

You got that right, Al. And while he’s at it, Cheney should apologize to the birds who were the victims of his male potency fantasy.

Farm-bred pheasants were released on the preserve 24 hours before Cheney arrived, making them easy targets for the hunting party.

“The way they hunt, I’m not fond of,” said Linda Smith, 52, who runs a local preschool. “It’s not what I would call a real sportsmanlike activity.”

And in case you’re wondering, the scene of this rich, whites-only activity was…Union Vale in Upstate New York.

Addicted to Fear – Cowardice Has Become the Source of Republican Power

Jon Ponder

The Republican Party’s macho bluster and apparently endless appetite for war makes it seem counter-intuitive to think of them as cowards. And yet, seven years into the Bush regime, it is clear that the GOP has become dependent on fear to keep itself in power — and to support this addiction the party leadership has converted its rank and file members into America’s first generation of bona fide yellow-bellied chickens.

After the GOP took over the government in 2000 and ran all three branches for six years, the truth about the conservative movement was finally revealed. After years of unctuous claims that they were for family values and lower spending and against corruption, Republicans demonstrated that the exact opposite is true. They were caught engaging in a wide range of sleazy activities, both personal and financial, and Bush and the GOP Congress ran the Treasury into the ground, racking up more debt than all the presidents since Washington, combined. Now, with that record fresh in voters’ minds, all they have left to run on is the politics of fear.

Nearly every day, a subtle or not-so-subtle message of fear — about terrorists, Moslems, Iran, whatever works — is transmitted from the bully pulpit of the White House press room podium out to the public via the seemingly unwitting mainstream media, Fox News and rightwing talk radio. The government’s fear propaganda is mostly just noise in the background to normal people, but rank and file conservatives gobble it up like ravenous dogs.

9/11 Did Not “Change Everything”

The Republican culture of fear was born out of the 9/11 attacks — which we are told “changed everything” because they were an “attack on America.” But when the World Trade Center was bombed in February 1993 by rightwing Islamic terrorists very like the ones who would take the towers down eight years years later, no one suggested that our response to this “attack on America” should be invading and occupying Iraq.

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