 
As long as everyone's talking about crack shot Dick Cheney, might as well pile on. From Josh Marshall:What stuck out to me though is that the owner of the property on which the incident occurred was the person interviewed by the AP. And the property owner, Katharine Armstrong, gave a highly exculpatory recounting of what transpired. Basically, she said the victim, Harry Whittington, snuck up on Cheney, didn't give the appropriate warning. And in any case getting sprayed with shot in the face and half your body isn't that big a deal anyway.
But by way of Brad Blog we find that Armstrong is the daughter of the one of the folks who hired Cheney at Halliburton.
They also waited 24 hours to report this, while they worked out a story that didn't make Cheney sound like a complete incompetent moron. I like Armstrong's quote in the New York Times about the physically robust Veep:''Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been,'' she said. ''The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came.'' (hat tips to stephen and bill for the images)
I am surprised I have not heard any "Deadeye Dick" jokes!
I love how they try to blame the victim, so typical of the Bush admin "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality.
OK , I grew up hunting, and I was instructed to NEVER SHOOT AT ANYTHING UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE that what you are aiming your weapon at is the thing that you want to KILL.
No hunter worth a shit would EVER just turn and fire at a sound, hoping it might be a bird or something other than a human being. What a fucking asshole moron & horrible excuse for a hunter.
What are they doing letting senile old men wander around in the woods with loaded guns anyway?
And what kind of asshole do you have to be when the way you relax & use your limited leisure time is to go kill cute little animals?
im looking forward to seeing some forensic data on this (charts w/ circles and arrows, etc). thor is quite right there is simple hunting protocol which would prevent this. the guy with the gun is the one whose supposed to be careful. it speaks to a trigger happy attitude and overanxious (hypercompetitive) blood lust for the kill. they were going after a second bevy of quail, they took off, cheney followed swinging his shot gun and firing right at a fellow hunter. for someone coming up from behind (as they claim) the victim has pellets in his front side. (someone wanna call inspector monk). sounds like they all pilled into a car and just went huntin'. no guide? wonder if they had cocktails before hand like allot of other hunters do. could be a cause for delay in notifying press. local sherif notified promptly but blood tested? errrr probably not.
"Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon."
whoops. thought that was the current trip.
Re : Dave's post:
thanks for posting that.
Choads like Big Dick who take part in "hunting trips" like that one are not real hunters, they are just lazy whimpies.
When we used to hunt we would be hunting real wild animals, and we walked around in the woods, and we NEVER used blinds or feed/salt licks. That is cheating and unsportsmanlike.
That said, I am not actually a fan of real hunting either unless your survival depends upon it (I have been a vegetarian for about 20 years), but real hunting is much more honorable than that kind of fake hunting that Big Dick engages in for his sick pleasures.
Just to round out the discussion I think we need a link to something a little further out.
I saw that human hunting movie with Gary Busey and Ice-T!
This is from the comments to that post, from "anonymous" (repeating some of what's been said here)--
The entire Cheney hunting accident story stinks. The delay in announcing it is suspicious, obviously. [...]
But a few other points that may be worth noting:
1. The news reports say the accident happened "around 5:30 pm" on Saturday. In Texas, quail can be hunted until 30 minutes after sunset. Sunset on Saturday, in Corpus Christi, was at 6:18, which means they were legal until 6:48. The "around" is suspicious.
2. The news reports say that after Whittington (left) had gotten off his shot and went looking for his bird, Cheney and the other hunter went to another spot where they saw a covey of quail. Texas quail might be different from Iowa quail, but in Iowa when a shotgun goes off, every quail within earshot flutters away. The story doesn't make sense.
3. None of the stories have commented on the fact that they were "road hunting", or hunting from a car. [Where does it say that? --tm] That is just about the lowest kind of low-rent, dishonorable kind of hunting there is (the phrase "road hunting" is often used synonymously with "poaching"). When I was growing up in Iowa, I went pheasant or quail hunting on scores of occasions with my Dad and others. We never would have hunted from a vehicle and it was an insult to even suggest that someone might. It was considered dangerous and declasse, as it was too great an advantage for the hunter to be "fair". It most states, including Texas, it is also illegal:
"It is unlawful to hunt from or by means of motor-driven vehicles and land conveyances or aircraft of any kind except paraplegics and single or double amputees of legs may hunt from stationary motor-driven vehicles or land conveyances."
However, Texas exempts private property owners from the prohibition when they are on their own land and Cheney was with the property owner on his ranch. But it is still really tacky.
4. Hunting quail in Texas requires an "Upland game bird stamp", which costs $7. This is a relatively new requirement, but I'll bet Cheney didn't have one.
5. The spin is that Whittington "came up from behind the Vice President", implying that he snuck up on him or was somehow partially responsible because Cheney didn't know he was there. When hunting, it is bad form to walk in front of someone's gun. When given a choice, one would always approach another hunter from behind.
Cheney has gotten negative press in the past for participating in "canned hunts" and a couple of years ago he got really negative press for going on a canned pheasant hunt in Pennsylvania where he got between 70 and 95 birds (depending on which report is to be believed). The typical daily limit in places like Iowa and South Dakota, where we have many more pheasants than Pennsylvania, is 3 or 5 per day and a possession limit of 15 or 20.
To many of our milieu, hunting is hunting is hunting and the distinctions noted above aren't that big of a deal. To hunters, these are important distinctions. Hunting regulations are strictly enforced in most states and every sixpack Joe knows he better abide by them or he'll get in trouble. Most hunters aren't affluent suede vest guys, they are working class guys within a couple of generations of agriculatural roots. The gluttony of shooting 70 pheasant in a day is almost impossible for them to comprehend.
Focusing on the kill rather than the hunt is frowned upon. Killing more than you can eat is frowned upon. Canned hunts and that kind of over-indulgence is for the Rambo hunters, who are not thought highly of by the old-fashioned Izaak Walton league type of guys, like my Dad.
Someone should be asking if Cheney was drinking, if he was properly licensed with his Upland Game Bird Stamp, when (and if) the hunting accident was actually reported to the authorities and if anyone has investigated why the quail in Texas seem to have gone deaf.
Ms. Armstrong claims to have been in the car, but to have witnessed the shooting. If so, that would mean the hunters were fairly close, within eyeshot, which makes it even less likely that Whittington had gotten off a shot at a quail and then there were other quail still waiting around for Cheney to find them. It just does not make sense.
Gilliard had a funny human hunting riff last night.
you were on the money with the 7 dollar hunting stamp!
i believe i also read in the nyt that ms armstrong had remained behind (and witnessed the incident) from "the car." heres this : Sandra Guzman, the secretary for Kenedy County Sheriff Ramon Salinas III, said no charges have been filed.
The local prosecutor's office has not been contacted and would only get involved if there were an indication of criminal wrongdoing or the facts were in dispute, said District Attorney Carlos Valdez.
Whittington and Cheney were being issued warning citations for not having a required $7 upland game bird stamp.
are the facts in dispute yet?
Apparently the first time a local policeman went up to the ranch to investigate this he was turned away by the Secret Service.
It is creepy that Cheney hasn't addressed the public about his shooting a man in the face and has hid behind other people. When I was growing up my parents would have said that shows a lack of character. But now that Cheney and Bush are returning the country to the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful days before hippies....
The news just said that Dick's victim just had a heart attack because he has some birdshot LODGED IN HIS HEART. I am sorry but this is in no way a "superficial at best" (as the repugs repeated constantly yesterday) wound, this is a serious and life-threatening wound. "Superficial", to me, means that something bonked into you and maybe your skin got a little broken... NOT penetrating well into the body & lodging in the heart.
The doctors are saying the birdshot "migrated" to his heart (presumably through his circulatory system from where ever it entered his body). At this point it's hard to know what's true especially with these lia-- I mean, good men who are returning the country to the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful days before hippies....
The SF Chronical has this story as the top headline, with a picture of Cheney skulking about the White House, and two, count 'em, two stories. One is about the 20+ hour delay. The other is about Cheney's abject ignorance of hunting protocols.
The SJ Merc went with the early arrival of allergy season as their top story. Ahh, the burbs.
from nytimes
Dr. O. Wayne Isom, the chairman of heart and chest surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, said it was unlikely that a pellet would migrate to the heart through the bloodstream, as some have assumed from the account of the Texas doctors.
The reason, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet would have to enter a vein, travel to and through the lung vessels that go to the heart, and then lodge in heart tissue, not in one of its chambers. The pellets were approximately five millimeters, about the size of a BB, and larger than most blood vessels, said Dr. David Blanchard, director of emergency services at the hospital.
A more likely explanation, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet lodged in or touched the heart when Mr. Whittington was shot.
who was in charge of the hunt? at what range? whos fault?
From Salon:
If you're unclear on the kind of damage that a 28-gauge shotgun can do, the paper that first reported on Dick Cheney's shooting of Harry Whittington has some visual help for you. A photographer for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times has simulated the accident by firing his own 28-gauge shotgun, loaded with birdshot, at a paper target 30 yards away -- the same distance that is said to have separated Cheney from Whittington when the vice president pulled the trigger. The result is up for viewing here.
Is the media stilll using words like "sprayed" and "peppered" now that we know deadly projectiles went through the man's chest cavity and into his heart muscle?
Josh Marshall makes the same mistake I did on buying the "migration" theory:
These gets fairly deep into the weeds of the Whittington case. But one point that garnered a lot of discussion yesterday was just how the birdshot got lodged in or near Whittington's heart.
What most people seemed to be saying yesterday was that the most likely possibility was that it was from a wound to the neck. Pellet goes into the neck, gets into an artery and then makes its way to the heart.
But Whittington's doctors said yesterday that they had known there was a pellet lodged near his heart from the beginning. So that seems to complicate the migration theory.
Now the Times has an article quoting Dr. O. Wayne Isom, the chairman of heart and chest surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, saying that it is much more likely "that the pellet lodged in or touched the heart when Mr. Whittington was shot." Of course, as steve's quote reminds us, arteries push blood away from the heart, with great force. Veins bring the blood back, through the lungs. Also, how could a pellet "lodge" in "heart muscle" through normal circulation?
So it looks like the Veep shot a 78 year old man in the heart.
Someone sent me a compilation of all the late night jokes about this incident. It seems to have given the yukmseisters carte blanche to joke about everything--the war, domestic spying, Administration incompetence.
Where was this kind of joking before the 2004 election, is what I want to know.
wotta laff riot!
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As long as everyone's talking about crack shot Dick Cheney, might as well pile on. From Josh Marshall: They also waited 24 hours to report this, while they worked out a story that didn't make Cheney sound like a complete incompetent moron. I like Armstrong's quote in the New York Times about the physically robust Veep:(hat tips to stephen and bill for the images)
- tom moody 2-13-2006 3:16 am
I am surprised I have not heard any "Deadeye Dick" jokes!
I love how they try to blame the victim, so typical of the Bush admin "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality.
OK , I grew up hunting, and I was instructed to NEVER SHOOT AT ANYTHING UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE that what you are aiming your weapon at is the thing that you want to KILL.
No hunter worth a shit would EVER just turn and fire at a sound, hoping it might be a bird or something other than a human being. What a fucking asshole moron & horrible excuse for a hunter.
What are they doing letting senile old men wander around in the woods with loaded guns anyway?
And what kind of asshole do you have to be when the way you relax & use your limited leisure time is to go kill cute little animals?
- Thor Johnson (guest) 2-13-2006 6:14 pm
im looking forward to seeing some forensic data on this (charts w/ circles and arrows, etc). thor is quite right there is simple hunting protocol which would prevent this. the guy with the gun is the one whose supposed to be careful. it speaks to a trigger happy attitude and overanxious (hypercompetitive) blood lust for the kill. they were going after a second bevy of quail, they took off, cheney followed swinging his shot gun and firing right at a fellow hunter. for someone coming up from behind (as they claim) the victim has pellets in his front side. (someone wanna call inspector monk). sounds like they all pilled into a car and just went huntin'. no guide? wonder if they had cocktails before hand like allot of other hunters do. could be a cause for delay in notifying press. local sherif notified promptly but blood tested? errrr probably not.
- bill 2-13-2006 6:58 pm
"Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today that 500 farm-raised pheasants were released yesterday morning at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township for the benefit of Cheney's 10-person hunting party. The group killed at least 417 of the birds, illustrating the unsporting nature of canned hunts. The party also shot an unknown number of captive mallards in the afternoon."
- dave 2-13-2006 7:52 pm
whoops. thought that was the current trip.
- dave 2-13-2006 7:55 pm
Re : Dave's post:
thanks for posting that.
Choads like Big Dick who take part in "hunting trips" like that one are not real hunters, they are just lazy whimpies.
When we used to hunt we would be hunting real wild animals, and we walked around in the woods, and we NEVER used blinds or feed/salt licks. That is cheating and unsportsmanlike.
That said, I am not actually a fan of real hunting either unless your survival depends upon it (I have been a vegetarian for about 20 years), but real hunting is much more honorable than that kind of fake hunting that Big Dick engages in for his sick pleasures.
- Thor Johnson (guest) 2-13-2006 7:59 pm
Just to round out the discussion I think we need a link to something a little further out.
- jim 2-13-2006 8:11 pm
I saw that human hunting movie with Gary Busey and Ice-T!
This is from the comments to that post, from "anonymous" (repeating some of what's been said here)--
The entire Cheney hunting accident story stinks. The delay in announcing it is suspicious, obviously. [...]
But a few other points that may be worth noting:
1. The news reports say the accident happened "around 5:30 pm" on Saturday. In Texas, quail can be hunted until 30 minutes after sunset. Sunset on Saturday, in Corpus Christi, was at 6:18, which means they were legal until 6:48. The "around" is suspicious.
2. The news reports say that after Whittington (left) had gotten off his shot and went looking for his bird, Cheney and the other hunter went to another spot where they saw a covey of quail. Texas quail might be different from Iowa quail, but in Iowa when a shotgun goes off, every quail within earshot flutters away. The story doesn't make sense.
3. None of the stories have commented on the fact that they were "road hunting", or hunting from a car. [Where does it say that? --tm] That is just about the lowest kind of low-rent, dishonorable kind of hunting there is (the phrase "road hunting" is often used synonymously with "poaching"). When I was growing up in Iowa, I went pheasant or quail hunting on scores of occasions with my Dad and others. We never would have hunted from a vehicle and it was an insult to even suggest that someone might. It was considered dangerous and declasse, as it was too great an advantage for the hunter to be "fair". It most states, including Texas, it is also illegal:
"It is unlawful to hunt from or by means of motor-driven vehicles and land conveyances or aircraft of any kind except paraplegics and single or double amputees of legs may hunt from stationary motor-driven vehicles or land conveyances."
However, Texas exempts private property owners from the prohibition when they are on their own land and Cheney was with the property owner on his ranch. But it is still really tacky.
4. Hunting quail in Texas requires an "Upland game bird stamp", which costs $7. This is a relatively new requirement, but I'll bet Cheney didn't have one.
5. The spin is that Whittington "came up from behind the Vice President", implying that he snuck up on him or was somehow partially responsible because Cheney didn't know he was there. When hunting, it is bad form to walk in front of someone's gun. When given a choice, one would always approach another hunter from behind.
Cheney has gotten negative press in the past for participating in "canned hunts" and a couple of years ago he got really negative press for going on a canned pheasant hunt in Pennsylvania where he got between 70 and 95 birds (depending on which report is to be believed). The typical daily limit in places like Iowa and South Dakota, where we have many more pheasants than Pennsylvania, is 3 or 5 per day and a possession limit of 15 or 20.
To many of our milieu, hunting is hunting is hunting and the distinctions noted above aren't that big of a deal. To hunters, these are important distinctions. Hunting regulations are strictly enforced in most states and every sixpack Joe knows he better abide by them or he'll get in trouble. Most hunters aren't affluent suede vest guys, they are working class guys within a couple of generations of agriculatural roots. The gluttony of shooting 70 pheasant in a day is almost impossible for them to comprehend.
Focusing on the kill rather than the hunt is frowned upon. Killing more than you can eat is frowned upon. Canned hunts and that kind of over-indulgence is for the Rambo hunters, who are not thought highly of by the old-fashioned Izaak Walton league type of guys, like my Dad.
Someone should be asking if Cheney was drinking, if he was properly licensed with his Upland Game Bird Stamp, when (and if) the hunting accident was actually reported to the authorities and if anyone has investigated why the quail in Texas seem to have gone deaf.
Ms. Armstrong claims to have been in the car, but to have witnessed the shooting. If so, that would mean the hunters were fairly close, within eyeshot, which makes it even less likely that Whittington had gotten off a shot at a quail and then there were other quail still waiting around for Cheney to find them. It just does not make sense.
- tom moody 2-13-2006 8:41 pm
Gilliard had a funny human hunting riff last night.
- tom moody 2-13-2006 9:14 pm
you were on the money with the 7 dollar hunting stamp!
- joester 2-14-2006 10:37 am
i believe i also read in the nyt that ms armstrong had remained behind (and witnessed the incident) from "the car." heres this :
are the facts in dispute yet?- bill 2-14-2006 9:05 pm
Apparently the first time a local policeman went up to the ranch to investigate this he was turned away by the Secret Service.
It is creepy that Cheney hasn't addressed the public about his shooting a man in the face and has hid behind other people. When I was growing up my parents would have said that shows a lack of character. But now that Cheney and Bush are returning the country to the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful days before hippies....
- tom moody 2-14-2006 9:19 pm
The news just said that Dick's victim just had a heart attack because he has some birdshot LODGED IN HIS HEART. I am sorry but this is in no way a "superficial at best" (as the repugs repeated constantly yesterday) wound, this is a serious and life-threatening wound. "Superficial", to me, means that something bonked into you and maybe your skin got a little broken... NOT penetrating well into the body & lodging in the heart.
- Thor Johnson (guest) 2-14-2006 9:55 pm
The doctors are saying the birdshot "migrated" to his heart (presumably through his circulatory system from where ever it entered his body). At this point it's hard to know what's true especially with these lia-- I mean, good men who are returning the country to the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful days before hippies....
- tom moody 2-14-2006 10:03 pm
The SF Chronical has this story as the top headline, with a picture of Cheney skulking about the White House, and two, count 'em, two stories. One is about the 20+ hour delay. The other is about Cheney's abject ignorance of hunting protocols.
The SJ Merc went with the early arrival of allergy season as their top story. Ahh, the burbs.
- mark 2-15-2006 12:18 am
from nytimes
Dr. O. Wayne Isom, the chairman of heart and chest surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, said it was unlikely that a pellet would migrate to the heart through the bloodstream, as some have assumed from the account of the Texas doctors.
The reason, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet would have to enter a vein, travel to and through the lung vessels that go to the heart, and then lodge in heart tissue, not in one of its chambers. The pellets were approximately five millimeters, about the size of a BB, and larger than most blood vessels, said Dr. David Blanchard, director of emergency services at the hospital.
A more likely explanation, Dr. Isom said, is that the pellet lodged in or touched the heart when Mr. Whittington was shot.
- steve 2-15-2006 12:44 pm
who was in charge of the hunt? at what range? whos fault?
- bill 2-15-2006 3:13 pm
From Salon:
If you're unclear on the kind of damage that a 28-gauge shotgun can do, the paper that first reported on Dick Cheney's shooting of Harry Whittington has some visual help for you. A photographer for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times has simulated the accident by firing his own 28-gauge shotgun, loaded with birdshot, at a paper target 30 yards away -- the same distance that is said to have separated Cheney from Whittington when the vice president pulled the trigger. The result is up for viewing here.
- tom moody 2-15-2006 4:48 pm
Is the media stilll using words like "sprayed" and "peppered" now that we know deadly projectiles went through the man's chest cavity and into his heart muscle?
- tom moody 2-15-2006 4:51 pm
Josh Marshall makes the same mistake I did on buying the "migration" theory:
Of course, as steve's quote reminds us, arteries push blood away from the heart, with great force. Veins bring the blood back, through the lungs. Also, how could a pellet "lodge" in "heart muscle" through normal circulation?So it looks like the Veep shot a 78 year old man in the heart.
Someone sent me a compilation of all the late night jokes about this incident. It seems to have given the yukmseisters carte blanche to joke about everything--the war, domestic spying, Administration incompetence.
Where was this kind of joking before the 2004 election, is what I want to know.
- tom moody 2-16-2006 9:04 pm
wotta laff riot!
- Thor Johnson (guest) 2-16-2006 9:29 pm