Bill Clinton: "It's hardly a sport. The quail are slow...."

[sabra]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/391408p-331986c.html

The buckshot stops here: Bill


Bill Clinton doesn't want to go off half cocked, but he can't resist peppering Dick Cheney with a little common sense after the Veep's hunting accident.

Speaking to us Monday night, the former President allowed that we should cut Cheney some slack if he was hunting "in a serious quail place, where wild birds land," where "you've got to rustle them up and they fly fast. A lot of times you can't see them on the ground, and you do turn and fire. As awful as it looks, happen."

But then there's the kind of place where Cheney's known to hunt - where, Clinton noted, "They raise the quail on a farm." He added: "It's hardly a sport. The quail are slow. You have to stomp on the ground to get them to get up and fly. And you can't not get your limit. If it was that kind of farm, then, whatever the facts are, the Vice President shouldn't have done that. Because he was going to get his limit."

[Norquist Nemesis]

1. The first sentence is a keeper!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[Yupster]

2. I just don't get it

where's the fun of shooting birds and then picking them up dead and wounded flapping around with broken wings and other wounds. I guess you get to break their knecks then too?

I know many DU'ers are hunters, but I just can't see taking pleasure from this?

[RethugAssKicker]

3. Me either.... Guess its a redneck thing!

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[rkc3]

9. Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.

[Jacobin]

10. I guess Prince Charles is a redneck, too

:rofl:

[TahitiNut]

34. Inbred is inbred. (Separated at birth??)

:evilgrin:

[Pool Hall Ace]

37. Hey! Can I have the tombstoned poster's hearts ?

Some great lines there by the Big Dawg ! :thumbsup:

[Catherine Vincent]

56. the poster wasn't tombstoned, just the post was deleted

[bleever]

61. Love the Janet Doobydoo icon.

:rofl:

[Pool Hall Ace]

64. Yeah, I still crack up over the Janet Doobydoo thread.

:hi:

[bleever]

65. I just wish we could recruit Bibby Bingo to run as well.

:hi:

[QC]

17. Nope--canned hunts are the province of the ruling class.

Most of the country boys I have known would be mortally embarrassed to be caught standing around with tiny, delicate designer guns shooting cage-raised birds.

[Patiod]

44. Absolutely true

My republican, state-college educated, avid hunter colleague at work seemed kind of embarrassed about the canned hunt aspect. I asked if he hunted quail, and he said yes, but made a point that he only EVER hunted wild game.

His main hunting is turkey and deer, and he eats what he kills (or brings it in for his commie liberal colleagues to enjoy)

[northofdenali]

57. No joke, QC - not to mention the shooting a bud in the face thing.

Can you imagine going after "canned" moose? Or duck? I can't call anyone a "hunter" who shoots set-up game.

[grace0418]

39. Hunting is popular among all races and socioeconomic levels.

I won't pretend to understand it's allure, but when done responsibly I cannot be hypocritical enough to say it should be banned or anything (seeing as I eat meat). Nor would I say "it's a _____ thing."

Hunting out of necessity is what it is. Hunting for food is also acceptible to me.

But hunting just to kill? Sorry, I just can't understand it. I'm a person who takes bugs outside when I find them in the house. And my cat is more precious to me than most humans are. If anyone did anything to him I would go OFF.

[Spiffarino]

43. How embarrassing for you

A "redneck" wouldn't set foot in one of those places. Ordinary folks stalk their pray; they don't wait for somebody to scare it up for them. That's for pasty rich boys.

To call what Crooked Dick was doing "hunting" is like calling what Fox does "news." Cheney was killing birds for fun.

Not being a "redneck" myself but counting many as friends, I don't appreciate your post. Not all of them are Repubs. My favorite - an avid outdoorsman - is politically quite progressive and a great guy. He just happens to work hard for a living and plays hard for fun. I think some of us around here need to take a step back and look at who we mock. Howard Dean is reaching out to working class people...he's on to something.

</rant>

[glitch]

45. To call what Crooked Dick was doing "hunting" is like calling what Fox

does "news" - well said.

[Inland]

47. Well said.

I can imagine my hunter friends from my youth doing a lot of things, but the quail slaughter isn't one of them. I just remember the way they talked about certain hunters that would use tree blinds or other tricks...the contempt was palpable. I bet Cheney lost the respect of a lot of outdoorsmen when the details of his hunt came out.

[Spiffarino]

50. I hope the real hunters are paying attention

Anybody who supported the two poseurs because they support hunting need to take a long look at these two cowardly wastrels. Killing tame animals for sport is a sign of a sick, twisted mind.

And thanks. ;)

[Inland]

46. Cheney isn't a redneck. Can't blame

the regressive traditions of certain rural southeners for THIS dude.

[av8rdave]

7. Hey, I'm all for a legitimate hunter...

You know, the kind that knows something about his/her quarry and the habitat and actually finds the target because of knowledge and effort. Most importantly, he/she cleans and prepares the kill and actually FEEDS somebody with it.

In the age of shrinking habitats and fewer predators, this can actually be a more humane form of population control than allowing animals to starve. What Cheney and its rich buddies do is nothing more than slaughter. You can only imagine the level of skill and knowledge that requires!

[Jersey Ginny]

8. I think it is like fishing. You take out the hook, they flop, they stop

you eat them for lunch or dinner. The birds may have a better end of life than the fish b/c it is likely that their necks are broken once retrived. Quick death. I'm not a vegitarian-don't have enough discipline to be one. "Processing" cows and chickens is much more disgusting.

[Leopolds Ghost]

22. Fish can be killed pretty humanely

Taking them out of the water on a hook is admittedly disorienting, but fish jaws aren't as damaged by hooks as, say, hooking your fishing partner on the cheek would be (and that happens all the time!) If you want, you can release the fish with little damage to the fish, or keep them live in a net -- unlike in hunting where you have to kill your quarry. And if you prepare the fish to be eaten, you can stupefy them in cold water or simply slice the top of their head where the spinal cord runs -- a relatively quick, painless death.

[DenaliDemocrat]

54. Up here the Alaskan Inuits and other natives

consider catch and release fishing "playing with your food" and look down upon it. They consider it the epitome of disrespecting wildlife and what mother nature provides.

[northofdenali]

58. Absolutely, DenaliD - my sister-in-law is Athabaskan.

She goes to fish camp every year - and usually gets her moose, too. She WAS a repub till Shrubbie and Frank the Bank, and finds this incident with Deadeye Dick repulsive. Tame game? Definite oxymoron.

[ShaneGR]

12. They actually taste pretty good...

The meat is quite tender, have you ever seen that cooking show with the two british fat ladies? They specialized in that type of cooking. Now, I doubt Cheney actually eats his kills so that point is moot but a lot of hunters do.

[Divernan]

13. But they're might tasty with all that buckshot in their flesh, right?

Gun enthusiasts could go target shooting, or they can go killing animals. I don't personally understand the thrill of shooting defenseless targets. It's a sport where one team doesn't know it's in a contest, right? What, nobody gave your team any guns? Boo hoo! But at the very LEAST, the hunters should put their kills to SOME use, i.e., eating them. And I know there are some wild animals, namely deer, whose natural predators in nature's heirarchy - such as wolves, mountain lions, etc., are no longer around to keep them (the deer) in proportion to their habitat, so there's a beneficial purpose to hunting deer. But to raise animals in a controlled and pretty much contained environment so that they can be easily shot, and to shoot them with weapons inundating them with buckshot and guaranteeing the birds cannot be eaten, is the kind of gutless activity of the kind you would expect from chickenhawk, draft-dodgers like Cheney. I don't call what he was doing "hunting"; I call it slaughtering.

I was trained to shoot by a Marine gunnery sargeant, and I did enjoy target shooting. I have never killed a living being. I scuba dive in areas where I occasionally encounter sharks. I have read many books on shark behavior, and I accept some risk in exchange for the thrill of diving. I just got back from a trip where 4 other divers and I had the thrill of being approached and circled and "inspected" by a six foot wide eagle ray. So I do know the thrill of encountering animals in nature - I just have no need to destroy them.

[Hand]

21. You mean one of these dudes?

Cool! Sounds like a thrill indeed!

[Divernan]

30. Yup! If you don't chase after them, they hang around awhile.

One of the divers got some great snapshots and will be sending them to me.

[Hand]

31. Probably thinking, "Damn! Those are some weird-looking fish!" nt

[Divernan]

32. There was a pod of humpbacks in the area - & 1 of our divers was big

and all in black. Between the whales, the eels, the octopus, the turtles, the big-as-a-dog lobsters and lots of fish, it was a great dive trip - plus we got to watch the Steelers win the Super Bowl at a local bar - Fat Hog Bob's, in Tortola. It was a great week away from the nightmare news.

[oneighty]

49. Had one a them swimming a circle

around me as I hung onto the descending line at about thirty feet. Beautiful clear water. Scary at first glance.

180

[TahitiNut]

35. I'd far rather dive with feeding sharks a hundred times ...

... than accompany even one such quail shoot with Cheney or his ilk. I've logged over a hundred dives with at least half of this kind. I've played with Morays and fed the sharks and felt like I'm in a far more rational and animosity-free environment than among such kill-for-fun folk. (I don't do spearguns and won't dive with such folk, either.)

[sasha031]

36. I agree, it sounds so sadistic

[shadowlight]

40. Thanks for that. nt

[Occulus]

41. And I'm reminded of the time

a bird crashed into our front window on our house when I was a kid and I went out to see if it was okay.

It was only stunned, and I picked it up and held it until it quieted. Poor thing, it was panting, its beak was open, and it looked scared.

I was as gentle as I could be, held it, and stroked its head until it calmed down. Then I let it go.

It was amazing- me, this big, clumsy thing, holding as lightly as I could, this (obviously young) bird. I was afraid it had hurt itself!

To shoot such...... geez......

[Dunvegan]

4. Nice 360 degree range of irony fire there, BigDawg...

Notice how Clinton begins in saying "...should cut (a real hunter) slack..." but that Dick Fudd:

1. Is NOT a serious hunter.

2. That Bill is a serious hunter that knows the difference from shooting wild game and shooting pen-raised quail.

3. That what Dick does is not sporting or fair.

4. The Veepie has no patience.

5. Elmer Cheney is guilty.

Love watching a Democratic President Rhodes Scholor take on the PAC-Rats of the Repbulican Cabal.

[Inland]

51. It's amazing how much he packs in to a few "compliments."

I'm not sure he thinks this stuff up beforehand or is does it subconsciously, but I really miss that guy.

[northofdenali]

59. A fellow DU'er came up with THE definitive name for this

incident: Fuddgate!!! :rofl:

[Coexist]

6. That was worth a hearty chuckle.

[peacetalksforall]

11. Precious - telling Dick that he shouldn't have shot Harry because it was

easy to make quota. Add that one to the books to come.

Question - do people eat the quails or do they throw them in the trash (barrel)?

[TygrBright]

15. You CAN eat them, and they're quite tasty. HOWEVER...

...even if you're using one of many recipes where you don't have to bone the quail, you have to clean and pluck each bird.

I deeply and sincerely doubt that someone was standing by ready and eager to clean, pluck, and cook SEVENTY OR SO quail for the Veeptard.

Unless he was planning on hauling them all back to DC for a state dinner or something like that.

Even so, I'm pretty sure that if quail was on the menu for such an occasion, it would be procured by the chefs from an ordinary culinary supply source, not from #2-With-A-Bullet.

speculatively,
Bright

[Lisa]

23. and also, the VP's work schedule isn't so empty ...

... that he can take WH catering supply on as part of his duties!

I also am having trouble imagining Dick tenderly eviscerating and plucking literally hundreds of quail and waterfowl every season, with his own hands (let alone Lynne being pressed into service!).

[Leopolds Ghost]

24. "#2-With-A-Bullet" LOL n/t

[Leopolds Ghost]

25. "#2 With A Bullet!" LOL

:rofl:

[rkc3]

14. What did Rob Corddry call the quail on Monday?

Farm-raised, wingless, quailtards, I think.

Quailtards is pretty fricking funny if you ask me. And appropriate too. I've hunted pheasants that were raised on a PA Game Commission farm (Southwest Game Farm to be exact), not exactly very sporting. Although it might explain why Dead-eye Dick uses a 28 gauge shotgun - a 12 guage would obliterate the birds when they decide to flush.

[Ganja Ninja]

16. Farm raised birds.

You can probably get them to eat out of your hand.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

18. Cheney discovered that old Republican lawyers are even slower.

Glad to see that he dispensed with the neck-breaking ritual.

[Leopolds Ghost]

26. He was actually using quail to hunt Whittington...farm-raised attack quail

"Smithers! Release the tame quail."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x424725

[SoCalDem]

29. Better yet.. Perhaps a bread crumb trail

Just have cook leave the kitchen door open and call the birdies..Let them follow the trail, which happens to end inside the open oven door.

[JHB]

19. "His Limit"?

Mr. President, may I submit that the thought of "his limit" never once entered Mr. Cheney's mind that day (or any other).

[Lisa]

20. nice one, Bill!

Great summary. So if Cheney were as great a hunter as his people say he is, he'd have been out in the woods with actual wild quail. So the accident could still have happened -- but not at THAT particular ranch.

And if he's settling for a considerably-easier shoot instead, he was greedy/undisciplined (otherwise the accident wouldn't have happened at all).

[Dunvegan]

27. According to the sites I've looked at on Shooting Preserve Management

like the one at "That Quail Place" forum they put out feed for the birds at a certain time every day...and the quail come to that place at that time of day if they hear people.

So that way you can create a rather accurate "shooting location and schedule" for your patrons, I believe.

Anyone else know more about these set-up "quail shoot-ops" done by some of the managed preserves?

[Inland]

48. That's as sporting as me shooting my cats.

For ten years, the sound of the can opener means food, then one day, BLAMMO! You fucked up, you trusted me!

[Dunvegan]

62. True. And this kind of hunting would really disgust a cat. No challenge...

...no sport.

[Lisa]

55. Saddam Hussein used to do this with gazelles ...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/04/18/international0513EDT0475.DTL

""I was worried about tenderizing the meat at first, but the gazelles here had obviously been fed grain and corn," Wicksell said."


Actually, the practice of captive-rearing game birds and animals (and releasing them just before the hunt) was also done during the Victorian era, at some shooting estates in the British Isles. I guess it was the only way they could guarantee that all the hunters, many of them unskilled, could kill dozens, even hundreds of birds, in a single afternoon (under natural conditions they don't occur at such densities ... it would even be hard to gun down that many migrating waterfowl at once).

Roald Dahl's children's book "Danny, the Champion of the World" discusses this (an obnoxious nouveau-riche guy planning a pheasant hunt for his rich friends). Dahl stresses the point that local people are going hungry while the landowner lavishes huge sums to fatten the birds (maybe Texas is economically better off than the UK in the early 20th century, but still ... he neatly turns the tables at the end of the book!).

The topic also comes up in "Lady Chatterly's Lover" (the gamekeeper, when he's not frolicking with the aforementioned lady, raises and feeds the pheasants, and keeps away poachers and predators).

[Hardrada]

63. Was that ever a movie?

The Chatterley thing, I mean?

[Lisa]

68. yes -- several attempts ...

... at least, ones which involve a character named "Lady Chatterley" or something similar, as I found in the IMDb listings. Possibly due to the original D.H. Lawrence novel's being banned at various times in the 20th century, there's a lot of nudge-nudge-wink-wink innuendo (hence the number of soft porn versions?).

http://www.imdb.com/find?q=lady%20chatterly's;s=tt

This is unfortunate, because the novel itself has been overshadowed by the sex component (rather tame by today's standards, as I found when I read it!). It examines some major social issues -- the unfairness of the English class system, and the damage done by the Great War to British society. I talked with a friend, whose father coincidentally was a London bookstore owner who led one of the first grassroots efforts to get the novel "unbanned". She pointed out that back then, the upper crust were especially enraged by the lady having a relationship with a working-class guy (and not to post too much of a spoiler, but things end up being happier and more dignified than today's "Girls Gone Wild" stuff). If she had an adulterous affair with another aristocrat, they probably would have let it go by -- another example of the double standard.

Also, the choice of a gamekeeper is interesting, because they were widely portrayed as tools and villains (since their job was to safeguard the property of the rich, even though they were "common folk" themselves). Resentment against gamekeepers goes back to the days of Robin Hood, and historian friends tell me that land-grabs by the aristocracy were a major factor behind peasant rebellions in the middle ages. So portraying the gamekeeper as sympathetic -- a WWI vet who's had some education and isn't brutal and cruel -- was rather radical.

My take on the situation is that Lawrence uses the pheasants as a metaphor for all the kids who were slaughtered in the Great War. All 3 of the main characters in the love triangle have been traumatized by the war. When the lady visits the gamekeeper and sees the cute innocent pheasant chicks he's raising, she is deeply moved. She's probably thinking about the children she won't be able to have (because her husband was injured in the war). And at the back of her mind is Britain's loss of nearly a million men -- two million more came home wounded. In real life, that cast a shadow over English literature for most of the century. It showed up in mystery novels (like Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie). It's there in J.R.R. Tolkien's books (he lost virtually all of his high-school classmates). And in the Monty Python sketches.

If you ask British people today -- especially those who aren't aristocrats or upwardly-mobile sorts who want to emulate them -- my guess is that they won't give Cheney much slack! My friend says he is acting just like one of those "upper-class twits" who made her family's life miserable. Another colleague, who teaches at a UK college, grew up in the country and hung out with a lot of the "riding set" because she's mad about horses -- she's not an anti-hunting activist, but she really loathes the industrial-scale canned hunts of the type which catered to aristos and wannabes. (She already dislikes the W regime and is furious with Tony Blair.)

Re-reading this, I realize that I do go on! Just to say that one of my favourite book reviews of all time is of "Lady Chatterly's Lover", by the magazine Field and Stream. This usually gets a laugh in my Wildlife Management class (usually there are at least a few people who've heard of the Lawrence book).

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's ''Practical Gamekeeping.''"

Much to my sorrow, this was actually part of an intentional humour column, and not written by a reviewer who didn't get the point! Apparently the Miller book doesn't actually exist, which is too bad, because I think it actually would be rather interesting ...

[Uncle Joe]

28. It's true the tame slow fat quail are much easier to hit unless of course

you are drunk.

[B Calm]

33. It's also a rule of hunting not to shoot unless you know what the hell

you are aiming at! This dipshit needs to go through a hunter safety course!

[Carni]

38. I AM SORRY...but COME ON now Bill

A slow fat little man... needs to shoot at slow fat little birds!

What the hell is Bill Clinton thinking anyway?

[lovuian]

42. They probably had a bet on who could kill the most and

he wanted to win the bet...

[Silverhair]

52. That isn't sport. That is like squirrel hunting in a city park. NT

[opihimoimoi]

60. Like shooting lawyers in a barrel?

[DenaliDemocrat]

53. This is very very true

Pen raised quail are terrrible flyers. I train pointers, and most guys who do will not use pen raised quail. The dog will point, but often the bird will not flush. If it does flush, it will fly about twenty yards and then just fall from exhaustion. Most knoweldable guys use homing pigeons. They fly strong and go home. You can use them over and over and over. A pen quail has one good flush in him then he is spent.

[KyuzoGator]

66. This isn't a "sport" or "hunting for food"...it's just killing for fun.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=415118&mesg_id=415118

Killing penned-up crippled animals that were specificially farm-raised to be shot at for pleasure is fucking pathological. I read that Cheney's party killed several hundred of these quail on this trip. Sick.

I'm not a big fan of hunting, but if you do it in an area where a species is overpopulated and you eat every scrap of meat on the animal...I can live with that. Real hunters think Cheney's hobby is perverse.

[sendero]

69. I agree..

.... calling this hunting is ridiculous. It makes a mockery of everything real hunters believe in, using the prey, giving the prey a sporting chance.

These pen-raised wing-clipped quail-tards are not prey, they are barely moving targets. Why don't they just shoot skeet?

[Tracer]

67. How the hell do you pick out all that buckshot from a quail?

I don't hunt, but it seems to me that if Cheney can blast Whittington with up to 200 lead pellets, what the heck does a small bird look like after its been shot?

Must be hard on the molars, if one or two get missed.

[sendero]

70. Not to be a nit-picker...

... but it was bird shot they used, not buckshot. Buckshot pellets are much, much larger. Had Mr. Whittington been hit by buckshot at a similar range, he'd be dead, no doubt about it.

Bird shot pellets are very small. The number 7 1/2 sized shot that was purportedly used is 2.5 mm in diameter. If you hit a quail at 10 feet, it would shred it. The idea is that you'll hit from much greater distance, and the small shot loses energy over that distance.