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Firecrackers, frogs, pheasants, and France

So when he was a kid, George W. enjoyed putting firecrackers into frogs, throwing them in the air, and then watching them blow up. Should this be cause for alarm? How relevant is a man's childhood behavior to what he is like as an adult? And in this case, to what he would be like as president of the United States?

In an administration in which the (unelectable) President is known to have a penchant for torturing small animals, I doubt that Dick Cheney will get much flack for personally killing over 70 small birds that were released from a net in front of him for target practice.

When Dick Cheney and a hunting party that included several Texas Republicans, among them U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, bagged hundreds of ring-necked pheasants at a private hunting club in Pennsylvania last week, animal-rights activists denounced it as a slaughter.

They were especially outraged that the vice president shot more than 70 himself. But Cornyn said Wednesday that the birds had a sporting chance, even if they were farm-raised and released from nets for the hunters.

"It was a good shoot," said Cornyn, who figures he shot dozens of pheasants himself. He conceded that bagging the birds was so easy, at times it seemed "kind of like how Tyson's and Pilgrim's Pride and other people do it. I must tell you that people don't necessarily hunt the same way in Texas that they hunt in Ligonier, Pa., but it was enjoyable," he said.
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Cheney hunts and fishes often, and his excursions rarely attract notice. But on this one, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the 10-man hunting party killed 417 of 500 pheasants released from nets for the morning hunt.

The Humane Society of the United States says that smacks of a mass killing.

"These birds were just planted right in front of this group of hunters. It was a bloodbath and it was a blaze of shotgun fire," said senior vice president Wayne Pacelle.
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One dog handler did describe the hunt for WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh last week.

"We release pheasants off a hill, and they shoot them...”

Many commentators have linked this episode with the Cheney Christmas card which quotes Ben Franklin: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" In fact, Cheney is in more trouble for the verboten word “Empire” than for “hunting” small captive animals. Thanks to those freedom hating French, though, Dick could still get what’s coming to him. A French Judge might soon indict Cheney for his crooked corporate leadership:

Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets.

At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton--the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President--in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh.

One of France's best-known investigating magistrates, Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke--who came to fame by unearthing major French campaign finance scandals in the 1990s that led to a raft of indictments--has been conducting a probe of the Nigeria deal since October. And, three days before Christmas, the Paris daily Le Figaro front-paged the news that Judge van Ruymbeke had notified the Justice Ministry that Cheney might be among those eventually indicted as a result of his investigation.

This is front page news in Paris. Orange you wondering why you haven’t heard more about this explosive story?