It's kinda worth knowing that this particular bit of hunting seems to be, forgive me, a bit of a blind, a cover for something else. Indeed: "a non issue".
Bwana Dick and the boys go off hunting for a bit and do their business. Actually, I'd be curious whether any of them actually did any hunting at all, other than for the benefit of a photographer.
But what do the common folks see? Not the dirty dealing that one can hardly be expected to believe was *not* going on; no: the boys, doing what the common folk themselves do. Boys hanging out in boats shooting dinner.
Just one more in a myriad of ways of pulling wool over people's eyes and giving them completely irrelevant reasons for them to vote for ya. And false reasons, even if they were relevant -- Cheney and the boys
really are not just like the common folk whose votes they want, they really do drink very expensive whisky and smoke very expensive cigars and sleep on very expensive sheets and take very expensive vacations and eat food that they never have to cook.
Just like all those effete, non-hunting Democrats do.
Demagoguery. A dishonest appeal to emotion and prejudice.
How can anybody look at a guy doing something as down-home and patriotic and law-abiding and god-fearin' as
shooting dinner and think he could have been getting up to anything dirty? Hell, if duck-hunters can't be trusted, who can?
We hunt ducks, all our friends hunt ducks, and we're the salt of the earth, after all.
(And how can anybody who
doesn't do something as down-home and patriotic and law-abiding and god-fearin' as shooting dinner -- like all those big-city Democrats -- be trusted?)
Why, not trusting a duck-hunting Vice-President ... that would be almost like not trusting Moses.
Just a little drop in the bucket of right-wing demagoguery, undoubtedly ... but it would shore be a whole lot easier not to trust some guy who did his dirty dealing in an off-shore hotel, say in the Cayman Islands, wouldn't it?
This fakery is far more endemic, and far more successful, in US politics than in Canadian (and no European would dream of trying it); witness two articles that have been referenced at DU this week (emphases added):
Canadians to Bush: Hope You Lose, Eh
According to a new poll, only 15 per cent of us would vote for the President
... ON THE HUMID night in August 2000 when George W. Bush officially became the Republican nominee for president, the thousands of delegates and reporters packed into a Philadelphia arena were given a peek at what party strategists planned to sell to the American people. The beautifully realized infomercial was mostly shots of Bush at his Crawford, Tex., ranch, tending stock, mending fences, driving a vintage pickup truck with his spaniel perched on his lap, all the while talking about his vision of a big country with small-town values. It was a persona lifted straight from a Hollywood Western. The likeable, soft-talking cowpoke who knows the value of an honest day's work and isn't afraid to take on the guys in the black hats when the town's in trouble. Reagan successfully mined the same vein for eight years. And it's an image that continues to pay dividends for Bush, playing off his folksy, good-natured strengths, and positioning him as someone who might reasonably be excused for not reading newspapers or knowing the names of his foreign counterparts. Clearing brush on the back forty is a lot more man-of-the-people than weekending at the palatial family compound in Kennebunkport, Me.
But Canadians have never been that comfortable with the type of cowboys who take the law into their own hands. Our frontier heroes were the scarlet-clad North West Mounted Police, not lone gunslingers.
Well, and not just that. We really just point and laugh at politicians trying to look like they're not politicians, they're just ordinary guys doing ordinary stuff. We
know that Paul Martin can't cook Kraft Dinner, even if he does claim that, just like all the rest of us, it's his favourite food, and that's the bit we tend to remember. He's a rich white anglo guy, not one of us.
Christian soldier Bush swears by the Lord
<Cdn Prime Minister> Martin was somewhat taken aback by what he heard. After the meeting <with Bush>, he was barely out the door before he was asking someone in his entourage what was to be made of all the God stuff. In meetings of presidents and prime ministers, religion has rarely been at the forefront. Business is conducted on the basis of knowledge and logic. With the Bush White House, the visitors must bear in mind that there is a third force.
With U.S. voters, he scores well for his religious views. It gives him moral clarity. In Canada, it hasn't helped his image. As a Maclean's poll reveals this week, this President is one of the most disliked in history. His sense of sanctimony combined with the right-wing warrior mentality is a potent non-seller.
It's all phoney and it's all demagoguery, the duck-shootin' and the cow-pokin' and the bible-thumpin', but a lot of people seem to fall for it.
And some people seem to think it would be a good idea for Democrats to be demagogues too.
Being a hunter does not make anybody one of the common people, or even a friend of the common people. And being a non-hunter does not make anybody an enemy of the common people. I'd stay focused on that message, if I were influencing any messages.
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