Word: armstrong
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...delicate and the dangerous meet in the ranch lands of South Texas. In the winter, quail gather in the soft gold of prairie sedge, but snakes, scorpions and wild-boar-like javelina lurk too. In 1999 a fourth-generation South Texas rancher named Tobin Armstrong testified before Congress that he sometimes found illegal immigrants dead of dehydration in the unforgiving brush of his 49,300-acre ranch. It was there that Vice President Dick Cheney, out with a hunting party that included Tobin's daughter Katharine, accidentally sprayed attorney Harry Whittington with birdshot. What took place in the hours before...
Gentility and blood sport are old friends, but the mix of the wealthy and the rustic at Armstrong Ranch that weekend was exceptional. Tobin's grandfather started the ranch on family land in 1882, after he won a $4,000 bounty for capturing outlaw John Wesley Hardin. The Vice President was hunting with not only his friend Whittington, who has advised Texas Governors and plays a monthly card game with the likes of a retired state supreme court justice, but also Pamela Pitzer Willeford, the ambassador to Switzerland. Tobin died in October, so his wife Anne Legendre Armstrong, a former...
Katharine Armstrong initially told a Texas reporter that there had been "zero, zippo" drinking that Saturday. But Cheney later said on Fox News that he had had "a beer" at lunch. The meal had been served under an old oak, and the hunt--which had begun that morning--didn't resume until midafternoon. In addition to the grandees with their guns--Cheney's an elegant, Italian-made 28-gauge shotgun, Whittington's a 20-gauge--the party included several guides and dogs. Because of the breadth of the terrain, they got around in old jeeps and other vehicles. According...
After searching for his birds for a bit, Whittington returned to the vehicle where Katharine Armstrong was. She "told him to go and shoot the second covey," the report says. Whittington walked toward Cheney and Willeford but, as Armstrong later told reporters, didn't announce his presence. "Your first responsibility is to let the other guy know where you are," says Texas A&M professor Dale Rollins, a quail-hunting expert. But Cheney too had a responsibility to know where Whittington was. "It's critical, especially with more than two hunters, to stay in a straight line," says Rollins. Cheney...
...seen of the public debate surrounding the Bush Administration's war in Iraq. Absent further evidence, the Administration seems guilty of negligence-a cavalier insensitivity to the unimaginable calamities that attend the use of lethal force. And while I have little faith that Cheney's awful experience at the Armstrong Ranch will change his views of war and peace, I do hope that it gives him pause and that he gains wisdom from the intimate knowledge that there are experiences other than "pleasure" that can attend the firing of a weapon...