Monday, February 13, 2006

Cartoon #244: “Cheney Hunting Accident”

Title: Cheney Hunting Accident; Text: (TV says) Vice President Dick Cheney shot a man while hunting on the Armstrong ranch in Texas and did not report it for 24 hours. (Couple watching TV shout in unison) The Armstrong Ranch!?

This was my reaction, and I think the reaction of the most politically savy Texans upon hearing about Deadeye Dick Cheney’s little mishap with a shotgun. The history of the Texas Armstrong family will be the most underreported aspect of this story, including its politically influencial daughter-in-law, Anne, and the relationship between the Armstrong family and the Bush Crime Family. There is also the related story of Bush’s other hunting companion, close friend and confidant, William “Will” Stamps Farish III, whose family has ties to companies that helped sponsor the Nazis. The Bushes have an annual hunt on the Farish’s Beeville, Texas ranch.

Sydney Blumenthal wrote the following in his column, “Shoot First, Avoid Questions Later”:

Katharine Armstrong is linked to two family fortunes — those of Armstrong and King — that include extensive corporate holdings in land, cattle, banking and oil. No one in Texas, except perhaps Baker, but certainly not latecomer George W. Bush, has a longer lineage in its political and economic elite. In 1983, Debrett’s Peerage Ltd., publisher of “Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage,” printed “Debrett's Texas Peerage,” featuring “the aristocrats of Texas,” with the King family noted as the “Royal Family of Ranching.” The King Ranch, founded by Richard King in 1857, is the largest in Texas, and its wealth was vastly augmented by the discovery of oil on its tracts, making the family a major shareholder of Exxon. The King Ranch is the model for Edna Ferber’s novel of Texas aristocracy, “Giant.”

John B. Armstrong, a Texas Ranger and enforcer for the King Ranch, founded his own neighboring ranch in 1882, buying it with the bounty of $4,000 he got for capturing the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. In 1944, almost inevitably, the two fortunes became intertwined through marriage. Tobin Armstrong’s brother John married the King Ranch heiress, who was also a Vassar classmate of Tobin’s wife, Anne, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family....

While the incident continues to unfold, the Bush administration is pressing a new budget in which oil companies would receive what is called “royalty relief,” allowing them to pump about $65 billion of oil and natural gas from federal land over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government, costing the U.S. Treasury about $7 billion. For Texas royalty like the Armstrongs, it would amount to a windfall profit.

The curiosities surrounding the vice president's accident have created a contemporary version of “The Rules of the Game” with a Texas twist. In Jean Renoir’s 1939 film, politicians and aristocrats mingle at a country house in France over a long weekend, during which a merciless hunt ends with a tragic shooting. Appearing on the eve of World War II, “The Rules of the Game” depicted a hypocritical, ruthless and decadent ruling class that made its own rules and led a society to the edge of catastrophe.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:19 PM

    Don't you think this is a bit of an exaggeration?

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  2. Anonymous8:16 PM

    I don't know why you are linking to articles about Bush when this had nothing to do with bush. (You should also post articles that are readable) It was a hunting accident by Dick Cheney. You appear to be an incessant and habitual Bush Basher.

    The Pattern-Seeking Animal
    In our complex and contingent world, random events often happen in seemingly peculiar sequences that cry out for meaning. We usually rise to the occasion, finding patterns in nature even when they do not exist or have no real significance.

    ReplyDelete
  3. “Anonymous said...
    Don't you think this is a bit of an exaggeration? 7:19 PM”

    Yes. Sorry. I'll try to exaggerate more next time. Don't you think anonymous criticism is cowardly?

    ReplyDelete
  4. “Anonymous said...
    I don't know why you are linking to articles about Bush when this had nothing to do with bush. (You should also post articles that are readable) It was a hunting accident by Dick Cheney. You appear to be an incessant and habitual Bush Basher.

    The Pattern-Seeking Animal
    In our complex and contingent world, random events often happen in seemingly peculiar sequences that cry out for meaning. We usually rise to the occasion, finding patterns in nature even when they do not exist or have no real significance. 8:16 PM”

    Are you actually claiming that Dick Cheney has “nothing to do with bush”? Your eyesight seems to be failing too. I don't appear to be an incessant and habitual Bush Basher. I am one. Also, the linked articles are readable. The Austin Chronicle jpeg is only a portfolio image of my caricature of G.H.W. Bush. The text on the page is readable. But if you want the article, you will have to do something called research.

    Which is more dangerous, finding threatening patterns that do not exist, or ignoring those that do?

    Sorry about your eyesight, but not your other cognitive failures. Understanding these things do not require a degree in rocket science. No wonder you post anonymously.

    ReplyDelete