Cheney hunt at gun club that breeds hate...
This is from the CBS News
quote:
Vice President Dick Cheney spent about eight hours hunting Monday at a secluded Hudson Valley gun club where well-heeled enthusiasts shoot ducks and pheasants.
Although a heavy police presence kept the media and curious local residents at a distance, Cheney's visit did stir up a bit of controversy when a New York Daily News photographer snapped a picture of a small Confederate flag hanging inside a garage on the hunt club property.
The photo was shown to New York City civil rights activist, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who issued a statement demanding that the vice president "leave immediately, denounce the club, and apologize for going to a club that represents lynching, hate and murder to black people."
Sharpton's statement was issued hours after Cheney departed the club at 3:45 p.m. for a flight out of the Stewart Air National Guard Base. In a statement issued Monday evening, Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said neither Cheney nor anyone on his staff saw such a flag at the hunt club.
It's not clear whether the door of the garage that contained the flag was even open at the time the vice president was in the area.
Good old Al Sharpton, you can count on him for quote to bounce up the news day.
quote:
Vice President Dick Cheney spent about eight hours hunting Monday at a secluded Hudson Valley gun club where well-heeled enthusiasts shoot ducks and pheasants.
Although a heavy police presence kept the media and curious local residents at a distance, Cheney's visit did stir up a bit of controversy when a New York Daily News photographer snapped a picture of a small Confederate flag hanging inside a garage on the hunt club property.
The photo was shown to New York City civil rights activist, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who issued a statement demanding that the vice president "leave immediately, denounce the club, and apologize for going to a club that represents lynching, hate and murder to black people."
Sharpton's statement was issued hours after Cheney departed the club at 3:45 p.m. for a flight out of the Stewart Air National Guard Base. In a statement issued Monday evening, Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said neither Cheney nor anyone on his staff saw such a flag at the hunt club.
It's not clear whether the door of the garage that contained the flag was even open at the time the vice president was in the area.
Good old Al Sharpton, you can count on him for quote to bounce up the news day.
0
-
someone needs to tell Al to shut his pie hole.
I'll do it.
D.0 -
Geez Al...S T F U!!!
More people were made slaves and murdered under the Stars and Stripes than under the Stars and Bars. Get over yourself.
I don't consider Old Glory to be a flag of hate...or prejudice any more than I do the Southern Cross...Dixie Battle Flag or any other name you want to give it.
Isn't Al and Jesses 15 minutes up yet?0 -
i was born in the south i had ancestors on both sides of my family fight in the civil war for the South. MY Father fought for the USA in WWII i went to Viet Nam under the US Flag. the Conferate Flag is not a symbol of hate or raceism it is my Heratage. people white or black who think it is raceist to be proud of my ancestory is just plain STUPID and can kiss my Grits! 0 -
quote:Originally posted by rsr1950
i was born in the south i had ancestors on both sides of my family fight in the civil war for the South. MY Father fought for the USA in WWII i went to Viet Nam under the US Flag. the Conferate Flag is not a symbol of hate or raceism it is my Heratage. people white or black who think it is raceist to be proud of my ancestory is just plain STUPID and can kiss my Grits!
agree +10 -
quote:Originally posted by AZEX
someone needs to tell Al to shut his pie hole.
I'll do it.
D.
AZEX, something we agree on, Al Sharpton has done more to hurt the Black community in this country than any other Black I know and as you know, I know many. This guy is nothing but a TOOL for, and of the media........the media keeps Sharpton viable....He is a true RACIST..and does nothing but hurt the image of Black America. I could go on but I think you get my view. RACIST PURE AND SIMPLE and it is a shame he is of the same race as I.0 -
Sharpton is the one using race to preach hate! 0 -
confederate flag was here long before the Civil War if my memory serves me correct 0 -
quote:Originally posted by reloader44mag
quote:Originally posted by AZEX
someone needs to tell Al to shut his pie hole.
I'll do it.
D.
AZEX, something we agree on, Al Sharpton has done more to hurt the Black community in this country than any other Black I know and as you know, I know many. This guy is nothing but a TOOL for, and of the media........the media keeps Sharpton viable....He is a true RACIST..and does nothing but hurt the image of Black America. I could go on but I think you get my view. RACIST PURE AND SIMPLE and it is a shame he is of the same race as I.
Good for you reloader.0 -
RACIST PURE AND SIMPLE and it is a shame he is of the same race as I.
HELL YEAH!!!
+10000 -
So was anybody stupid enough to hunt with him or did he have to hunt alone? 0 -
Take Al hunting and shoot him in the face.. 0 -
I am a "Yankee" from connecticut and even I realize that it isn't the "racist, slave owning bigot" flag, but a part of our country's history.
Sharpton needs to get pissed off about racisim around once a day or he feels useless(and he may be right on that). If he doesn't find a real example he makes one up.0 -
0 -
Maybe Sharpton should ask blacks to apologize for the "Jena 6" who represent 6 black young men who cowardly attacked and beat a single young white man with absoutely no regard to whether or not their mass attack would kill or permanently injure the white man. 0 -
quote:Originally posted by LKB3rd
I am a "Yankee" from connecticut and even I realize that it isn't the "racist, slave owning bigot" flag, but a part of our country's history.
Sharpton needs to get pissed off about racisim around once a day or he feels useless(and he may be right on that). If he doesn't find a real example he makes one up.
You sound like a damn yankee, literally.0 -
...I'd be proud to hunt with the Veep anytime for many reasons, no problem. He hunts and fishes where most of us only dream of.
...Maybe could arrange for some libs and Bush/Cheney Derangement Syndrome sufferers to hold some targets to check the pattern [:p] ...maybe full choke with #4 at oh, say 40'.
...Better yet have 'em wear the target...[^]0 -
This guy in Florida is fighting to save the Confederate flag. His grandfather was a Confederate soldier who had a military burial with the Confederate Battle Flag draped over his coffin. Oh yeah.... he's Black.
STORY: St. Pete Times.
KISSIMMEE -- Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle.
The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross -- better known as the rebel flag.
Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States."
His grandfather's casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt.
Winbush is also black.
"You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"
* * *
Winbush's nondescript white brick house near Kissimmee's quaint downtown is cluttered with the mess of a life spent hoarding history.
Under the glass of his coffee table lie family photos, all of smiling black people. On top sits Ebony magazine.
Winbush is retired and a widower who keeps a strict schedule of household chores, family visits and Confederate events. He often eats at Fat Boy's Barbecue, where his Sons of Confederate Veterans camp meets.
Winbush's words could come from the mouth of any white son of a Confederate veteran. They subscribe to a sort of religion about the war, a different version than mainstream America.
The tenets, repeated endlessly by loyalists:
The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history.
But Winbush has a conceptual canyon to bridge: How can a black man defend a movement that sought to keep his people enslaved?
* * *
Winbush is one of at most a handful of black members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the country. He knows skeptics question his story and his sanity.
To win them over, he pulls out his grandfather's pension papers, reunion photos and obituary. He also gives speeches, mostly before white audiences.
Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority.
"It was an exercise in rhetoric, that's all," Winbush says.
His views run counter to many historical accounts. Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III, the field operations chief for the NAACP, called Winbush's arguments illogical. Rivers spoke with Winbush by telephone a few years ago, intrigued by his position. Rivers remembers him being loud and sincere, holding fast to his convictions.
"I was courteous and respectful and respectfully disagreed with him," Rivers said. "This is America. He has a right to believe what he wants to."
At one speech, Winbush stood in front of the square battle flag that draped his grandfather's coffin, retelling the stories he has told so many times that the words emerge in identical iterations.
At the end of his talk, he held the microphone to a stereo and played a song by the Rebelaires, with a sorrowful, bluesy rhythm: "You may not believe me, but things was just that way. Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray."
Once other Confederates recognize that his story is real, they love him. Opponents often attack white Confederates as ignorant or racist. Winbush is harder to dismiss. If nothing else, the naysayers are more willing to listen.
"It kinda wipes out the whole segregation and hate and racism issue," said Christopher Hall, 29, commander of Winbush's SCV camp. "Coming from him, that really can't be an argument."
* * *
Winbush's views were once more widespread, even in the land of theme parks and turnpikes.
Florida was the third state to secede. Its Civil War governor, John Milton, shot himself rather than rejoin the North, telling the Legislature, "Death would be preferable to reunion." Former Gov. Lawton Chiles defended the Confederate flag in 1996 when black lawmakers asked for its removal from the Capitol.
"You can't erase history," Chiles said at the time.
But now neo-Confederates are losing this second war of culture and memory.
Confederate flags are coming down, especially from the tops of Southern statehouses, including Florida's in 2001.
The agrarian Bible Belt has become the Sun Belt, full of northerners with few deep roots in the area. Identification with the South as a region has declined since the World War II era, which united the country with patriotism and the interstate system. Areas of South Florida, for instance, are known better as the sixth borough of New York than part of the Deep South.
High school teachers don't preach the righteousness of the South. And historians, for the most part, agree that the Civil War was about slavery, undermining the standard neo-Confederate argument.
But Confederate loyalists are digging in. Winbush considers the South his homeland. And his family history, because it's rarer than that of white Confederates, is in danger of extinction.
* * *
Slowly, in his deep, rough voice, Winbush tells the story of a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war as a teenager with the sons of his master.
"They grew up together," Winbush says.
At first his grandfather cooked and looked out for the others, but later he saw action, fighting with a rifle under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and plantation owner.
At Shiloh, a two-day battle in 1862 in which more than 23,000 American men were killed or wounded, the Confederate Army needed a chaplain. Louis Nelson couldn't read or write, but he had memorized the King James Bible.
He stayed on as chaplain for the next four campaigns, leading services for both Confederate and Union soldiers, before they headed back to the battlefield.
He also foraged for food. One time, he killed a mule, cut out a quarter and hauled it back to his comrades.
"When you don't have anything else, mule meat tastes pretty good," he would tell his grandson.
Some topics even the loquacious grandfather considered off limits. He wouldn't talk about the Union siege of Vicksburg, a bloody battle that captured an important Mississippi River port and effectively split the South.
After the war, he lived as a free man on the James Oldham plantation for 12 more years. Then he became a plasterer, traveling the South to work on houses.
Over the years, he went to 39 Confederate reunions, wearing a woolly gray uniform that Winbush still has.In photos, he stands next to two white men who accompanied him to soldiers' reunions until they were old men. Through the sepia gleams a dignity earned on the battlefield.
"When he came back, that was storytelling time," Winbush says.
His grandfather died in 1934 at the age of 88. The local paper ran an obituary that called him a "darky." Winbush is proud that his grandfather's death was marked at all.
* * *
Winbush grew up in the house his grandfather built in 1908, a two-story yellow structure with a wraparound porch in Ripley, Tenn. The Oldham plantation, where his grandfather was a slave, provided the wood in recognition of his loyalty to the family.
Winbush and his siblings lived in a family of educators. His grandmother and mother were teachers. He says he first went to school as a baby in a basket.
All three children went to college. Winbush studied biology in hopes of becoming a doctor but didn't have enough money for medical school. He switched to studying physical education.
Winbush moved to Florida in 1955, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated school desegregation. Like many around the country, Osceola County schools remained segregated for several more years.
He didn't mind the divide because he felt both black and white students got a better education by not being able to use racial conflict as an excuse. When the superintendent, a friend of his, decided it was time to integrate in the late 1960s, Winbush agreed. The time had come, he thought, when people could accept the change.
Winbush thinks that people will get along if they know each other. He says he never suffered any blatant racism. The small Southern towns he lived in were familiar and accepting.
He remembers the "I Have A Dream" speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He respects King but disagrees with his reverence for Lincoln.
Winbush wasn't moved by the speech. King was just speaking the truth, he says, but it didn't change the daily reality of blacks.
* * *
Winbush's convictions about the war lay dormant until 1991, when the NAACP began an all-out campaign against the Confederate flag, saying it was a symbol of hatred. It vowed to have it removed from public places by the end of the decade.
Winbush saw it differently, and he was retiring. He no longer worried about what some "Yankee boss" would think.
"I got fed up about all this politically correct mess," he says.
He joined the Sons and started speaking at their events. He twice appeared before the Virginia Legislature to dissuade them from taking down the flag. He collects clippings of newspaper stories written about his speeches. One shows him posing in front of a statute of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Winbush acknowledges that misuse of the Confederate flag has made it a symbol of hate in some people's eyes. But he says the American flag is just as racist. Troops of color are sent to die disproportionately in American wars, he says, and the Stars and Stripes flew above slave ships.
Rivers, the NAACP official, said people like Winbush need to let go of their family history and admit that all people, even those now dead, are imperfect.
"Just because your grandfather was wrong does not mean you can't break the generational curse and not be wrong too," he says.
* * *
Winbush is the last direct link to his grandfather, someone who heard the stories firsthand and felt the passion.
He feels the legacy of Confederate soldiers like his grandfather won't survive unless the history is passed within families, from one generation to the next.
But it's not easy. Even Winbush's son, a Naval Academy graduate who works for IBM, once suggested Winbush donate his Confederate collection to a museum.
"This is the only way some people will find out what did happen," he said. "The history books leave it out."
Winbush knows he won't be around forever. He only hopes that someone will continue to tell the stories.0 -
Sharpton has been exposed. He's an attention whor*. 0 -
Hey, can't we concentrate on the positives here?
After all, Cheney managed to make it through a hunt without blasting someone in the face![:D]0 -
We are a band of brothers and native to the soil,
Fighting for the property we gained by honest toil;
And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far,
"Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!"
Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
As long as the Union was faithful to her trust,
Like friends and like brothers both kind were we and just;
But now, when Northern treachery attempts our rights to mar,
We hoist on high the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
First gallant South Carolina nobly made the stand,
Then came Alabama, who took her by the hand;
Next quickly Mississippi, Georgia and Florida,
All raised on high the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Ye men of valor, gather round the banner of the right,
Texas and fair Louisiana join us in the fight;
Davis, our loved president, and Stephens statesman are,
Now rally round the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
And here's to old Virginia, the Old Dominion State,
Who with the young Confederacy at length has linked her fate;
Impelled by her example, now other states prepare,
To hoist on high the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Then cheer, boys, cheer, raise the joyous shout,
For Arkansas and North Carolina now have both gone out;
And let another rousing cheer for Tennessee be given,
The single star of the Bonnie Blue Flag has grown to be eleven.
Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Then here's to our Confederacy, strong are we and brave,
Like patriots of old we'll fight our heritage to save;
And rather than submit to shame, to die we would prefer,
So cheer for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.0 -
quote:Originally posted by ElMuertoMonkey
Hey, can't we concentrate on the positives here?
After all, Cheney managed to make it through a hunt without blasting someone in the face![:D]
His techique is better.. next time they are thinking about loading his gun0 -
Classic: Thank you. 0 -
Flying the flag is not about race, it is about heritage.
Trinity +++0 -
OK I can't hold it in anymore. RE: the Dick Cheney hunting accident - Am I the only one who has ever been sprinkled or even slightly peppered with birdshot by another member of a large hunting party? Am I the only one who ever blocked at the end of a field and heard and felt the shot landing on the cornstalks and the brim of my cap? If we weren't talking about politicians, and if every little thing didn't have to be recorded and reported and investigated, would we even know it happened? 0 -
yack, yack, yack.....the real question is how many attorneys did he shoot? Remember,,,,,,no baiting!
Moose0 -
KIMI: you are welcome, I thought the article was very interesting.. 0 -
"OK I can't hold it in anymore. RE: the Dick Cheney hunting accident - Am I the only one who has ever been sprinkled or even slightly peppered with birdshot by another member of a large hunting party? Am I the only one who ever blocked at the end of a field and heard and felt the shot landing on the cornstalks and the brim of my cap? If we weren't talking about politicians, and if every little thing didn't have to be recorded and reported and investigated, would we even know it happened?"
bigcitybill: The difference in Cheney's case is that the guy who got shot was not "sprinkled," the shot penetrated, and he spent several days in the hospital.
For several days after the incident, the Cheney pr staff was blaming the guy in the hospital for "getting in the way."
Cheney did not talk to law enforcement until the next day. Do you think you would get to wait until the next day to talk to Game and Fish? For one thing, if Cheney had been drinking he had time for the alcohol to wear off.
I know a guy who was shot in the same type incident in South Carolina, he got about 40 number 6 shot in the shoulder, neck and side of the face. His hunting partner who shot him was charged with several misdemeanors, and he was convicted.0 -
to bad he didn't show up personally, old dick could have had another AD
it's sad he preaches against hate with hatred, not to mention ignorance0
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
28 comments