Pete Bodo: Why Some Hunters Declared Open Season on Sarah Palin

The show represents an authentic hunting experience with honesty and integrity
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Hunter and author Pete Bodo finds that the most interesting discovery from the controversy over last Sunday's hunting episode of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is how little most people who criticized it know about Alaska, guns, wildlife, and hunting. And no one knows less about such things than Hollyweirdo Aaron Sorkin, who doesn't even know the difference between a caribou and a moose:

I mean, I know Sorkin wrote “The Social Network” (OMG! 2 cool!) and all that, but boy, does he know zilch about animals (including, presumably, the ones that provide his Santa Monica dinners). I suppose he doesn’t understand that he’s a predator in his own right – who else would label a woman documenting a hunting trip with her father, Chuck Palin Sr., as a “witless bully?”

But never mind that. Friends have told me that even some hunters have criticized the show on various grounds. After watching the episode, I suspect it’s simply because those critics are among that distinct minority that hunts but also suffers from Sarah-phobia. The show accurately represents an authentic hunting experience; in fact, it does so with greater honesty and integrity that you find on your typical Saturday morning “antler porn” hunting show.

[...]

Palin also was ridiculed for emptying the five-shot magazine of the gun her father had provided for the hunt, after which she dropped the caribou with the first shot she took using Becker’s rifle. I confess to having felt a bit puffed up when, after Palin finally made her killing shot, I thought back to a previous scene, in which Chuck Palin took a tumble down a loose bank with his gear and rifle. “The scope (telescopic sight) must have gotten knocked off zero,” I thought (“zero” being the point were the bullet goes exactly where the crosshairs are centered) as Palin missed her fourth shot.

As we learned near the end of the episode, Chuck’s scope was indeed way off.

[...]

Some also objected to the way Chuck Palin worked the bolt after each shot taken by his daughter, interpreting it as a sure sign of her incompetence. Well, Palin’s obvious, basic familiarity with the rifle, and her decent form handling it, were sufficient to make me think that was nothing more than a typical “daddy knows best” moment. Hunters, guides, parents – we all get excited at the moment of reckoning. And only someone who’s never handled a rifle would suspect that Palin doesn’t know how to work a bolt. It isn’t rocket science, trust me on that.

But it’s depressing to have to parse the video episode this way. What, is Sarah Palin on trial here? The critics mostly demonstrate how woefully little they know about hunting, firearms, and the natural world in general, despite the “green” vows they’ve taken.

I’m a hunter, and to me Palin’s show was Emmy-worthy for its honesty, modesty, and it’s effective portrayal and celebration of the hunting experience.

[More]

- JP

Politico Click: Hunting expert grades Sarah's shooting

"It seemed realistic to me, and I’m a pretty harsh critic of that"
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Palin haters have been claiming the guv is no hunter, a bad shot, and everything but a child of God in the wake of Sunday's hunting episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Her supporters have pointed out the the gun she tried first likely had it's scope knocked out of alignment when her dad, who was carrying the rifle at the time, took a hard spill on rocky ground. They add that the first shot she took with another rifle, one which did not hit the ground hard, dropped the deer.

Politico decided to ask Nick Seifert for his opinion of Gov. Palin’s hunting skills. The outdoorman's credentials include hosting the “Straight Shooting” segment of “American Gun Dog” for five seasons and 12-years at Field & Stream and Outdoor Life magazines:

“Technically, it wasn’t perfect, but to me it seemed honest. Unlike a lot of shows that cut everything out, that was a fairly honest hunt,” said Seifert.

As for what was technically off, Seifert said Palin “shot a lot of times, it’s hard to say what kind of shot she is.” But Seifert noted that Palin “had a good rest, she was calm and she squeezed the trigger.”

“That’s the hardest part,” he said, “to calm yourself down when you are going to kill a big game animal. She did a good job there.”

[...]

Palin also took heat for the questions she asked her father about the gun kicking and when to shoot, but Seifert said that he has heard experienced hunters ask similar questions. “You don’t want to injure the animal,” he said.

[...]

Seifert’s conclusion? “It seemed realistic to me, and I’m a pretty harsh critic of that because I see a lot of unrealistic stuff out there on hunting channels. I thought it was an honest hunt and I thought there are a lot of people out there who would like to have that kind of time with their dad.”

But the haters won't listen to anything anyone says that doesn't tear down Sarah Palin. Try to get them to listen to Seifert's evaluation and they will put their hands over their ears and shout, "I can't hear you."

h/t: Jesse Cornish

- JP

Sarah Palin Pwns Aaron Sorkin

"I didn't know anyone ate dogs, tanned the hides, and made boots out of them"
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All that cocaine he snorted must have rotted Aaron Sorkin's brain. Either that, or he has morphed into Disney's famous character Pinocchio. How else to account for his bizarre assertion in a Huff-Posting that Gov. Palin didn't kill that caribou for food, just for fun? Good grief, last Sunday's episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" clearly shows her checking her depleted freezer's foodstock before the hunt and filling it with meat from the caribou she bagged afterward.

Even more evidence of the leftist producer's mendacity or brain damage (or both) is given by Sorkin's curious claim that he couldn't distinguish between Sarah Palin's hunting and Michael Vick's participation in a dogfighting ring, for which he was sent to prison for 18 months.

"So a leftwing Hollywood producer thinks there is no 'distinction' between harvesting healthy, wild organic protein to feed my family and engaging in dog fighting?" Palin said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "I didn't know anyone ate dogs, tanned the hides, and made boots out of them."

Pwned!

h/t: Ian Lazaran

- JP

TLC video shoots down another leftist lie about Gov. Palin

Here’s proof that Sarah had all her paperwork in order
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The hateful left has long been spreading the lie around the moonbatosphere that Sarah Palin doesn't have the proper tags and license to hunt caribou. Time for the "reality-based community" to get yet another reality check:


From the blogs at SPAlaska.com:

Thanks to the production team’s diligence, here’s proof that Sarah had all her paperwork in order with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The entire episode was recorded September 1-5, 2010. This video was recorded on September 2, 2010, and the permits purchased were valid September 3-4, 2010, because of the no fly and hunt rule. Sarah shot her caribou on September 4, 2010.

We’ve heard that our friends at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game have been inundated with requests for copies of her hunting license and caribou tags. Hopefully, this post and video can put those questions to rest so these diligent state workers can focus on more pressing matters than disproving rumors.

Actrually, overloading government offices with bogus requests and inquiries is part of the left's anti-Palin plan. It's a modification of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, just as were the more than twenty bogus lawsuits and "ethics" complaints they swamped state offices with in Alaska when Sarah Palin was governor.

Also, TLC's blogger is much too gentle. These aren't "rumors" -- they're lies. Malia Litman and Politics USA should be ashamed of themselves, but these lying leftists have no shame. Their job is to destroy Sarah Palin, and they will tell as many lies as they think they need to in pursuit of their dark goal. But it's an article of faith that light drives out darkness. Don't ever hesitate to confront the darkness and shine a light!

h/t: Ron Devito

- JP

Quote of the Day (December 8, 2010)

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Jim Treacher at The DC Trawler:

"Why merely whine about being reminded where food comes from, when you can throw a complete temper tantrum? Sure, Palin is like Michael Vick because… well, because Aaron Sorkin doesn’t like either one of them. And Sorkin’s not a hypocrite for railing against the killing of an animal and then going out for a steak dinner, because that would make him a bad person... But look on the bright side: There’s no meat in a coca leaf!"

- JP

Surprise! Jezebel's Anna North defends Sarah Palin's hunting

If you're a meat-eater like Sorkin, quit wringing your hands over Palin's hunting trips
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We can't remember Jezebel, the gossip site for leftist women, ever defending Sarah Palin on anything. But then again, we don't pay close attention to any of the gutter gossip websites that are under the Gawker Media umbrella until one of them gives us good reason to. Gawker's big fail of posting photos of some pages of Gov. Palin newest book (which a judge decreed had to be taken down) before its release was one of those occasions. Now Ana North, a writer for Jezebel, has given us reason again with her unexpected defense of Gov. Palin.

Make no mistake, North doesn't like our Sarah much at all, and she manages to get her little digs in at the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate. But North at least has the intellectual honesty to admit that the attacks on Gov. Palin and her hunting episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" are unwarranted and hypocritical. North singles out screenwriter/producer/cocaine connoisseur Aaron Sorkin, who slammed Gov. Palin for hunting in a recent HuffPo hit piece:

Everybody has a different moral compass when it comes to food. But does feeling a little bit bad about the animals you eat make you superior to someone who feels cool enough about the whole thing to flay a reindeer on television? Sorry, it doesn't.

[...]

Sorkin also says to Palin, "for the life of me, I can't make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing." But famed ethicist (and vegetarian) Peter Singer made just such a distinction in a 2007 interview: "the aim of a hunter is to kill the animal with as little pain as possible — or it should be. [...] It seems pretty clear that the dogs that didn't fight well that Michael Vick and his associates killed were not killed instantly at all." Singer also says that dog-fighting and hunting "are both really very minor cruelties in the terms of the scale of things. The big thing that is going undiscussed here is the industrial raising of animals for food."

You can talk all you want about how gross it is to butcher an animal on television, or how unseemly it may be to celebrate when that animal dies. But squeamishness and decorum don't help the billions of animals killed in slaughterhouses every year.

[...]

Hunting has its problems too, but if you're going to eat meat, there's something to be said for eating an animal that got to live in its natural habitat and eat its natural diet (rather than, say, the corn-based cattle feed that may be contributing to antibiotic resistance). And while Palin may intend to make political hay out of her caribou kill, she's also clearly planning to eat the beast — she and her dad skin it carefully and she explicitly states that it's going to feed her family.

[...]

But if you're meat-eater like Sorkin, getting your meat in a package from a slaughterhouse is no better than shooting it yourself (provided you hunt in a legal and sustainable way) — and really, it might well be worse. So to anyone who eats factory-farmed meat, quit wringing your hands over Sarah Palin's hunting trips and find something better to criticize her about.

[More]

Related: See also Gov. Palin is a Real Hunter, the most recent in a trifecta of excellent posts by Ron Devito on Sarah Palin and hunting.

- JP

As expected, leftists go berzerk over SPA hunting episode

"Much wailing and gnashing of teeth"
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Most everyone on the conservative side just knew what the reaction would be among the critter cuddling watermelons (green on the outside; pinko on the inside) after the hunting episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" aired Sunday night on TLC. "Hyperventilating Lefty Alert Moved to DEFCON 1: Sarah Palin Shoots a Caribou" predicted Weasel Zippers.

And like Pavlov's dog, the response has been just as hysterical as expected. The headlines from the moonbatosphere measure just how far off-planet the loons managed to launch themselves into orbit:

"Sarah Palin Starting a War Against PETA" reads the head on one gossip site. Guess they forgot that it was PETA that started the war against Gov. Palin over a predator control program that was in place in Alaska long before she was elected in 2006.

"Sarah Palin kills an animal for sh*ts and giggles" proclaims another another ignoramus, even though anyone who actual watched the episode knew that she bagged the caribou for food. But when have the PDS-infected ever let pesky things like facts get in the way of a good meltdown?

"Sarah Palin Kills a Frolicking Caribou on the Arctic Tundra" was the title of a post on NY Magazine's Daily Intel blog. Frolicking? We saw it walking around some and just standing there for a few seconds, but we didn't see it frolicking, and we watched the entire episode twice. "Frolicking" caribou must be in the eyes of the imaginative left, which have obviously been focused on the Cartoon Channel too often.

Finally, we knew we could count on the guttersnipes at Gawker to put their slimy sort of spin on the show, and they didn't disappoint with the title "Sarah Palin Murders a Caribou." Don't anyone tell these commie clowns that most dictionaries define "murder" as "to kill a human being unlawfully and with premeditated malice." Last we checked, four-legged critters aren't human beings. Oh well, must be the Cartoon Channel at work again...

On the less neurotic side of the 'sphere, conservatives have been enjoying the the moonbat meltdown:

"Anytime someone makes the loons at PETA angry, then that person is alright by me," blogged talk show host Steve Gill, who quoted PETA's VP:

“Sarah seems to think that resorting to violence and blood and guts may lure people into watching her boring show, but the ratings remain as dead as the poor animals she shoots.”

If 3.8 million viewers -- which was the program's average audience for the first three episodes -- are "dead ratings" then his organization's 750,000 total members and supporters must be so dead that they never even existed. Not in the reality most Americans live in, anyway.

And from Jamie Jeffords at Eye of Polyphemus:

We should hear much wailing and gnashing [of] teeth from the likes of PETA, Keith Olbermann, and perhaps even George F. Will, who seems to have forgotten what a rugged sportsman Teddy Roosevelt was.

Palin’s message on hunting is well worth reiterating, for it reflects Biblical stewardship and conservative philosophy. Alaska is one of a number of places in the United states where hunting is a necessity to control the animal population. But it is also a place where grocery stores are not necessarily convenient, so people have to hunt to survive.

But wait a sec... Wasn't Teddy R a progressive? Curious how the PETA-ful leftists never seem to bring that particular hunter/conservationist up in their ridiculous rantings...

- JP

Lorie Byrd: Tonight's 'Sarah Palin's Alaska' definitely not PETA approved

In which we meet Sue Akins, "a real frontier woman"
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At Big Hollywood, Lorie Byrd observes that tonight’s episode of "Sarah Palin’s Alaska" is the best example yet of "just how much of the state is still remote and untamed," proof that the state still earns its nickname, "America’s last frontier":

In this episode, Sarah Palin explains that hunting in Alaska is not just for sport — it is still done in some areas out of necessity. She says that in some remote parts of the state the closest grocery store could be 400 miles away. She tells viewers that people pack their freezers full of meat for the long winter. She even gives us a peek at her freezer, noting she has plenty of caribou sausage and moose pepperoni, and there is some buffalo in there, but she is getting low on packages of moose and caribou meat.

Did I mention that this episode might just make a PETA member’s head explode?

[More]

That's because liberals believe that steaks and fish fillets grow in the refrigerated display cases of grocery stores like they were fruit on trees or something. As Gov. Palin remarked on Facebook Today:

Tonight's hunting episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska "controversial"?
Really? Unless you've never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather couch
or eaten a piece of meat, save your condemnation of tonight's episode. I
remain proudly intolerant of anti-hunting hypocrisy. :)

Anyway, Gov. Palin, her dad Chuck Heath and his buddy Steve Becker journey 600 miles from Wasilla to Kavik River Camp for a hunting experience in the tundra, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Actually, from the Kavik camp they still have to travel by airplane to an even more remote location. Since the Piper Super Cub only has room for its pilot and one passenger, the three have to be flown in one at a time. Only then does the hunt begin...

Be watching tonight at 8PM Texas Time, with an encore presentation at 10PM on TLC.

- JP

Ashley Judd, please check your e-mail

Those critter-huggers who have been blasting Sarah Palin because she hunts and supported wildlife management practices while Alaska's governor should be advised that their hope for change has just gone on the record in support of huntin' and fishin', as our friend Andrew Malcolm observes:

Well, on the eve of that special season when so many Americans blast migrating ducks out of the sky and blow large holes in the side of fleeing deer, Barack Obama, now in the White House, has just issued a special Presidential Proclamation.

He's saluting and celebrating those "ageless pursuits" of hunting and fishing, just like some caribou-killing ex-Alaska governor might.

And he's actually returning to Pennsylvania this week, only not to kill animals.

Obama says today's American hunters and fisherpersons like, say, ex-VP Dick Cheney, celebrate sound, scientific game management and "freedom, fairness and self-sustainability." Although, truth be told, it's pretty hard to imagine hunting ever being fair until the game are armed too.

Anyway, this Democratic president has proclaimed Friday as National Hunting and Fishing Day "from atop Pikes Peak to the shores of the James River." Which leaves out a lot of the West. But, hey, he's president now.

Here's the president's full proclamation from the White House, which does have a dog living there but successfully evicted a family of raccoons some months ago.

Will the defenders of lovable, furry wild animals come down on the president even a fraction as hard as they did on Sarah Palin? We wouldn't advise holding your breath while your wait for them to do so. You might turn blue.

- JP

Credibility Test

Which of the following two people do you believe?

Levi Johnston...

"She says she goes hunting and lives off animal meat -- I've never seen it. I've never seen her touch a fishing pole. She had a gun in her bedroom and one day she asked me to show her how to shoot it. I asked her what kind of gun it was, and she said she didn't know, because it was in a box under her bed."

... or Chuck Heath?

"She started shooting a gun when she was eight and shot her first animal when she was ten. It was something small, possibly a rabbit.

"She is a really good shot. I taught her to shoot a moose and dress it, to fish and hunt for game."

"We raised our family to be able to support ourselves - 90 per cent of our meat and fish we get ourselves."

We will take the word of the man who shot the bear that adorned the couch in former Governor Palin's office over the lies of the paid character assassin who drives around in a $30,000 truck and has never so much as bought a pair of diapers for his infant son.

- JP