Attention ! Roll Call will commence now !
CO's of the Chicken Hawk: Barking Head Brigade
Name: George W. Bush (R-TX)
Born: 1946
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: You know when a guy walks away from a National Guard obligation during wartime and gets away with it, he must come from "a good family." Not that his daddy had anything to do with his getting a Guard slot in the first place - oh, no ...
Name: Richard "Dick" Cheney (R-WY)
Born: 1942
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Says he had "other priorities." You bet he had other priorities. Imagine how early in life you must begin scheming to get away with what this guy has. He was too busy thinking about Halliburton to go fight Charlie.
Name: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Born: 1950±
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: I. Lewis ?Scooter? Libby is Dick Cheney?s Chief of Staff. He?s had a string of no-doubt well-paying government jobs in State and Defense. He?s also practiced law. In fact, he was Marc Rich?s lawyer for years. Yes ? the Marc Rich whose pardon from President Clinton was excoriated by so many high and mighty Republicans. Maybe if Scooter had been a better lawyer, his client wouldn?t have needed that pardon. Speaking of legal questions, ?Scooter? is alleged by some to have traded energy stocks while helping his buddy Dick Cheney cook up a new energy policy in secret. He?s also suspected of having inserted the bogus ?Niger yellowcake? reference into the President?s State of the Union address. As if all that weren?t enough, he?s also a top suspect in the outing of CIA operative Valeria Plame. Clearly ?Scooter? is a ballsy kind of guy, so it?s a complete mystery to us why, when he graduated from Phillips Andover in 1968, he didn?t enlist in the Marines or go Airborne instead of going to Yale.
Name: Karl Rove
Born: 1950
Employer: Baal
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: This little cherub was born on Christmas Day, 1950. Karl ?Bush?s Brain? Rove ran George W.?s campaign, right down to the tiny detail of deciding Bush was going to run. The hardest part was convincing a horde of Republican skeptics that it could be done. He is said to have said of his boss, he?s "the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with." Now Karl?s Senior White House advisor. If he really is ?Bush?s Brain,? and if the fondest wishes of former US Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV come true, one fine day Karl will be ?frogmarched out of the White House in mandcuffs.? Will history record that event as ?Bush?s Lobotomy??
Name: Donald "The Don" Rumsfeld
Born: 1932
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Korea
Notes: When the shooting started in Korea Rummy here was either 18, or about to turn 18. Not to worry for him, though ? he spent the war at Princeton, wearing a ROTC uniform. Once the war was over he flew jets for the Navy for a few years. Defenders of Rumsfeld will say he?s no chickenhawk ? he served, and it?s not his fault the war ended before he got his commission. To which others answer, ?plenty of farmers and mechanics and kids just out of high school served. Anyone as full of whatever that stuffing in him is, could have tried out for a battlefield commission.?
Name: Paul Wolfowitz
Born: 1943
Employer: The U.S. Taxpayer
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Deputy Secretary for Defense - yet another Bush administration man in the Pentagon who has no idea what it's like to wear a uniform. He got a BA at Cornell in 1965. Maybe if we'd had a guy as bright as he thinks he is in Vietnam, it would have turned out differently.
Chicken Hawks: Barking Head Brigade
Name: William "Bill" Bennett
Born: 1943
Employer: Empower America
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Bill's occupation used to be "public scold," but since his gambling habit was exposed, he's a little less noisy on that front. Bill's a triple-crown winner as a former bureaucrat, a propagandist, and a barking head. (All barking heads are propagandists, but not all propagandists are barking heads.)
Name: Ann Coulter
Conflict Avoided: Desert Storm
Notes: Critics will howl that a woman can?t be a chickenhawk. In Ann Coulter?s case, that doesn?t matter; anyone with her level of bellicosity deserves to be held to a higher standard.
Name: Frank Gaffney
Born: 1953
Employer: Indeterminate
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Frank here is a very clever boy. Built a thing called the Center for Security Policy, which apparently keeps him in nice suits so he will look good in front of the TV cameras, which can't seem to get enough of him. As far as we can tell, Frank is a freelance salesman for the defense industry who is paid by an elaborately circuitous process. For all his obsession with the military, it's funny he never served.
Name: Rep. Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich (R-GA)
Born: June 17, 1943
Employer: Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: A virtuoso in the art of hypocrisy, the former Speaker of the House now claims the Vietnam War was a splendid idea, but at the time he opposed going himself. Newtie also speaks highly of morality, but as a serial adulterer he doesn?t want to get too close to it himself.
Name: Sean Hannity
Born: December, 1961
Employer: Rupert Murdoch
Conflict Avoided: Desert Storm
Notes: Plenty of guys his age were in Desert Storm - what's his excuse?
Name: David Limbaugh
Born: December 11, 1952
Employer: newspapers with low standards
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: David's no fool - he stayed in school! Straight from high school to college in '71, where he stayed 'till '75, when the war was safely over. Poly sci major, wouldn't you know? The least annoying of the Limbaugh brothers, but only because he's more obscure.
Name: Rush Limbaugh
Born: 1951
Employer: Yack Radio
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Where to begin ... a joke about the Hindenburg? No, let's go right to the reason he had to stay home from the war - the world's most famous anal cyst. He's denied it, but www.snopes.com, the Urban Legends Reference Pages, has got the goods on him.
Name: William "Bill" O'Reilly
Born: 1949
Employer: Rupert Murdoch
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: Bill O?Reilly loves to come off as a straight-talking, blue-collar kind of guy. Funny, a lot of guys who fit that description and graduated high school the same year he did - 1967 - went straight to Vietnam. Not our Bill - he went to college. And he didn?t just go to college, he spent his junior year, 1969-1970, in London. He graduated in 1971, briefly exposing him to the draft again, but Bill was miraculously spared.
Name: Michael Reagan
Born: March 18, 1946
Employer: Yack Radio
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: What are the odds anyone would know who he is if everybody didn't know who his daddy was? What are the odds he would have escaped the draft if his name had been Manual Rodriguez?
Name: Michael Savage
Born: Unk.
Employer: UNK.
Conflict Avoided: Vietnam
Notes: We're not sure if this frothing lunatic is still on the air. Didn't he get canned for saying all gays should contract AIDS and die? If only he could have channeled all that animosity against Ho Chi Minh - we'd be selling Big Macs in Vietnam today!
Name: Rep. Joseph "Joe" Scarborough (R-FL)
Born: April 9, 1963
Employer: MSNBC
Conflict Avoided: Desert Storm
Notes: A former Republican congresman (1995-2002) turned Faux News motormouth, Joe qualifies as a politician and a barking head. Where were you during Desert Storm, pal?
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