Huckabee Has a 'Cheney' Moment: Was He Hunting for Reporters?

By: E&P Staff It looked at first like nothing more than a humorous update on the Dick Cheney shot-his-friend-in-the-face moment, this time featuring Mike Huckabee. But by the time Jim Tankersley was done, at the Chicago Tribune's popular The Swamp blog, it had gained a serious edge.

Tankersley, under the title, "Huckabee's muzzle control problem," explored the candidate's photo op "pheasant-hunting expedition" in Iowa on Wednesday. A reporter asked why he hadn?t invited Cheney along, and Huckabee quipped, "Because I want to survive all the way through this." Har-har, and all that.

But Tankersley then related that at one point, "Huckabee?s party turned toward a cluster of reporters and cameramen and, when they kicked up a pheasant, fired shotgun blasts over the group?s heads." He added: "This, friends, is dangerously bad hunting form.

"Your Swamp correspondent, the son of a longtime hunter education instructor, grew up plying the corn rows and stream banks of rural Oregon with a Labrador retriever and a Mossberg 20-gauge pump shotgun. On our hunts for pheasant, grouse and quail, merely swinging a gun barrel in the general direction of another person was grounds for day-long banishment to the truck (which smelled like wet dog).

"Suffice to say, if any of our hunting mates had pulled a stunt like Huckabee?s yesterday, we never would have invited them back. It?s the sort of behavior that drives safety-conscious hunters up the wall, because it reinforces a reckless, gun-totin? stereotype.

"My colleague James Oliphant reports that Huckabee?s party was about 75 yards away from the press corps Wednesday when a pheasant jumped up and flew toward the reporters, drawing several shots. 'That was too close,' he reports a cameraman saying."

The full post is at: http://www.swamppolitics.com.