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The entry titled "Palin's speechwriter not a fan of hunting," and any of the comments about it.

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Home > Window on Washington > Archives > 2008 > September > 03 > Entry

Palin’s speechwriter not a fan of hunting

By Ken Herman | Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 10:32 AM

Former longtime Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully is the man behind tonight’s convention speech by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, which is interesting in light of Scully’s moral opposition to hunting and Palin’s love of the activity.

The speech by the woman selected by John McCain as his running mate is viewed as crucial as she withstands withering scrutiny of everything about her. Among the things learned about Palin is her love of hunting.

“We hunt as much as we can, and I’m proud to say our freezer is full of wild game we harvested here in Alaska,” she recently told Newsweek.

Another report detailed the home where her parents “live amid hundreds of sets of trophy antlers and a taxidermy collection that includes a giant moose head and a full-grown mountain lion.”

The photo above, published in London’s Daily Mail, shows the grizzly bear skin on a sofa in her Anchorage office. Chuck Heath, the governor’s dad, bagged the bear, Sally Heath, the governor’s mom, told the British paper. And the Heaths said they heard the news about McCain picking their daughter as they returned from a reindeer hunt washed out by rain.

“Sarah grew up hunting. She can use a gun. She and her daddy would wake up at 3 a.m. on school days to hunt moose,” the governor’s mom told the paper.

Now, at some length, here are some excerpts from a 2002 book by Scully, a George W. Bush speechwriter in the White House for five years. The book is “Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.” It is a condemnation of factory farming, trophy hunting and other activities involving animals.

On page 347, Scully challenges Roger Scruton, a hunting advocate:

“Like other sport hunters, too, Mr. Scruton carries his moral relativism a step further in his constant appeals to experience. To ‘understand’ hunting and the delights of the ‘substantial minority’ of people who enjoy it (five to seven percent) we must hunt, submerge ourselves in the raw, choiceless passion of it all. We, too, might then know that sense of ‘homecoming to our natural state.’”

“Of course, this is an argument equally available to enthusiasts of bull-fighting, cockfighting, bear-baiting, hare coursing, crush videos, or, for that, matter pornography in general. Since when do we have to indulge in vice before we may adjudge it as such?”

Earlier in the book, on page nine, this from Scully:

“Such terrifying powers we possess, but what a sorry lot of gods some men are. And the worst of it is not the cruelty but the arrogance, the sheeer hubris of those who bring only violence and fear into the animal world, as if it needed any more of either. Their lives entail enough frights and tribulations without the modern fire-makers, now armed with perfected, inescable weapons, traipsing along for more fun and thrills at their expense even as so many of them die away. It is out fellow creatures’ lot in the universe, the place assigned them in creation, to be completely at our mercy, the fiercest wolf or tiger defenseless against the most cowardly man.”

“And to me it has always seemed not only ungenerous and shabby but a kind of supreme snobbery to deal cavalierly with them, as if their little share of the earth’s happiness and grief were inconsequential, meaningless, beneath a man’s attention, trumped by any and all designs he might have on them, however base, irrational or wicked.”

So far today, no response from Scully about how he reconciles his work for Palin and his feelings about hunting.

A political operative familiar with Scully offered this: “Yeah, there is a kind of delicious irony re Scully working for the moose hunter, eh?”

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