As a boy, I spent fall weekends hunting with dad and filling the family freezer with game birds and venison.

By the time I was 10, I was harvesting my limit in a dove field or duck blind. My Winchester 42 was a 1930s-era relic with a skeet barrel, but I was a pump-action killing machine.

When hunting pheasant, the lumbering bombers of bird life, I had to learn not to shoot too early on the rise, destroying their meat with a too-close blast of birdshot.

My first quail hunt brought me back to Earth.

Roosting quail form a wagon wheel on the ground, heads pointed outward in a compressed coil of avian energy. When flushed, a covey of 12 to 18 birds explodes like an insurgent IED.

Despite dozens of quail hunts, I never mastered that snapping-stick second when the air would inflate with a buzzing bird-overload.

I grew to approach such hunts with fear, like a Victorian virgin on her wedding night. Dad would swing his barrels through a moving bird, fire, swing through a second and fire again: two birds for Sunday supper.

I would swing toward one bird, see a closer second bird, get distracted by a crossing third bird, and finally fire at a disappearing fourth bird. Toward dusk, I’d be blasting in the general direction of any covey-rise, and praying the shot would intersect a bird someplace in space.

The first six weeks of the Obama presidency have been a quail hunt. The explosion of presidential energy has caught this Bush-watcher unawares.

The air has been filled with Obama speeches, Obama summits, Obama addresses and Obama orders. Presidential directives have opened third-world clinics, closed terrorist prisons, blocked al-Qaeda trials and boosted union benefits.

Do I aim at the “there is not one single earmark in this stimulus bill” statement, or do I shoot at the “middle class won’t pay one single dime” statement? Do I focus on Obama’s campaign pledge to end earmarks -— contrasting it with the 9,000 earmarks in the Democrats’ $410 billion Omnibus bill — or do I aim at Obama’s repeated assertion that “95 percent of Americans will receive tax cuts,” when we know that half of America’s workers don’t pay income taxes.

Whir! Whoosh! Whiz! Flap!

Obama is aired on Al-Arabia; Obama holds a prime time press conference; Obama speaks to Congress; Obama holds a televised town meeting; Obama speaks to the Marines; Obama talks to Katie, to Brian and Matt in seconds flat. Obama stimulates our economy. Obama bails out our banks, our mortgages, our insurers, and our manufacturers. Obama insures our children and assures our pensioners.

And that’s just the day-deprived month of February.

While Obama’s teleprompter is being iced down, the media fill lapses with video of the president entertaining George Clooney at the White House.

During those rare seconds when Obama is catching his breath, Vice President Biden fills the airwaves with Quaylisms. Last Wednesday morning, after Obama’s speech to Congress, Biden appeared on the CBS Early Show, and told hostess Maggie Rodriguez that small business owners could call him, personally, to learn how they’d benefit from Obama’s stimulus package.

The owners of 25 million American businesses were grateful.

Biden offered to take their phone calls, because he couldn’t recall the “website number.” Recovery.gov — that’s almost as tough to remember as the spelling of “potato.”

Blustering onward, Biden then attacked Gov. Jindal’s Republican response to Obama’s speech by asserting, “... what I don’t understand from Governor Jindal is what would he do? In Louisiana, there’s 400 people a day losing their jobs.”

Turns out that Vice President Biden “misspoke himself.”

Louisiana is the only state in the union currently adding jobs, not losing them. In December alone, Louisiana added 3,700 jobs, while Biden’s home state of Rhode Island lost 3,000.

Oops!

Recalling Speaker Pelosi’s recent statement that “500 million Americans lose their jobs each month,” Biden’s verbal pratfall was, as usual, cushioned by the well-padded floor of America’s mainstream press.

If we had a billion dollars for every time Obama or Biden has used the words “crisis” or “catastrophe” to drive the DOW into the toilet, we might be able to pay off the $8 trillion the administration’s mushrooming government is projected to cost America.

On Nov. 5, the day after Obama delivered his victory speech at Grant Park, The Associated Press filed a story celebrating the president-elect’s 305 point boost to Wall Street: The DOW soared to 9625.28 — a record-setting, post-Election Day affirmation of investor optimism.

Since that day, torpedoed by the president’s persistent, Great Depression dirges, the DOW has shed 2,600 points — more than a quarter of its value — to a level not seen since the mid-’90s.

That’s a multi-trillion dollar hit to pension funds, investment accounts, and property values across America. It’s the story of bankruptcies, business closings, and worker layoffs: Jobs sacrificed to “the politics of fear,” and to spending on a socialist agenda that even the congressional GAO (Government Accountability Office) reports won’t solve our recession, but will, instead, worsen it long-term.

Consumers drive the American economy, and Obama has scared consumers witless. In fact, consumer confidence plunged to its lowest point, ever, last week after the State of the Union show.

Can Obama raise $8 trillion by hiking taxes on “America’s wealthiest 2 percent?” Not according to economists and grade-school mathematics. If we seized every single cent of income from “America’s wealthiest 2 percent,” it would still only generate an additional $1.3 trillion in revenue, and that’s assuming the economy recovers in 2010.

The Democrat Congress plans on spending $4 trillion next year, alone.

Where is that revenue shortfall going to come from? If you guessed “the middle class,” help yourself to a “Change we can believe in!” campaign button.

But keep your checkbook handy.

Addison Gardner's column appears every other Tuesday in The Aspen Times.