They say that looking at cute animal pictures at work will improve one’s day, so I should probably apologize in advance for this post. But hey, at least this is the evening and not the morning, so hopefully lost productivity will not be the result.
In what I had thought was intended to pass as serious analysis, Salon editor Joan Walsh tries to make the claim that voters just plain don’t like Romney. But the very first paragraph reveals the shallowness of her argument.
I know, “the dogs won’t eat the dog food” is kind of a cliché, but maybe because of Mitt Romney’s Seamus I couldn’t resist it. It refers to attempts to blame marketing for a product not selling, when the problem is the product itself. Romney is the product the voters aren’t buying – the dog food, if you will.
OK? She actually thinks that Romney strapping Seamus’s crate onto the top of the family station wagon is important enough to merit both her closing and her opening paragraph.
It amazes me that a leading leftie journal like Salon still thinks this is important, but the Wiki post linked in the first sentence speaks for itself. The post is titled, simply,
Anyone who has been following political debates knows what happened. Romney took the family dog on a trip by tying his crate on the luggage rack, and at some point Seamus had diarrhea, and Romney hosed him off. Say what you will, but this is old. When I thought about it, it struck me that it would have been more abusive to leave Seamus at home. (I’ve had many dogs that have been excitable and had diarrhea, but as I noted, none of that matters because I am not running for president.)
What I would like to know is precisely what qualifies as a “dog incident” in politics? Romney admits what happened, and just how damning is it?
If it is a “dog incident,” then I certainly think that eating a dog — as Barack Obama admitted he did in his book — also has to be a dog incident. Both men are running for president, and yet only one has a Wiki page bearing his name with the title of “dog incident.” Now, I realize that because Obama ate the dog when he was as a child, it’s not quite the same as if he had done so as an adult. But I didn’t like the way he wrote about it, and I said so:
Most American presidents did not eat dog meat when they were kids, and while I cannot say for certain that none of them ate dog during their lifetimes, the American consensus is that dogs are man’s best friend, and we do not eat them. (I see dog eating as a betrayal of man’s best friend.) My biggest objection to Obama’s dog eating is not that he ate dog meat as a child, for children should not be held responsible for what adults feed them, but the casual, trendy way he assumes a moral license to have eaten dog meat simply because it is not American. No American politician who ate dog meat as a child in the United States would admit (much less romanticize) such a thing in a biography, and if he did it would count against him. But the fact that the dog eating was a foreign thing makes it defensible, even “multicultural.”
What makes the above a “dog incident” is not so much that it happened, and not even that we have a president who ate dog meat, but that we have a president who thinks it is OK because it is a foreign custom.
Foreign custom or not, I think it qualifies as a “dog incident.”
Now, what both “dog incidents” have in common is that there are no pictures of the actual incidents. A dog in a crate on a luggage rack would look like a dog in a crate on a luggage rack. As to dogs which are sold in Indonesia for food, they look like the ones in the pictures here, and I decided not to upload any of them, as they’re pretty hard to look at — certainly lot harder than a picture of a dog in a crate on the family station wagon would be. But we have a president who must think that the Indonesian dog market is OK, because he wrote about it in a very blase manner, and didn’t even feel the need to mention (much less condemn) the horrors which are necessarily involved in what any dog lover would consider a barbaric practice.
If Romney had a “dog incident,” then so did Obama.
And while I can’t speak for all dogs, with Coco’s permission I’m going to stick my neck out here and speculate that if I had to be a dog, I’d rather be temporarily in my crate on top of the family station wagon, than hog tied in a market and waiting to be butchered.
MORE: OK, now that it’s the next morning, I thought I would ruin everyone’s day with a little more miserable nitpickyness. One of the arguments which is commonly advanced by Democrats against Mitt Romney is the ostensibly serious claim that “dogs are not luggage”
Really?
Haven’t these people have been to an airport and seen this commonplace scene?
Now, I can’t ask Coco directly, but I know dogs, and if I put myself in the position of a dog, I think I would prefer to be in my crate on top of the family car I love, with them inside it below, than finding myself on a winding journey through a conveyor belt system leading God-knows-where, only to have the box grabbed and moved by total strangers, then driven in a strange vehicle to an even stranger thing, and then be crammed into a weird sort of room with a bunch of other humans’ suitcases and then have my ears assaulted with unknown noises, my sensitive ears feeling strange and hitherto unknown pressures, and a sense of enormous and rapid movement that cannot be seen towards places unknown and unimaginable.
I would far prefer the familiarity of the former to the terrors of the latter.
Yet had Mitt Romney placed Seamus on a plane, he’d have been entirely blameless, even if the dog had gotten sick in the air.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with putting dogs on planes, mind you. Only that this attack on Romney is so completely without logic that I cannot ignore it.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Sarah Hoyt (guest blogging at Instapundit) for the link, and a warm welcome to all.
Comments welcome, agree or disagree. (I still haven’t been able to get Coco to weigh in, despite her many years of blogging experience…..)
No, seriously.
MORE: In a comment, Jim Treacher notes that that “Wikipedia took down the entry about the Obama dog incident. That’s not as important as Romney’s.”
Shame on Wikipedia. And shame on Obama for thinking it’s funny to eat dogs, while somehow shameful to transport them in a crate on a luggage rack.
Comments
18 responses to “Whose tail could still wag?”
[…] THE DOGS OF POLITICS: If you talk about Romney’s dog incident, shouldn’t you talk about Obama’s? […]
You could ask Coco, but if you think she has clear answers, they you have bigger problems.
There was an article about the Obama dog incident. The liberal Wikipedia editors got it deleted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Obama_Eats_Dogs
No-one ever asked Obama any of the pertinant questions. Do you still eat dog? If no when did you stop? What breed is the tastiest? Why ARE you friends with Michael Vick? I know you sent him plays, did you send him recipes?
That’s not the only contradiction. For intance, this is the same group that wants to allow full-term partial-birth abortions- yet will call any form of spanking, child abuse. Not that I’m a fan of spanking. But I find their mentality contradictory. If you can’t paddle a child on his bottom, then why is it ok to end the life of a living baby after a failed full-term abortion? So its ok to eat the dog once its dead, but its not ok to put a live dog in a kennel on top your car. Makes sense to me.
The thing about Obama’s dog eating is that it was totally normal, ok teabaggers? His mom was married to a second Muslim guy in a row – but of course Barack Hussein Obama is not a muslim, you racist teabaggers. But anyway, he is living with his just-happens-to-be muslim stepfather who just so happens to live in Indonesia. And it is totally normal there to eat dog meat, you closed minded hillbillies.
The scandal here, from the liberal point of view, is that he owned a van or station wagon, went on a folksy trip out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and found it preferable to flying first class someplace exotic while sipping vermosa. Enjoying common things is unforgivable.
Liberals don’t bring up Seamus because of any of the details of the story. They bring Seamus up to transmit a feeling or to interrupt arguments from conservatives about topics that put the Dems on defense. We keep amplifying their point, which is exactly the reaction they wanted from us, with long discussions of details and various alternative scenarios.
It’s like a tv reporter asking you “when did you stop beating your wife?” The question isn’t about details of your marriage or your boxing habits. It’s asked to put you in a defensive crouch and convey “wife beater.”
The libs won’t change tactics as long as it keeps working. Why should they? 90% of conservative talk radio is discussing what the commielibs want discussed. We hear the details and think we’ve put the commielibs in their place. In reality, we’ve wasted another day arguing about when we stopped beating our wives. There is no way to answer the question, there is no better way to treat the dog, because the dog isn’t the issue. Had Romney never had a dog, he would be accused of something else, even if yesterday the commielibs defended what they are now outraged about.
We don’t have time left for every single conservative and libertarian to re-learn every lesson by personal experience and only then stop falling for the same commielib tactics. Smart people learn from others’ experience. In the modern idiocracy no experience seems to teach a lesson but we must frantically repeat the experiment endlessly.
Reject the premise and stay on attack.
Is the fact that Obama was six when fed dog really an excuse? Put a plate full of unrecognizable meat in front of any six year old in the US and tell him its dog. What do you think will happen?
Should be simple to explain. I just want to see a before and after picture of both Romney’s dog and Obama’s.
Obama may have eaten dog when he was young, but he wrote about it as an adult. As an adult he could have written, “I ate dog meat as a child- that seems so wrong now, but those were the traditions I was brought up in.”
He didn’t.
#ObamaEatsDog
Dog in a Crate, or Dog on a Plate?
From @jtLoL
Q: Why did @MittRomney put his dog on top of the car?
A: So @BarackObama wouldn’t eat it.
My favorite debate Tweet: “Romney just strapped Obama to the top of his car and drove him across the country. And then ate him.” My contribution: “Out: Zingers. In: Crushing your opponent, seeing him driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of his women. #EatenLikeADog”
BTW, it is NOT normal to eat dog in Indonesia, according to the Indonesian government. Most likely it was something Obama made up to sound exotic during the 1991-2007 period he was still calling himself “Kenyan-born.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/19/Indonesian-Diplomatic-Source-Obama-Would-Have-to-Go-Hunting-for-Dog-Meat-in-Jakarta
Dogs. We pet ’em.
You et ’em.
Nuff said.
Dogs are haram (forbidden) under Sharia. They are not only not food, they are not to be kept as pets. The dog-eating customs that Lolo introduced to Barry are lingering traces of the culture of Indonesia before Islam.
Many cultures do eat dog and many cultures have their Fidophagia in recent past. It doesn’t appeal to me but then I’m sure Hindus have the same feeling about my eating beef, and of course observant Jews and Muslims are none too thrilled abou my bacon.
Wikipedia took down the entry about the Obama dog incident. That’s not as important as Romney’s.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/02/wikipedia-doesnt-want-you-to-know-that-obama-eats-dogs/
The important thing, Geoff, is that Obama didn’t put the dog on top of a car first. That’s the REAL scandal.