POOCH POO…THE DOGGIE WARS…JAMES TARANTO
One time Barack Obama went to an Indian restaurant and ordered the lassi. Was he ever disappointed when the waiter brought him a yogurt drink! We’ll be here all week. But seriously, folks, we have a man-bites-dog story for you today.First, some background. Last week Byron York of the Washington Examiner reported that “some Obama staffers are reportedly obsessing over a nearly 30-year-old story about [Mitt] Romney’s dog”:
In 1983, Romney took his family on vacation and, faced with a packed station wagon, put his Irish setter Seamus in a travel kennel strapped to the roof of the car. Romney constructed a special windshield in an effort to make the dog more comfortable, but Seamus ended up relieving himself on the roof, which reportedly caused much consternation among the Romney boys. Ever since the story got out–it was reported by the Boston Globe in 2007, during Romney’s first run for president–Romney opponents have used it in semiserious and sometimes fully serious ways to portray him as insensitive.
“I have heard, in focus groups, the dog story totally tanks Mitt Romney’s approval rating,” Chris Hayes said on his MSNBC show. The Washington Post reported last month that the Seamus story “is ballooning into a narrative of epic proportions”:
Late-night host David Letterman has been giving the dog near-nightly shout-outs. There are parody Web videos, “Dogs Aren’t Luggage” T-shirts and Facebook groups. (“Dogs Against Romney,” which protested outside last month’s Westminster dog show, has more than 38,000 Facebook fans.) The New Yorker featured a cartoon, with Rick Santorum riding in Romney’s rooftop dog carrier, on its cover last week. In the five years since the story was revealed, New York Times columnist Gail Collins has mentioned Seamus in at least 50 columns.
In January Obama adviser David Axelrod–not to be confused with Axelrod, the Flying A Dog–blew a dog whistle. He tweeted a photo of the president with Bo, the White House canine, in what appears to be the back seat of a limousine. Axelrod’s comment: “How loving owners transport their dogs.”
In a more serious vein, Lincoln Mitchell of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute writes at the Puffington Host: “For many voters, treating a dog this way is unimaginable and could only be done by somebody who has a problem empathizing with others.”
But then Jim Treacher, the Daily Caller’s resident wag, picked up his dog-eared copy of “Dreams From My Father,” Obama’s 1995 autobiography, and sniffed out this passage from the second chapter. If Axelrod’s tweet was a dog whistle, Treacher’s post is a dinner bell:
With Lolo [Obama’s stepfather], I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.
It reminds us of the conclusion of the sci-fi tale “A Boy and His Dog”: “It’s a cookbook.”
The jokes write themselves.
#ObamaDogRecipes: Yorkshire terrier pudding, mutt chop, Pekingese duck, bichon frisee salad, beagle with cream cheese, pure bread.
“So, Mr. President, where shall we go to eat?” “I know a great Spot.”
If you want a friend in Washington, don’t eat him (credit to Jim Geraghty).
Happiness is a warm puppy, with a side of fries.
Obama’s favorite fast-food joint? Checkers (Patrick Daly).
I wouldn’t vote for that guy for dogcatcher.
Did you hear about the insomniac polyphagiac president? He lies awake at night wondering if there is a dog.
Romney aide Erich Fehrnstrom got into the act last night, retweeting Axelrod’s Obama-Bo snapshot from January with the comment: “In retrospect, a chilling photo.” That may be the wrong adjective, since it doesn’t appear to have been taken in a refrigerated truck. Obama really spoils that dog.
Almost as funny as the jokes at Obama’s expense have been the discomfited responses of Obama supporters who’ve been dining out for months on the Seamus story. “Had only just noticed new rightwing Obama is weirdo Muslim dog eater meme. Thk you twitter,” tweeted TalkingPointsMemo’s Josh Marshall last night. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Marshall that as dogs are haram, this should put to rest the Muslim rumors.
Slate.com actually published a piece in defense of dog-eating–in January 2002. Talk about prescient. Meanwhile Mediaite quotes the founder of Dogs Against Romney:
“It seems desperate for the Romney campaign to bring up something that happened to Obama when he was 10 years old, not preparing his own meals, in a country where eating dog meat probably isn’t all that unusual as if it compares in any way to Romney, as a 36-year old adult, in America, making the conscious decision to strap his family pet to the roof of a car for a 12-hour drive, and leaving it up there even after it got sick.”
Scott Crider, who writes his site in the voice of a dog, Rusty, said Romney was “desperate to divert attention from what Romney did.”
That Obama was but a child is an entirely fair point. As National Review’s Geraghty observes, “I doubt there are many Republicans or conservatives who are genuinely outraged or bothered” by it.
Well, maybe bothered. Geraghty notes in a later post that Andrew Zimmern, a “professional bizarre-food eater,” has tried dog twice in Vietnam and vows never to do so again: “We have a pug at home.” Observes Geraghty: “The Zimmern comments do indicate just how alien and taboo this is in American culture; it is so forbidden that a man whose fame and fortune derive largely from an entertainment program about eating strange food in foreign locales will not eat this particular animal again.”
On the other hand, Obama was 33 when he published “Dreams From My Father,” in which he recounted this tail–oops, tale–with no evident repugnance. Anyone who argues that the Lolo story is irrelevant while the Seamus one is fair game seems to us to be barking up the wrong tree. Geraghty closes his initial post on the subject with an astute observation:
In 2008, John McCain’s presidential campaign wouldn’t have touched this anecdote with a ten-foot pole. Between this and the Romney camp’s rapid response to the [Hilary] Rosen comments, we are seeing a Republican presidential campaign that is exponentially faster on its feet and way more nimble than the previous general-election campaign against Obama.
Part of the reason for that is in 2008 Obama didn’t have a record to defend, so that he ran a campaign that was part hope-and-change and part an attack on the incumbent, who wasn’t on the ballot. This time around, his campaign is nasty by necessity, which makes it vulnerable in new ways. As with the “war on women,” this dog fight is a dispute that the Obama campaign started.
Then again, somehow in 2008 the passage of “Dreams From My Father” that Treacher highlights escaped the notice of the watchdogs of the press, which is why it is news now, four years later and 17 years after publication. If a Republican turned out to have eaten dog meat as a child, the mainstream media’s vetting would have included a visit to the veterinarian.
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