Still and all, though, there's a limit.
Or should be.
(By Russell Goldman | ABC OTUS News)
Seamus, Mitt Romney's Irish setter who traveled with his young family strapped to the roof of their station wagon, "loved" those trips, despite once getting ill, Ann Romney told ABC's Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview.
Seamus' 1983 trip from Boston to a summer cottage in Ontario, Canada, inside a dog carrier lashed atop the family's Chevrolet, has become a regular barb in Romney's side and is routinely used by his critics to paint him as uncaring.
Mitt Romney told Sawyer that the Seamus attacks were the most wounding of the campaign "so far," but Anne Romney insisted the dog loved traveling that way and looked forward to trips.
"The dog loved it," Ann Romney said. "He would see that crate and, you know, he would, like, go crazy because he was going with us on vacation. It was to me a kinder thing to bring him along than to leave him in the kennel for two weeks."
Adding to the left's narrative that Romney had little compassion for the animal is a detail from the 1983 trip that Ann Romney confirmed to Sawyer. The dog became sick, defecating all over itself and the windshield of the car, leading Romney to hose them both off before they continued on the drive to Canada.
"Once, he - we traveled all the time - and he ate the turkey on the counter. I mean, he had the runs," Ann Romney said, laughing as she explained how the dog got diarrhea.
In a 2007 blog written during Romney's first campaign for the presidency, Ann Romney said the dog rode "in an enclosed kennel, not in the open air" and compared the experience with a person riding on a motorcycle or roller coaster.
Politics, by it nature, is a irrefutable example of Catch-22.
People can't really be expected to take the political process seriously, at least as it is presented to most of us most of the time, because that presentation seems to assume that most of the time most of us are stupid.
At the same time, anyone who isn't stupid is, by default, too intelligent to take the process seriously.
Especially when the process attempts to convince us of the relative merits, or lack, of a particular candidate for President of the United States by offering up that particular candidate's attitude about dog shit coating their windshield.
Putting aside any debate on the wisdom and/or cruelty of traveling around the country with the family pet tied to the top of the family truckster, a debate that would almost certainly cause cerebral hemorrhage in any PETA card carrier, while causing next to nothing in the way of a response from your average deep South F-150 with a gun rack owner, the lament hidden amidst the lunacy here is that media, first in the form of the Diane Sawyer's "in depth" questioning and, then, in the form of Russell Goldman's print furthering of the non-event, continues to do a disservice, not only to those of us who would really like to know about legitimate charater qualities of the people who are asking us to elect them, but to those people themselves as these all flash, no fire "news items" distract everyone from the job at hand and demean the serious business of trying to make sure the best (wo)man wins.
Allowing for the inevitable distraction that defecation tends to deliver, here's politics in plain english....
Disqualifying Mitt Romney as a potential President on the basis of this kind of blather is exactly the kind of thing that will validate the blather and do nothing to, ideally, some day put an end to it.
Because you don't have to know anything about politics to recognize bullshit when you hear it.
Or dog shit, as the case may be.
No comments:
Post a Comment