So let us set the stage:
- Mitt Romney puts a canine on the roof of the car for a family trip
- a lot of people make fun of him for it
- which pisses off conservatives who now have to find an equivalent sin hidden in Obama’s murky past
- so they look and they look until finally someone thinks to read one of the president’s biographical books, and lo
- there they find the weapon. And they toss it back. And it is good.
Here it is:
In his book Dreams of My Father, Obama tells of being a six-year-old learning about a new and unfamiliar culture after his family’s move to Indonesia:
The children of farmers, servants and low-level bureaucrats had become my best friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night, hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines — the loser watched his kite soar off with the wind, and knew that somewhere other children had formed a long, wobbly train, their heads toward the sky, waiting for their prize to land. With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chili 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 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. That’s how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life. …
Did you catch it? It’s in there all right. Obama ate your dog.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 
If the Democrats make an issue out of a non-issue, they shouldn’t be surprised if the Republicans respond in kind. It’s all ridiculous.
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I think there was a difference here Sean – it wasn’t the dems who went after Romney on the Seamus the dog thing (whch I think was actually quite reasonable) – it was the lickin’ their lips media. The pushback? I’m honestly not sure where it originated, but I understood it was the Romney campaign..
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That’s not true. David Axelrod sent out a photo of Obama with his dog on Twitter with a snarky comment to contrast his treatment of dogs with Romney’s. Of course, the photo now seems kind of creepy now we know that Obama has eaten them.
The Dems created this stupid controversy. Now they are reaping what that have sown.
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Well…he ate them as a child, but treats them well as an adult. I can accept that. Mitt was an adult when he made the infamous Seamus decision.
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I cannot believe how much of a double standard people have about this. Moreover, people put dogs in crates any time they get on an airplane. It’s the law for goodness sake. Do you really think traveling on the top of a car is any worse than in the bowels of a stuffy airplane storage compartment? The rationalizations here are starting to get insane.
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For what it’s worth, I never liked having to put my dog in that crate in the underbelly of the plane…I knew he probably would be very uncomfortable. But I didn’t have much choice, especially when coming to America (unless we were going to take a boat). I also don’t like that people eat dog, but you have to see there’s a difference between a child who just immigrated to a country being told that this is what you eat, and adult Mitt seeing that his dog just crapped himself on the roof, and still just washing him off briefly and continuing on.
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“For what it’s worth, I never liked having to put my dog in that crate in the underbelly of the plane…I knew he probably would be very uncomfortable. But I didn’t have much choice, especially when coming to America (unless we were going to take a boat)”
Since it seems to be less morally objectionable here, perhaps you could have fed him to a six-year child instead.
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The feeding to a kid would have been more morally objectionable, obviously. If I were the six year old kid eating the dog, however, because my parents told me that’s what we eat, then it’s less objectionable. Less objectionable on the part of the kid only, not the parents.
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Its well known that obama does not like the whitehouse dog.
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Hmmmm…what is the source for that?
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22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for
his wife.
First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000.00 a year at taxpayer expense.
and he does hate the dog but has to keep it for political reasons.
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I think brat asked for a source – got one?
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This isnt about Democrats or Republicans, this is truly about stupid, stupid people. Maybe you could all get along if you would just eat the worm at the bottom of the bottle. 😉
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But how was it cooked? Poodle and chips? Sweet and sour Alasatian, or Chiawawa in a basket? We should be told. And hold on…..did they get a doggy bag?
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Ah the doggy bag………priceless. 🙂
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Yum yum . . .
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So many six-year-olds have control over what they eat. I know I was doing all the shopping and cooking at that age …
There is also Romney’s big fundraiser, Fred Malek, who, as an adult BARBEQUED A DOG: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/04/why-cant-people-forgive-fred-malek-little-dog-roasting/51124/.
Makes Mitt look like the height of sensibility.
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An excellent post, Moe. The E.C. recommended Obama’s book to me last year but I have yet to read it. This post and the president’s evident candor make me think that I should. It is redolent of both his otherness and his honesty. Most Americans are, I think, like me in that we all grew up in a protective bubble of our own culture among people just like us. Not him. Memories begin about the age of 3 or 4 and experiences become a part of who we are from that point on, so it seems to me that who Barack Obama is today is more a product of conscious decision that if he had come from a homogenized background like most people. I think that’s a positive.
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[we all grew up in a protective bubble of our own culture among people just like us] Right, Jim. That’s the way it was for me. I didn’t actually see a black person up close till I was a teenager.
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And welcome Jim.
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Thanks, Moe. I don’t know why it took me so long – no excuse really, because I’ve always valued your comments.
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Are we going to ask folks in India how they feel about Americans eating cows?
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Bingo!
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it is entirely correct to say he was raised, in his formative years, as a Muslim. give be a boy until he is 6 and I give you the man. In this case, they had him until 10.
he was, until the age of 10, raised Muslim. His early schooling was in Indonesia
where religious instruction is compulsory and where he received religious instructions in Islam since his parents registered him in every one of the schools he attended, as a Muslim. In a book he authored “I will stand with them (Muslims) should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”
And he proved it by helping to hand Egypt over to the muslim brotherhood and sharia law.
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Let’s put Obama’s comment in its full context:
I despise and loath Muslims and fully understand that Islam and America are incompatible, but I’d be hard pressed not to do as Obama claimed he would do within the context of his full statement.
It would take a lot of soul searching on my part to put aside my ingrained resistance to such things and take such dramatic steps to ensure my countrymen’s safety.
As for Egypt – that was self-centeredness and venality, not a love of Islam, on Obama’s part. He wasn’t willing to take a politically unpopular stance even though it would benefit America to do so.
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A positive? Mr. Hope and Change wants to create a nation humbled; humiliated, casting-aside capitalism and individual freedoms for one where we the people are government controlled. This would be a system that genuflects mediocrity, steals personal aspiration and opportunity, and punishes those who strive to succeed.
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@ jet2,
I started to write you a sarcastic reply, but on re-reading your comment I realize that you are not open to reason on the subject. (Your i.d. icon is appropriate.) Clearly your mind is made up. But I wish you would reflect on the matter. Why would a president “want” to do those things? Do you think he is crazy for power? A secret Muslim zealot? A communist mole, recently activated?
Allow me to recommend to you a radio program I think you might like: Coast to Coast AM.
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I’m sure that he’s open to reason on the topic; there’s just no reason-based argument to his position. He has accurately, if vitriolically, described “the plan” as expressed by Obama himself. Jet2 chose harsh words, but those words are basically true.
Obama has made it clear that he wants America to be just one nation among others and generally subordinate to the UN. He also has no love of capitalism in the form of the American free market and believes that it is the role of the government to redistribute wealth more “fairly” and to ensure that all people are financially supported by the government in as many ways as possible from birth to death.
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“He has accurately, if vitriolically, described “the plan” as expressed by Obama himself.” Really, jonolan? Look again. He said Obama wants our country to be “humbled; humiliated” and wants to “cast aside capitalism and individual freedoms”. That’s simply not true.
I believe it is true that he wants “America to be just one nation among others”, and I support him in that. The opposite of that is to try to force other countries to be like us, including “nation-building”. That has gotten us into a lot of trouble. It did in Vietnam, in Iraq, and has now been going on for over 10 years in Afghanistan. I think it’s hubris to think that ours is the only model for the rest of the world and it is my experience that other cultures resent it when we try to remake them in our image, which is why it doesn’t work. For another example, look at Venezuela. That ugly-American image is why Hugo Chavez has been able to leverage his country’s cozy relationship with Castro and other anti-capitalistic regimes.
Our military relationship with the U.N. has concerned me for a long time. However, I can think of no example of Obama subordinating us to the U.N. any more than any other president of either party. It has historically been a useful device to get some things done, but in others to get us into trouble. As a retired military officer I am appreciative of the restraint Obama has shown in that regard. He’s gotten us out of Iraq as far as active military actions (although thanks to G.W.B., we’ll likely never be free of responsibility for it) and has laid out a plan to get out of Afghanistan. If you and jet don’t like those actions, then you and I have a real disagreement.
When you speak of the “free market” you allude to something many conservatives see as an icon of purity that simply doesn’t exist any more than pure communism exists. Government regulation of markets has always been required, it’s simply a matter of how and how much. The housing debacle is a prime example of too little regulation and there are two more crises looming for the same reason: student loan debt and credit-card debt. Then, look at the BOA crisis in the headlines now. Same problem.
Finally, the redistribution of wealth. Without government to attempt the regulation of commerce and to devise social programs we would have a country that looked a lot like the world Charles Dickens painted in “A Christmas Carol”, or the world of the Robber Barons of the 19th century. Maybe you and jet want to live in such a world, but not me. I want a society that places a minimal safety net under the unfortunate, the ill, and the elderly and just because we have a president who wants those things too doesn’t mean he hates capitalism or wants to make us subservient to the U.N. That stuff is demagoguery.
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That’s sort of funny. You claim that I’m wrong and then go to great lengths to agree with everything I said. 😆
You and jcjet2 just said the same thing. He just thinks it’s wrong and you think it’s right. You even explained plausible rationales for Obama holding those beliefs, which answered you own questions to jcjet2.
The facts are not, and haven’t been, in argument. Only the worth of the positions of the groups involved are of note in this war.
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Oddly – to me, at least – all of the comments so far make sense.
As far as eating dogmeat goes, I’m not going to complain about Obama doing it as a child as I’ve done it with full knowledge of what I was doing as an adult.
When your friend, a Korean-American, has a very aged grandmother who is dying and wants a feast of traditional foods from her rural Korean roots, if you care about your friend and respect his family at all, you show up and tuck in, even if it’s fido.
Hell! In the course of travelling the benighted corners of this planet for work I’ve eaten a LOT “worse” things than dogs. Most of them were actually pretty tasty once I got past the “food panic.”
And, before anyone jumps the shark, think about how many American children’s “pet” lambs, piglets, and calfs ended up on their plates. I know that all my wives’ did when they were children on the farm.
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This comes down to Democrats believing they could take a silly issue, make political hay, and the Republicans defusing it by being even more absurd . Still it is funny as hell.
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Alan, you knnow I hate it when I agree with you, but yes, the Dems were dumb to pick up on the Romeny dog thing – it started with the media pouncing; they just loved this one because dog poop was involved.
In fact, I don’t find the episode with the dog in his cage on the roof all that odd.
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Best comments: Jim above and Alan.
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