Skip to main content

Dog Days



It isn't August, but the "dog days" have really heated up with the Romney camp digging into Obama's Dreams of My Father for some "red meat" to throw to the crowd.  This after the Obama camp focused on Romney's infamous 1983 vacation in which Mitt strapped Seamus (albeit in a dog carrier) to the top of the family wagon.  It is kind of hard to compare a 30-something-year-old man strapping a family dog to the roof and a five-year-old boy being given a fuzzy story about "you are what you eat" by his step-father as he feeds him dog meat, but leave it to the Romney camp to inflate this into tabloid news.  I have to wonder how the SPCA weighs in on the matter?

Comments

  1. I think the subtext here is linking Obama with an Islamist stepfather through the dog meat story. The Romboids know that this is more juicy than eating dog meat. Not that we haven't been down this road before, but it would be a shame to have persons forget.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great photo!

    We all know that Obama is not one of us. He eats dog? What else is new? As John Powers said at the LA Book Festival, no amount of facts will change people's minds.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Shriftcat shared this one with me,

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/28/eric-fehrnstrom-auto-bailout-mitt-romney_n_1461805.html

    Tell that one to the folks of Michigan.

    ReplyDelete
  4. David Gergen was saying the other day that Romney hasn't quite learned how to hit a major league fastball yet, after playing in the AAA with Newt, Santorum and Paul. I guess this his campaign's idea of a curve ball, the only problem is that he is on record on saying let the auto companies go bankrupt. He may have meant "managed bankruptcy," but that isn't what the Obama administration did. They put GM and Chrysler into receivership and gave them the opportunity to buy themselves out of debt, which they have done.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks! I honestly didn't get what they were saying since Romney had said let them eat cake. I mean go bankrupt. He really does like to take both sides of an issue. Amazing.

    I have never been a big fan of American cars -- I've had too many of them fail on me -- but to let an entire industry die at the same time everything else around them was collapsing seemed a bit much. And it seems like this loan from the taxpayers has paid dividends tenfold.

    The country doesn't seem to have much appetite for an industrial policy, but some industries have such a large footprint or ripple effect it seems like that's where the tax benefits and other perks of government should go rather than to subsidizing oil that creates very few domestic jobs.

    Watched a rerun of the PBS special on the 1929 crash. The more things change the more they stay the same.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I saw a rerun of the Romney aide making that argument on t.v. tonight. And no one sitting with him there even laughed. Hard to believe they think Americans are that stupid, but Republicans have gotten away with turning peoples' strengths into weaknesses before, so I guess anything is possible!

    ReplyDelete
  7. He got pounded on this issue in the primaries, which makes it all the more amusing to see the Repugs let Romboid's campaign chief trying to pass this one off as a factoid. But, the Repugs have been lying to themselves for a long time now. Not one of them has stepped forward to apologize or in any way take blame for the economic crisis of 2008. Too busy trying to pass the blame to Clinton's HUD policies. As I remember it was Bush who was peddling "the ownership society," but I guess he didn't mean the lower 98%. Of course, we can't blame Bush anymore for his failed policies ; )

    ReplyDelete
  8. Well that's the republican play book -- take your opponent's strongest suit (death of bin Laden and survival of GM) and turn it into a weakness.

    Here's another book idea -- I had never heard of him before, but he was on the "boys on the bus" panel in L.A. Trying to understand the roots of liberalism:

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Cause-American-Liberalism-Roosevelt/dp/0670023434

    Caro's book is also available now. Shall we set a date?

    ReplyDelete
  9. It takes about 3 weeks for me to get the book, so how about June 15?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Next thing you know, the Romney camp will be claiming the Obama administration followed their plan in bringing down bin Laden,

    http://news.yahoo.com/mitt-romney-takes-manhattan-eats-pizza-visits-firefighters-212116215--abc-news-politics.html

    ReplyDelete
  11. Leave it to the Mittster to flub a joke,

    http://news.yahoo.com/mitt-romney-makes-fun-obama-campaign-slogan-during-012631360--abc-news-politics.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005