COMMENTARY | Obama eats dog meat. Romney drives highway with dog on car top.
Too many people are taking these pooch stories seriously, the Christian Science Monitor notes, as though the fate of the most important presidential election in U.S. history (is it really?) were at stake.
We started, of course, with Mitt Romney putting the family's pet Irish Setter in a well-secured cart atop the crowded family car for a vacation drive from Massachusetts to Canada way back in 1983. This led to both jokes and some overwrought expressions of outrage.
Romney backers, taking matters too seriously, got sick of the Seamus story that seemingly would never end. Somebody who had read President Barack Obama's autobiographical "Songs from My Father" recalled his acknowledgement that as a child in Indonesia, he had been fed the cultural cuisine of dog meat, snake meat and grasshoppers. So now the outrage is reversed: How can Obama backers criticize Romney, when Obama actually has eaten the flesh of dogs that were killed for the dinner table?
Some people on either side doth protest too much. Romney safely secured the dog, while Obama was simply eating in the same manner that many people dine not only in Indonesia, but in China and elsewhere.
Thankfully, not everyone is going bonkers. Examiner.com reports some good and not-so-good jokes regarding all of this silliness. My favorite is one that seems to poke fun at both candidates: "What does President Obama call a dog riding on top of a car? Fast food."
People (voters) are starting to become so locked in that a candidate can't even take the risk of humor. Keep in mind that this whole doggie debate has taken root with neither Romney nor Obama making any statements or criticizing one another. Furthermore, the Romney/Seamus story first was unveiled in 2007, and Obama's "Songs" book first was published in 1995. Can't we just let certain things rest, or at least loosen up a bit?
