Skepticism

The Revenge of Seamus the Dog

From time to time, I wish I believed in an afterlife. This is one of those times. I would love to believe that somewhere, in some high dimension of which we know nothing, Seamus the dog could look upon Mitt Romney and think, “yeah, payback for the top the car you crazed, cold-hearted, monkey-minded excuse for a mammal.” You see, in the last forty-eight hours or so, Mittens lost the election. I think that in the end, this will be that moment back in 2008 when America could breathe a sigh of relief that Sarah Palin wasn’t going to be an old man’s heartbeat away from the most stressful job ever. When Team Romney emailed a press release saying that President Obama sympathized with people who had attacked our embassy, while the attack was going on, in order to score political points, they showed their commitment to Machiavellian tactics knows no outer boundary.

Make political hay out of the deaths of Americans overseas? Sure, the POTUS is within two points in Virginia, if it could pick up another eighth of a point why not? Violate the rule that politics stops at the water’s edge? Well, if it makes the conservative commentariat stop saying we’re not hitting hard enough, that seems a price worth paying. If you really want to close that deal, you’ll do anything to make it happen. That’s how you win. It doesn’t matter that these are things that are just not done because you have an agenda.

Seamus could have told us this. Off in the canine equivalent of Valhalla, I’m sure that he’d be gnawing on the bone of something big and cow like, nodding his head and thinking, “he put me on the top of the car instead of the luggage. Then, after I’d completely voided my bowels, he put me back on top of the car. What the hell do you think the monkey words, ’scared shitless’ mean? Thank you, oh so very much, Great Monkey. Hosed down or not, cleaning your own shit off of you isn’t tasty. May you try it with your tongue someday.”

It’s another of those things that is in the category of just not done. Now, I don’t know whether it is illegal to put a dog on top of a car in a carrier in all fifty states or not. Legal or not, it’s one of those things that isn’t done. Favor the luggage over the dog? Sure, it solves the conservation of space problem but it does so in a singularly ruthless way. Unless the Romney boys were unusually cold-hearted kids, I doubt they were particularly happy about the matter. I want to believe that Ann Romney wasn’t enthused about it. So here’s a man who puts the dog on top of the car, sees that the dog has completely soiled itself in terror, hoses the dog off, and over the likely objection of his wife and sons puts the dog back on top of the car because that was his solution.
Romney likely would have been the perfect leader for the Galactic Empire. You can see him happily give the order to fire, err, blow up the planet Alderan. The man is nothing if he isn’t robotic and ruthless.

Up to this point, one could oppose a Mitt Romney candidacy because of differences of policy or because the GOP has gone insane. One could hope that he isn’t in a position to govern because his party isn’t capable of governing at present. The Tea Party on all the levers of power? Of such things are nightmares made and historical tomes written explaining how things went catastrophically wrong. These were all good reasons to oppose a Romney presidency. One could hold that position without saying that he did not deserve to be President and was entirely unworthy of either the trust or dignity of it.

He proved both. Consider that all he had to do was either nothing or make the perfunctory and customary statement expressing outrage at the attacks and condolences for the bereaved. He had the chance to show he was human and not the product of a particularly wild night in which a member of the Borg and a Ferengi got their freak on and he was the blessed and unintended result. He had the opportunity to actually look presidential. Instead he went at it with the same kind of ruthless efficiency at problem solving that allows someone to buy up a company, shuck it like an ear of corn, and then toss the remains over his shoulders, employees and all, while talking sagely about ‘creative destruction’. It’s perfectly legal to do such things. It doesn’t really seem like being a ‘job creator’, though. More like job terminator. Destroying jobs may also be one of those things that just isn’t done. The man who can make such heartless decisions with a smile on his face, is not a man who is going to sympathize the next time a storm destroys some city on the Gulf Coast. The man who makes such rash decisions is not someone who should have the ability to order bombs to be dropped on inhabited places.

The way we elect our President is cruel. It is long and it is grueling but it does show the citizenry something we desperately need to know; how does this person make decisions when the heat is on? What kinds of decisions do they make? Seamus the Dog could tell us, from whatever ethereal zone he now calls home, that Mittens is a decisive man who doesn’t quite grasp that you have to take into account how actions might have negative effects on others. He can put his feelings to one side and figure out what has to be done and then make it happen. Therein lies the problem. I would love to think that somewhere, Seamus the dog was wagging his tail and thinking, “Good. Monkey was undone by his own heartlessness.”

Kind of a pity there isn’t an afterlife.

 

Adrienne J Davis

Adrienne Davis is a 40-something grandmother of two beautiful children. Mother of a wonderful son and his girlfriend. Wife of an amazing woman A former soldier and freelance reporter, she now works in the software industry while trying to decide what she wants her third act to be. She lives in Portland, OR, where she and the missus live with a bearded collie, three cats and a bearded dragon named after one of the witches from Discworld. "All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others. " Douglas Adams

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16 Comments

  1. Well written, Adrienne. Not enough can be said about the way people treat their pets being used as an assessment of the manner in which they would treat human beings if they are put in a position of power, such as the office of the POTUS. Despite the stories that were told during the Republican Convention of Mitt’s “kind and generous nature”, ACTIONS speak louder than WORDS. This particular story about his dog should be a red flag for anyone considering voting for this man and his tea party second in command. There is also something else off-putting about him and his wife. They seem almost mechanical, like the “Stepford Wives” or the cold, unfeeling,unemotional aliens from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. My mind was made up long ago never to vote for another Republican candidate in any race, local or national, until they rid themselves of right wing Christian fundies, and right wingers in general. The Rep. Party now represents a population of people who want to create a society led by their own brand of Christian-Taliban morals squads, disenfranchising anyone who disagrees with their social agenda.

    1. … the way people treat their pets being used as an assessment of the manner in which they would treat human beings if they are put in a position of power

      We don’t need to infer anything from how he treated his dog.

      There are enough incidents being reported in which he has shown an equally callous attitude towards humans, especially he has power over (or more power than.) From what I’ve been hearing, what would be hard would be to find well-founded reports of incidents in which he _has_ shown empathy and generosity when he didn’t have to.

  2. I love this post. I particularly love how you worked in both Star Wars and Star Trek references. The Borg/Ferengi combo is particularly apt. :D

    1. Yeah I’m trying to work that out myself. I spent the entire article trying to figure out what happened in the last 48 hours, I don’t think it is ever mentioned unless this is an old article just published now and the embassy comments were within the last 48 hours of when the article was originally written. It’s probably a good article but I was just really confused.

  3. Wait, Romney did this to his own dog? How does he treat dogs he doesn’t like then? Or people?

    Wow. What a lowlife scumbag son of a bitch bastard.

    Like the first commenter, I judge people a lot by the way they treat animals.

    1. Yeah, it’s pretty awful. The Seamus thing, the reports of bullying when he was in school, how he views the 47%…put the string of “gaffes” & incidents together and you get a pretty scary image of what this guy is really like.

      1. Of course, I’d need to hear his side of the story too – there may be mitigating circumstances! (cue groans and hail of rotten tomatoes)

  4. Urgh, what about dying people? This is pure hearsay anecdata and not actually about Romney, but being an anonymous and unaccountable Internet poster, I claim privilege.

    Last week, one of his neighbors here in Belmont who works at a hospice in another town nearby told me that a few years back, a group attempted to buy a nearby house to convert to a hospice. One of the abutters stood up in town meeting to object on the basis of noise and traffic. The NIMBY was one of Mitt’s sons, who lives down the street from Mitt’s old house. The town knuckled under and the necessary permits were denied.

    Think of the horror, those dying people are notorious for their loud parties and drag racing in the middle of the night. And the fireworks. Don’t get me started on the fireworks!

  5. Fuck me dead for a drongo.

    It’s like this: callous cold hearted businessman we expect.

    Animal cruelty OTOH suggests active sick sadism. What’s he gonna do if nobody is looking and he thinks he can get away with it?

    Obviously if the story is untrue or exaggerated I withdraw my comments.

    The worst thing of all is that Seamus would still defend his master to the death if he were able.

      1. Sorry, but that wiki page does not in any way support your conclusion the story is exaggerated. There is no such thing as an “air-tight kennel” unless we’re talking about something used by NASA to hurl animals into orbit. There is insufficient detail regarding the “windshield” but I’m willing to bet a months salary (~$10K) it was an ad-hoc affair that did little more than redirect the airflow so that it buffeted the dog from angles other than forward facing. Have you ever ridden in the bed of a pickup truck? The fact that you’re sitting directly behind the cab of the truck does not mean you’re not buffeted by the wind. Not to mention the fact the situation would be terrifying by virtue of being wholly different from anything the dog had theretofor experienced.

        Even if you grant that Mr. Romney honestly thought his solution would not harm the animal it still represents a gross misjudgment. Which when coupled with his other documented behaviors and statements makes me wonder if he should be seeing a psychiatrist.

        P.S., I’ve had as many as four large dogs in my care at any point in time (currently two). One of those dogs, Nick the Wonder Dog, made several flights with me on business. As stressful as that was I can barely imagine subjecting him to traveling several hours in a dog carrier strapped to the top of my car.

  6. ” Have you ever ridden in the bed of a pickup truck?”

    Countless times, both with and without dogs, and invariably the dogs loved the experience.

    I find the Wikipedia article perfectly plausible.

    Like Buzz, I reckon there are better documented avenues to attack Romney

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