Democrats Light Themselves Pair Of Exploding Cigars

IBD Editorials ^ | April 27, 2012 | MARK STEYN

[Kaslin]

A couple of days ago, Obama campaign top dog David Axelrod threw in the towel on the dog war.

"I thought it was a little absurd to talk about what the president had done as a 10-year-old boy," he sniffed to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, which is as near as the suddenly sheepish attack dog will ever get to conceding that Barack Obama is the first dog-eating president in the history of the republic.

For those coming late to the feud, the Democrats started it, assiduously promoting accounts of a 1983 Romney vacation to Canada in which the family pooch Seamus rode on the roof of the car. Axelrod and the boys thought they could have some sport with this, and their poodles in the media eagerly played along. The New York columnist Gail Collins alone has referred to it dozens of times.

And then Jim Treacher, the sharp-eyed wag of the Daily Caller, uncovered this passage from Chapter Two of Obama's best-selling but apparently largely unread memoir "Dreams From My Father," in which the author recalls childhood meals with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro:

"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 remnants of 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."

There followed an Internet storm of "I Ate A Dog (And I Liked It)" gags.

[Verginius Rufus]

"First dog-eating President in the history of the republic"?

I guess we can't be sure about all of the previous Presidents. Many of their youthful indiscretions were not recorded for posterity.

I'm thinking Sam Houston might have eaten dog while he was living with the Indians, but I guess when "the republic" is used without further specification it means "the United States," not the Republic of Texas.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Kaslin.

[SunkenCiv]

And thanks neverdem for the ping.

[Cincinna]

Obama at WH correspondents dinner on Sarah Palin
“ What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?
A pit bull is delicious.”

[HiTech RedNeck]

Good Muslims wouldn’t touch dog meat any more readily than pig. At least officially. Maybe pops was coming from some kind of syncretism between Islam and pagan worship?

[HiTech RedNeck]

Will the young Barack Obama who ate dog go down in the annals of legend like the young George Washington who cut down the cherry tree but then confessed it out of conscience? (This sounds possibly in character for Washington, who actually struggled to keep his own bad temper under control. He might have caught his head on it while horse riding, and in a fit of pique cut the whole blankety-blank tree down, no matter how valuable it was.)

[Verginius Rufus]

I think the first time the cherry tree story appeared was in a biography published after Washington's death by Parson Weems. Supposedly young George had been given a new hatchet and was trying it out and got carried away. The original version may have been that he girdled the tree (causing it to die) rather than chopping it down outright. It was supposed to illustrate Washington's honesty--but the story itself seems to be a lie.

Parson Weems lived in the Edgefield District in South Carolina which got the nickname of "district of devils" (because a lot of the most extreme South Carolinians were from there) but claimed to have been a pastor in the Mount Vernon area previously.