The GOP's animal problem

What is it with top Republicans and animals? First, we found out that former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist used to "bring cats home from animal shelters and dissect them" while he was in medical school. Now, Mitt Romney is in trouble for stuffing his poor dog into a carrier on his station wagon's roof rack for a twelve-hour trip. Yikes.

Comments

[Marie]

Not to mention Karl Rove, who joked about beheading small animals as a hobby.

[Rob]

Speaking of dogs and presidential candidates, do you remember that in 1944 Republicans claimed that a destroyer had been sent back to one of the Aleutian Islands to recover FDR's Scottish terrier Fala? In a speech to the Teamster's Union, Roosevelt brilliantly skewered the charge: “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him - at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars- his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself - such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog."

[Seth]

On the up side: Nixon and Checkers had a happy ending.