Odds and ends

A couple of stories caught my eye this morning.

Rand Simberg thought, as I did, that the Denver debate Obama was pretty much the usual Obama:

I guess I didn’t realize how poorly Obama was doing because he didn’t look any different to me. I’ve just never seen the Chicago Jesus that everyone else seemed to. It’s almost like the scales have fallen off everyone’s eyes, and I never had them. Was this the moment that everyone else finally noticed that the emperor was wearing nothing but his birthday suit?

I thought I wrote something about that yesterday - I know that I talked about it. But yes, I thought Obama was pretty typically Obama during the debate. I've never thought he was a great speaker, and I've commented on it before. Several times. But he's never been challenged. On anything. He's great at burning straw men, but when faced with a real man, he's considerably less impressive. As I did say yesterday, "The real Mitt, as opposed to the straw Mitt, is tougher for them to deal with..."

(There's also an interesting exchange in the comments on Simberg's post about Romney's proposed tax rate reduction proposals, and whether or not it can be revenue neutral, and, if it's revenue neutral, why you'd bother doing it.)


Whose tail could still wag? Eric Scheie notes that there are still Democrats pushing the Seamus story as making Mitt a bad man.

Now, I can’t ask Coco directly, but I know dogs, and if I put myself in the position of a dog, I think I would prefer to be in my crate on top of the family car I love, with them inside it below, than finding myself on a winding journey through a conveyor belt system leading God-knows-where, only to have the box grabbed and moved by total strangers, then driven in a strange vehicle to an even stranger thing, and then be crammed into a weird sort of room with a bunch of other humans’ suitcases and then have my ears assaulted with unknown noises, my sensitive ears feeling strange and hitherto unknown pressures, and a sense of enormous and rapid movement that cannot be seen towards places unknown and unimaginable.

I would far prefer the familiarity of the former to the terrors of the latter.

Yet had Mitt Romney placed Seamus on a plane, he’d have been entirely blameless, even if the dog had gotten sick in the air.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with putting dogs on planes, mind you. Only that this attack on Romney is so completely without logic that I cannot ignore it.

Yup. Obviously I'm in complete agreement with Eric, and have written about it.

As much as the incessant harping on that incident irritates me, as much as it is completely irrelevant to anything having to do with who should win the Presidency, as mind-numbingly irrational it is to keep harping on one candidate's non-cruel behavior to his dog when the other has actually EATEN DOG AS A MEAL...

I've actually asked people pushing this story what Mitt did wrong. What I've gotten back is, "I hope you don't own dogs." When pushed, the next response was, "would you do that with a child?" When I noted that no, I wouldn't, but children aren't dogs in any ways that I saw as relevant to this particular issue, so I still didn't see what the problem was, how the dog had been mistreated, I got just silence. They can't answer the question as to how it was cruel, because it's apparently self-evident. It's so self-evident, that they can't even formulate a basic rational sentence in support of that position. What it seems to come down to, based on all I've seen, is that it was cruel because Mitt did it, and they haven't come up with anything else to impugn him with.