What Romney's Dog Says About Romney
What Romney's Dog Says About Romney
Walter Shapiro looks at the story of Mitt Romney's dog Seamus "heroically riding for 12 hours in a dog carrier atop the family's station wagon during a 1983 vacation to Canada" and says it has less to do with his treatment of animals than it does his treatment of people.
"What gives the Seamus story legs (four) is the inadvertent glimpse it offers of Romney's rigidity. For all the natural parental annoyance with the constant are-we-there-yet demands and the bodily needs of five boys on the trek to Canada, it is a rare father who would so zealously limit bathroom and food stops. Remember: The Romneys were not exactly desperate refugees racing to get across the Canadian border before they were stopped by the authorities. They were an affluent American family on vacation, but with all the spontaneous joy of an automotive assembly line. Seamus was collateral damage. What matters is the suck-it-up discipline that Mitt Romney tried to impose on his family."
"People are not cyborgs -- they have human needs, including a propensity for rest stops and, in politics, healthy egos. But an awareness of these personal factors does not seem to be part of the Romney repertoire."
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/other-story-mitt-romney-dog-character-sketch-160624499.html
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/03/21/what_romneys_dog_says_about_romney.html
tk2kewl
(18,133 posts)"What an asshole!"
It's no more complicated than that. Dude is an asshole without empathy or compassion.
sad sally
(2,627 posts)The final destination of the Mitt Romney clan that summer of 83 with Seamus strapped to the car roof was his parents cottage on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron in a private gated community called Beach O Pines which was the focus of one of the most important civil rights cases in Canadian history. Up until 1949, the bylaws of the exclusive community, which was located near Grand Bend, Ontario, restricted who could live there. The covenant stipulated that the land could never be sold, used, occupied or rented by any person of the Jewish, Hebrew, Semitic, Negro or coloured race or blood. The document provided a legal justification that only persons of the white or Caucasian race could live within the cottage community.
In April, 1948, Bernard Wolf, a successful London, Ontario, Jewish, businessman, signed a buyers agreement to buy a cottage property in Beach O Pines for $6,800. But he later found out that the transaction was voided due to the real estate restriction. So with the help of a hot shot attorney by the name of John J. Robinette, they sued Beach O Pines.
They lost at the first trial. But as the case made its way through the Canadian judicial system, it was clearly obvious that there was a dont-rock-the-boat mentality, according to Bob Aaron, a lawyer and columnist for the Star: Barely disguising the anti-Semitism that was so prevalent at the time, five justices of the Ontario Court of Appeal agreed with the trial decision, and noted that the restriction against those of Jewish, Negro or coloured race or blood was just to assure that the residents were of a class who will get along together. This was merely an innocent and modest attempt to establish a place suitable for a pleasant summer residence, according to the Chief Justice.
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....As Aaron writes, lawmakers passed a law voiding restrictive covenants entered into after March 24, 1950, but it did not cancel older ones.
Three or four years later, Mitts father, George Romney, who was president of American Motors, bought a cottage in Beach O Pines. It was here, that George, who later became governor of Michigan, took his family every July Fourth (why not celebrate American Independence Day on Canadian soil?). And keeping the Romney summer vacation tradition intact, Mitt annually shlepped his family to the beachfront cottage on the shores of Lake Huron despite the long 12-hour drive from Massachusetts. (It was only a two-hour drive from Detroit).
http://seamus2012.com/?p=176#more-176