In abusing his dog, did Mitt also abuse his kids?

By
Greg Diamond
– February 27, 2012Posted in: "The OC", 2012 Presidential Elections, Fresh Juice, mitt romney

Romney not only put a dog in a carrier on his car roof for 12 hours, but he made his wife and sons complicit in the act.

A good Monday to you all.  Here’s a little something to set the mood.

Someone has made a video with about 100 seconds of a dog (actually a fake model of a dog, with lifelike floppy ears) riding in a carrier on top of a car.  This is a re-enactment, of course, of Mitt Romney’s 2007 story of how he drove his family to a vacation cottage in Ontario, Canada with his Irish Setter, Seamus, in the summer 1983.

Here’s a question for you all — and it’s not the standard “what sort of empathy-challenged person would do this?” question. It’s about Romney’s wife and sons, the non-canine passengers in that station wagon.

The oldest of them, Tagg, would have been about 13. Matthew would have been about 12; Joshua 8, Benjamin 5. (Craig, at 2 or so, would probably have been riding in mom’s lap in those pre-car carried days.) At least the two oldest sons, and probably one or two more — as well, of course, as his wife Ann — would have been old enough to exhibit some empathy and moral reasoning.

I have come to believe that Romney is seriously damaged, lacking in empathy, in a way that so far as I know neither of his parents seem to have been. (I won’t bother trying to prove this to anyone; you probably understand without my doing so.) But let’s say that it’s genetic. The chances are that at least one of these older boys would have been spared the anti-empathy mutation.

Did any of them say “Dad, it’s OK — let Seamus ride in the car with us. He can sit on my lap.”

Now maybe they did ask him and he said “no”; maybe they were too cowed to ask. I can’t imagine being even eight years old and not objecting to this. So the question is not merely what kind of animal owner Romney was. It’s what kind of parent was Romney, that he could have kept a dog on a roof for a twelve hour highway drive and no one tried to stop him (or the tried and he didn’t care)?

Romney seems to have lived a life without consequences. That’s not what I want in a President. Until today, when I saw this video, the “Seamus on the Roof” story led me to roll my eyes at Romney. Now, helped along by this visual aid, it seems darker and more serious.

(By the way, for those who didn’t click the link, Romney supposedly gave Seamus to his sister while in Canada, but two of his sons have leaked word that Seamus ran away — though it could of course be worse. Good doggie.)


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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)