Media Mania Over Mitt's Mutt's Mishap

Talk about smear campaigns: Mitt Romney is spending millions of dollars to offset the damage to his quest for the presidency by something his dog did almost a quarter of a century ago.

Today’s Washington Post reports Romney “made another seven-figure loan to his campaign this quarter, on top of the $2.4 million he gave to jump-start his effort at the end of last year.”

The story goes on to explain:

“An example of Mitt Romney's crisis-management approach has turned into something of a political problem for the Republican presidential contender.

“Romney placed his family dog, an Irish setter named Seamus, into a kennel fastened to the top of his station wagon for a 12-hour family trip from Boston to Ontario in 1983. Despite being shielded by a wind screen that Romney had erected, Seamus expressed his discomfort with a diarrhea attack.

“The story, recounted this week in a Boston Globe profile of Romney, has touched off howls of outrage from bloggers and animal rights activists, even though it was presented as an example of Romney's coolness under trying circumstances.

"When Romney's eldest son, Tagg, and his four brothers complained about the brown runoff down the back windshield, their father quietly pulled the car over, borrowed a gas station hose and sprayed down both the dog and the kennel before returning to the road.”

Future historians may find the episode a perfect example of how MSM can distort the nation’s political dialogue. Luckily the blogosphere, as usual, has come to the rescue with 45,000 hits on Google to clarify its significance.

This post is a humble contribution to that noble effort.

Salad Dressing Secrets and Our Own

Sometimes American culture looks like one of those circus riders straddling two horses pulling in different directions.

Today’s equestrianism is about individuality. Under one foot is the report that a New York restaurateur is suing a former employee for theft of intellectual property by copying elements of her establishment from the décor to the menu.

Going in another direction is Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column titled “The Whole World Is Watching,” which says:

“When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer--and each of us so much more transparent.”

There are echoes here of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where “everybody belongs to everybody else,” and you don’t have to be Ayn Rand to find some of the implications troubling, even while cheering on the kind of open society that people like Dick Cheney hate.

Chef Rebecca Charles will likely not have much luck with legal remedies for claims about appropriation of her recipe for Caesar Salad dressing and touches like little packets of oyster crackers at each place setting, but her sense of feeling violated is understandable.

We may not live in a Brave New World--yet--but it makes sense to be thinking about where all this transparency is taking us while we can still rein in the horses.