Cartoon Of The Day...

[Roland Deschain]

How very brave those Teddy Bears are! They deserve a Nobel Prize.

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[PKMKII]

[Roland Deschain]

If Obama really did eat dog meat as a child, what's the big deal? Dogs are eaten regularly in some places in Asia, such as one infamous road in Vietnam, and it's no stranger than us eating raccoon or something similar. Why's everyone going on about it?

[Roy Hunter]

Why's everyone going on about it?

Because foreign or unusual = bad. That's how politics works in the land of the free and the home of the brave: they're shit-scared of anything that doesn't conform with the 'Murkin way'.

[PKMKII]

If Obama really did eat dog meat as a child, what's the big deal? Dogs are eaten regularly in some places in Asia, such as one infamous road in Vietnam, and it's no stranger than us eating raccoon or something similar. Why's everyone going on about it?

Well, one of the criticisms of Romney that's been going around for a few months (David Letterman has been bashing Romney on it nearly every night), was an incident in the early 80's where he put the family's Irish Setter in a crate, strapped the crate to the roof of his car, and the family drove for twelve hours that way on the way to a vacation. The dog ran off after they arrived.

So some conservatives decided in response (because two wrongs make a right!) to trot out a passage from Obama's memoir in which he recalls having eaten dog meat in Indonesia. When he was a kid. And the conservatives are acting as if this makes them even, or that Obama's act was worse.

Of course, it's problematic for three reasons. Obama was a kid. He wasn't choosing to eat dog, it was put in front of him and he was told, "eat." You can't hold him responsible. As you pointed out, dog is a common meat source in parts of the world. The conservatives aren't making a general "meat is murder" argument, so they're engaging in the most egregious form of cultural/moral ethnocentrism here. Finally, it's a lot less cruel to quickly and humanely kill an animal for meat, than it is to torture it for half a day.