I have to agree with Thers; this has to be the dumbest thing I’ve read in a while.
AS THE “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?
Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.
Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first woman president. …
Clinton’s treatment of Socks cuts to the heart of the questions about her candidacy. Is she too cold and calculating to win the presidency? Or does it signify political invincibility by showing she is willing to deploy every weapon to get what she wants?
Such a perfect example of a hit piece, really. First, there’s the implication that Hillary Clinton is an ice queen, and that it was the cat, not Chelsea, who brought out her “caring, maternal” side. Then, there’s the equation of giving the cat to Betty Currie with dumping or abandonment. Does Betty Currie live in a box by the side of a busy highway? I think not. Was Socks left in a box by the side of a busy highway? No. But the cat had been Chelsea’s, Chelsea was at college, and Bill was allergic. Currie undoubtedly spent a lot of time with Socks in the White House, seeing as how she worked there and all, and maybe she had bonded.
Then, there’s the whole “some say” bit, making sure to get in a swipe at Hillary’s “ambition,” her coldness and calculatingness. As if no one else running for President is ambitious, cold or calculating.
“Some say.” But who says?
“In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. “But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”
Flanagan’s article, headed No Girlfriend of Mine, points out that Clinton wrote a crowd-pleas-ing book Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets, in which she claimed that only with the arrival of Socks and his “toy mouse” did the White House “become a home”.
I thought I smelled sulfur.
To be honest, I don’t remember much about Hillary interacting with Socks during the 8 years the Clintons spent in the White House, other than than this one book. I hardly think that qualifies as deploying him for years as a character reference.
Now, I don’t subscribe to the Atlantic, so I can’t read Flanagan’s article, but something tells me that the hits just keep coming. And I really have to wonder if Flanagan has anything to say about where this falls in the annals of human evil:
The reporter intended the anecdote that opened part four of the Boston Globe’s profile of Mitt Romney to illustrate, as the story said, “emotion-free crisis management”: Father deals with minor — but gross — incident during a 1983 family vacation, and saves the day. But the details of the event are more than unseemly — they may, in fact, be illegal.
The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it got there: Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamus’s rather visceral protest.