April 21

There will be Republican Presidential primaries this coming Tuesday in the eastern part of the country, most notably in the delegate rich Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but that portion of the race is a thing of the past, as the general election between incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney is underway. For his part, Newt Gingrich continues to campaign at zoos, but receives no coverage absent the occasional penguin bite. The official nomination of former Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode by the Constitution Party is for now, a footnote, as he is unlikely to garner much attention anytime soon.

With still 199 days to go before the election, there were many other matters, some of them quite trivial, that occupied the media coverage that would have otherwise gone to covering a primary. We could be in for several more weeks of manufactured stories, scandals, and back and forths, with a heaping side of Veep speculation.

There was much attention this past week to the Secret Service scandal in Columbia, as well as the agency clearing Motor City Madman Ted Nugent, after the aging right-wing rocker made some odd comments. The Democrat Governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, might have had some Democrats slapping their heads after he brought up the specter of polygamy in the family history of Mitt Romney and tried to link it to potential political damage.While it is true that Romney's great-grandfather had more than one wife, it was inaccurate to say that the candidate's father had grown up exposed to that lifestyle. Since the issue has nothing to do with Mitt Romney itself, it really should not play any role in the campaign, especially when we consider that Obama's own (largely absent) father was a practitioner of polygamy.

I am now trying to reach deep into my memory of this past week to see what else major happened (I think I will save the in depth Veep talk for at least another week) and as far as I am concerned, there was really nothing other than the dog stuff.

During the past week, some believe Obama accused Romney of having been born with a "silver spoon in his mouth", while elsewhere the Romney campaign raised the possibility that Obama may have had a Golden Retriever in his mouth.

For years now, much has been said about a 1983 incident in which on the way to a family vacation, the large Romney brood had their Irish Setter Seamus ride on an airtight kennel on top of the family car. Many have accused the younger Mitt Romney of animal cruelty on a Clark Griswold scale,. but the family insists the dog had always enjoyed traveling in such a way and indeed the entire story makes the event sound significantly less sinister than what others allege.

Obama's political guru David Axelrod (who incidentally had a horrible showing on Fox News Sunday a week ago)  has made note of this story publicly at least once, but this week the tables were turned a bit with the sudden revelation that while Obama never had a dog on the roof of his car, he used to have them on the roof of his mouth.

In Obama's first memoir he tells (which somehow completely got past the Hillary Clinton and John McCain campaigns) of having eaten dog meat as a child in Indonesia. The context makes it appear that he preferred dog meat to snake and was not exactly apologetic or regretful over this chapter of his past. A Romney campaign official (and it is not clear to me whether or not they were the ones who unearthed this information) made a joke about it on Twitter and soon it was everywhere online and the hundreds of jokes about eating dog flowed wild and free. Quite a way to pass the time, I assure you.

Let me be clear: I do not think the fact that Obama used to eat dog (whether he enjoyed it or not) has any bearing on his ability to be President. I certainly think there is far more relevant stuff to focus on, but if their campaign or surrogates want to get into irrelevant nonsense about dogs or polygamy, they are going to have to expect to hear it right back. In that regard, many conservatives were thrilled to see Romney's people more than willing to fire back with something about Obama and make his people groan about unfairness.

So, where it was the so-called "War on Women" last week, this week brought about whether a dog would be better off going on a vacation joyride with Mitt Romney or being "Woked" by Barack Obama. Expect some other manufactured news story to be introduced in the past week.

In the meantime, national polls show that the race between the two men are close, perhaps a great deal closer than many Democrat partisans expected immediately following a supposed brutal GOP primary battle. It appears as if Mitt Romney has managed to unite the Republican Party in pretty quick order.