Thursday goes to the dogs.

So back in the 80s, Mitt Romney & family drove to Canada with the family pooch strapped to the roof of their car; said dog became distressed, evacuated its system, whereupon pere Mitt made an unscheduled(!) stop at a gas station where he hosed off car and canine before re-embarking on the trip with dog still aloft.

Since this factoid was revealed in 2007, New York Times columnist Gail Collins has refused to mention Romney's name without alluding to the story, and the cover of  this week's New Yorker may be as much a tribute to Collins', ahem, dogged persistence as anything else, since the analogy is inapt at best--except maybe for the evacuation of the system part, which is left out of the illustration: 

Today in a New Yorker blog, Amy Davidson uses the occasion to muse about presidents and their pets, specifically FDR and his Scottish Terrier Fala as well as Richard Nixon and the Nixon family spaniel Checkers.  There's an embedded video of FDR's famous Fala speech, which inspired a portion of Nixon's Checkers speech.  As Davidson suggests, the FDR clip is well worth watching; you can see the Checkers speech on You Tube, but honestly it is awfully painful to watch, for all kinds of reasons.  Actually, watch both of them, and ponder how even since Nixon's heyday our politics have really gone to the dogs.

Here's the link to the New Yorker post:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/03/what-presidents-talk-about-when-they-talk-about-dogs.html

And in what might be seen as a celebratory lap, today Collins rehashes canine-gate in a mock Q&A:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/opinion/collins-dogging-mitt-romney.html?hp