American Politics Journal

Going to the Dogs
Freepers run out in traffic trying to hound Clinton
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Jan. 7, 2002 -- Mt. SHASTA (APJP) -- When the story first showed as a little squib on the AP Latest wire that Buddy, the chocolate lab belonging to Bill Clinton, was killed when he ran out into traffic, I shook my head sadly. I lost a young dog that way years ago, and felt a pang of sympathy for Clinton.

I already felt a little sorry for Buddy before the accident even happened. While I'm sure the Clintons loved him and treated him well, he was a presidential pet, and that's a tough existence for any animal.

Buddy was never the center of controversy the way some presidential pets have been. Fala, FDR's dog, came under attack from the 1930s equivalent of the Freepers when a rumor made the rounds that FDR had sent an entire battle fleet to retrieve him from Alaska. FDR, in one of his fireside chats, scorched the Republicans with his matchless wit and biting irony:

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons.

No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.

Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them.

You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him - at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars - his Scotch soul was furious.

He has not been the same dog since.

I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself - such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable.

But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.

The Freepers of that time decided it was at good idea to just kinda drop the whole thing. They passed into obscurity and were forgotten while FDR's little terrier was immortalized.

The story so inspired Dick Nixon that he decided to come up with his own "doggie story" and, with his back to the wall in 1952 when rumors of a secret "slush fund" financed by Howard Hughes emerged and Eisenhower was contemplating kicking him off the ticket, he went on national television, and in a lachrymose performance that came to symbolize Nixon, blubbered:

We did get something, a gift, after the election... It was a little cocker spaniel... our little girl, Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers... I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.

The account was delicately described by the History Channel as "loosely factual," and it saved Nixon's loosely factual career. For better or for worse, it made cocker spaniels a popular breed.

Lyndon Johnson had a dog nearly destroy his career, when he picked up his beagle by the ears. Animal lovers around the world were outraged and Johnson's popularity, still high at the time, took a dramatic drop and may have played a role in his subsequent actions and eventual inglorious political end. Mind you, he didn't swing the beagle around by the ears. He merely lifted the animal - who was unperturbed - up on his hind legs. I wouldn't recommend lifting any dog by the ears - at the very least, it would be uncomfortable for the animal. But it caused the sort of uproar that LBJ normally associated with "being caught in bed with a dead woman or a live man." Who knows? If the dog had yelped, LBJ might have been impeached. People who couldn't name LBJ's vice president knew the beagle's name was "Little Beagle Johnson." LBJ himself was probably among those.

In Clinton's second year, we all got a disturbing look at the decline of the American media when that famous photo of two dozen photographers scrambling around the Presidential cat, Socks, was published. All these professionals, making an aggregate of thousands an hour, with hundreds of thousands of equipment, being used to take snaps of a cat, like an eight-year-old with her first cardboard disposable camera. Clinton found the incident disturbing, and put the word out that perhaps editors should consider the First Cat (yes, the media was calling it that) off-limits. Chagrined editors admitted that perhaps they could find some way of making a living without harassing a harmless cat.

If the media had an unhealthy and stupid obsession with pets, it's nothing compared to the political right. Right wing politicians tend to use their pets as stage props - Ford named his dog "Liberty," a fine, patriotic name for a dog who you would trust alone in a room with a nice American flag to chew on and sleep on. George Bush's "Millie" was the putative author of a book about being the White House dog, and it may actually be the best piece of literature to come from anyone in the Republican party in 50 years.

While right wing politicians tend to use their animals as scenery, the Freeper followers attack the pets of politicians of whom they disapprove. Socks and Buddy were routinely vilified, while obsessive nuts collected stories designed to show that Clinton secretly hated his pets. One example is the story of Clinton tossing a stick for Buddy to fetch, and jumping on board a helicopter and scooting away, leaving a dazed and heartbroken Buddy to sit disconsolately, another innocent victim of Clinton satanic influence. Like nobody has ever used "fetch" to distract their dogs so they could escape out the front door without the dog getting out.

After responding to one tongue-in-cheek post on Usenet about how Clinton had Buddy killed because Buddy was about to talk ("The lab was gonna blab"), I got around to wondering how the Freak Show at Free Republic was handling all this.

Under normal circumstances, Free Republic looks like a somewhat poisonous version of Toontown. The death of Clinton's dog apparently was NOT "normal circumstances," and there were caws, screeches, and whistles as feathers flew as high as the rafters. In 36 short hours, thousands of messages about Buddy's death had been posted, under such subject headers as "Buddy Death Report Raises More Questions Than It Answers," "For 'Buddy,' the Clintons just couldn't spare a dime," "Prior to his death Clinton dog, Buddy, recalls the events surrounding his so_called 'accident'...," "I Killed Buddy, " and "AP: Police rule Buddy's death an 'accident'"

I wasn't the only one taking this all in with considerable bemusement. One Freeper posted the following, which had appeared in the e-zine Salon:

The most active threads on the conservative bulletin board Web sites
Thursday were the ones dedicated to the death of Bill and Hillary
Clinton's chocolate Labrador, Buddy.

The dog was struck by a car and killed near the Clintons' home in
Chappaqua, N.Y. In a brief obituary, the Associated Press remembered
Buddy by evoking the time the pooch "sniffed out a box of reporters'
doughnuts and quickly ate three. Another time, when playing fetch
with Clinton, Buddy became entangled in the ex-president's legs and
knocked him down in full view of the cameras."

But don't expect the folks at the Free Republic to reminisce fondly
about Buddy or send sympathy to the Clintons. As when Vince Foster
died, the right wingers see a conspiracy behind Buddy's unfortunate
demise.

"Buddy learned the hard lesson," writes one poster. "Don't play 'go
fetch the stick' in Ft. Marcy Park with anyone named Clinton."

Of course, some of the viler specimens took full advantage of the opportunity to resurrect the old garbage about "the Clinton body count." Free Republic is the place where crackpot notions are resurrected and have everlasting life.

Now, the great thing about this is that it doesn't do any real harm to anyone, except the credibility of the right wing. If they want to howl and yammer about Buddy like that, folks like me are more than happy to point it out to the general public at large (you can do this by going to http://www.freerepublic.com and then doing a search for "Buddy" -- it's very funny in a sick junior high kind of way) and let them decide.

But while I normally leave the pets of celebrities alone, that being the sort of thing expected of someone who was a bleeding-heart liberal kid who raised money on Guy Fawkes' Day for the RSPCA, I can't help but wonder about Kenneth Lay's mongrel pet.

Nondescript, a dull and poorly trained animal. George W. Bush is the name.

I wonder if Kenny ever got that mutt toilet trained, or had to donate him to the Republicans, where lack of toilet training wouldn't be noticed?

POSTSCRIPT: The following was recently posted to Free Republic:

"Lots of grumbling lately about deleted posts. Well, my friends, the simple truth is the game has changed. We are now at war. We have been attacked by a vicious cold-blooded force of international terrorists who want to destroy our nation, our freedom and our way of life. There is no doubt about this. Knowing this, I am alarmed to read some of the stuff that has been posted to FR in the last few days. This is not the time to raise doubts about our leaders. This is not the time to raise conspiracy theories. This is not the time to second guess our intelligence agencies. This is war. This is survival of our way of life. We must unite behind our Commander-in-chief and do all we possibly can to support him and our war efforts. We do not have a choice in this matter."

It was posted by none other than the "president" of Free Republic, Jim Robinson.

Translation: "You will hoBAY! George is much more important than any old stupid Constitution!"

Note one last hilariously hypocritical detail -- Free Republic still has the words "Defending the Constitution" as a part of its logo.