Sarah Palin had to know before she posted this photo that the left would go ballistic. Her New Year’s Facebook post is lighting up Twitter and causing a collective clucking of tongues because, along with the sentiments, she posted a photo of her son Trig standing on top of the family dog to reach the counter.
As you can imagine, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had a figurative and proverbial cow:
PETA assailed Palin Friday, calling her a “bizarrely callous woman.”
“It’s odd that anyone—let alone a mother—would find it appropriate to post such a thing, with no apparent sympathy for the dog in the photo,” PETA said in a statement on its website Friday.
“Then again, PETA, along with everyone else, is used to the hard-hearted, seeming obliviousness of this bizarrely callous woman, who actually thought it appropriate to be filmed while turkeys were being slaughtered right behind her in full view of the camera,” the activist group added referring to a 2008 interview at Triple D Farm in Palmer, Alaska.
Palin, who was at the farm to pardon a turkey in the week before Thanksgiving, did a lengthy TV interview while live turkeys were being fed head first into a machine behind her.
Palin’s New Year’s post was still up Friday night. Though some Facebook commenters supported Palin, calling the picutures “cute,” others expressed concern for Trig’s safety and the dog.
“Not only the dog, but is she not worried the boy will fall and bust his head on the counter???? Nope. Keep snapping pictures,” one commenter wrote.
Oh dear. Someone’s got the vapors over this — except, as Allahpundit points out, you have to wonder if PETA knows anything about animals:
I’m going to guess that if little Trig’s weight caused the dog any pain, the dog would have made that clear to him in ways that dogs are wont to do but I’ll defer to experts in the comments. In the meantime, let’s pray that the number of hideously overwrought Smart Takes this incident produces remains small.
The dog appears to be a black labrador retriever, one of the most gentle and patient dogs around little children there is. No doubt, the pooch enjoyed the attention, although if the dog was really uncomfortable, he would have let out a yelp or two before trying to get out from under.
Again, Allah has the situation pegged:
I think this still qualifies as a “fake fake outrage” for the moment but has potential to become an “actual fake outrage” simply because there’s a dog involved. Remember how the story of Mitt Romney putting his dog in a kennel on the family car’s roof during a trip years ago became a thing, at least on the left, during the 2012 campaign? Stories of possible animal abuse by Republicans grab them, I think, because they support the liberal narrative that conservatives are heartless. They’re a Window onto the Conservative Soul in a way that, oh, say, abortion without restriction is most certainly not a window onto the left-wing soul. And of course they disdain Palin singularly for a mess of reasons, so any chance to score a point on her is a chance that must be taken. It’s really a perfect post-New-Year Friday story — nothing else is going on in the news, everyone wants to get back to holiday revelry before the deep-breath plunge into normal order in January, and one of their favorite whipping boys has given them something to chatter about. I figure they’ll reach “actual fake outrage” intensity by mid-afternoon today, with the storm dissipating this evening as everyone eases into the weekend and stops thinking about this even a little.
Fake outrage or not, Palin has become an expert at getting the left’s goat, making them look small and petty in the process.
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