Fox News host Sean Hannity tried unsuccessfully on Thursday to get presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to weigh in on claims that President Barack Obama tried dog meat and other local foods while living in Indonesia as a young boy in the late 60's and early 70's.
Earlier this week, conservative website The Daily Caller dug up a quote from Obama's 1995 book "Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" to push back against criticism of Mitt and Ann Romney for forcing their dog Seamus to ride on top of the family's station wagon.
"I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)," Obama wrote.
"Tell us about your dog and what did you think of the revelation -- it went viral today -- in the president's book, he admitted eating dog when he was growing up in Indonesia and grasshoppers," Hannity asked Romney. "And I didn't make that up."
"I -- Sean, I'm going to talk about jobs and the economy and getting America working again," Romney replied. "I'm going to talk about the debt. I'm going to talk about the measures people care about."
"All of these extraneous stories and attacks... nah," he added.
But other members of Romney's team weren't so shy when it came to attacking Obama for something he did before the age of 10.
"In hindsight, a chilling photo," Romney strategist Eric Fehrstrom tweeted along with a photo of Obama and his current dog, Bo.
The Christian Science Monitor noted that while dog meat is considered taboo in the U.S., it is "common in China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Vietnam, and even Switzerland."
On Tuesday, Romney had told ABC News that he wouldn't force his dog to ride on the roof again "with the attention it’s received."
According to a 2007 Boston Globe profile of the Massachusetts Republican, Romney’s oldest son, Tagg, yelled, “Gross!” as he noticed a brown liquid flowing down the back window from the Irish Setter Seamus, who had been riding on the roof of the family’s station wagon for hours during a family trip in 1983.
“As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station,” the Globe noted. “There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.”
During the Tuesday interview, Ann Romney defended her husband's actions to ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer.
“The dog loved it,” she said. “Once, he — we traveled all the time and he — he ate the turkey on the counter. I mean, he had the runs.”
“But — he would see that crate and, you know, he would, like, go crazy because he was going with us on vacation. It was to me a kinder thing to bring him along than to leave him in the kennel for two weeks, so.”
(h/t: Mediaite)
