Ann Romney's Horse Fails to Win But Avoids Offending British

One has to love the British sense of humor - especially when the British press is castigating Mitt Romney.  The Guardian ran a story today under the headline "Ann Romney's horse fails to win dressage but avoids offending British" - would that Mitt had the political skills of Rafalca.  And I suspect that Rafalca is for less snooty and full of herself than her owners.  One can only how many tax write offs the Romneys have taken relating to Rafalca.  Here's a sampling of the Guardian story:

Short of mocking Shetland ponies over their lack of stature or laying into zebras for their failure to make a significant contribution to the world of equine culture, Ann Romney's horse Rafalca was always going to struggle to match the sheer incredulity that her husband managed to provoke on his recent overseas trip.

And in the event – the event in question being the individual dressage – the 15-year-old bay Oldenburg mare acquitted herself rather well. True, she and her rider, Jan Ebeling, may have been left well behind by Britain's Carl Hester, Germany's Dorothee Schneider and Denmark's Anna Kasprzak but, by Romney standards, her performance was a positive triumph.

 

Never for a second during her seven-minute performance did a hoof stray dangerously mouthwards, nor did she do anything at all to offend or upset the host nation. From the moment she entered the Greenwich Park equestrian arena at 12.15 on Thursday afternoon, the most famous political horse since Caligula toyed with making a consul of Incitatus seemed in her element.

She bowed her neatly plaited head on cue, trotted diagonally across the sand, did the jogging-on-the-spot thing, the skipping thing, the rhythmic boogying thing, the controlled trotting thing: in short, Rafalca did everything that the occasion and the peculiar rules of the dressage demanded of her.

While he chose not to impart any information about Rafalca's voting intentions, the 53-year-old US rider did confirm that Ann Romney had given him "many words of encouragement" before the Olympics.

She had not been in touch on Thursday morning, he added, but her last message had been full of good counsel: "Do what you know to do and do what you do best. Just ride like it's a normal day." Fine advice indeed. If only her husband had heeded it.

Mitt Romney is an arrogant ass.  I suspect that Rafalca has far more personality and is probably far less self-absorbed.