Mitt Romney's Horses Have It Better Than You:
Rafalca, the 15 year-old Oldenburg who is the daughter of Argentinius and Ratine, granddaughter of Rubinstein I, is, dear God, a fuck of a dressage horse. That mare bitch can piaffe and passage like the Queen of England wearing wooden pantaloons. She's in the World Cup now in the Netherlands, having won the Grand Prix in Del Mar, California.

Of course, things weren't always so smooth for Rafalca. As co-owner and rider Jan Ebeling writes about the 2009 World Cup, "After entering the dressage arena, she became frightened and refused to perform her dressage test. Each time she got close to the dressage judge, she would not go forward. As a pupil of the German riding system, I know that going forward is fundamental, but at that moment it was all I could do to complete the test. It was the ride—in front of thousands—that no one wants to have, and it was one of the biggest disappointments of my career."

Ebeling said a few more things that seem heavily symbolic about the presidential ambitions of Republican Mitt Romney, whose wife Ann is also an owner and is deeply into dressage: "We must accept defeat because defeat teaches us many things...I believe in every rider’s life there comes a moment when you have to be brutally honest about the structure of your program. If there’s a problem, you have to probe deeper instead of just chalking it up to bad luck."

Rafalca receives the best care that money can buy. She has a farrier, a chiropractor, a vet, and a masseuse. Yes, the horse has its own hoof doctor. And masseuse. For massaging. A horse.

Oh, and it gets to dance to music selected by Mitt Romney. The soundtracks to Rain Man and The Mission. The latter film is about a Jesuit missionary to Brazil. The former is about a slick, empty, soulless man who gets redeemed by his idiot savant brother. Again, symbolism run amok.

The next few months will be about Mitt Romney trying to convince us all that he's one of us, that he understands our problems. The difficulty is not that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It's that he's going to say that he should not have to pay a slightly higher marginal tax rate while his wife's horse is fed with that silver spoon.