ohmidog!

Seamus finally got a song.

DEVO’s Jerry Casale has released, “Don’t Roof Rack Me, Bro,” a song that mocks Mitt Romney for strapping his Irish setter, in a crate, to the roof of his car on a family vacation trip.

The  new single, subtitled “Seamus Unleashed,” was written by Casale and will be released in conjunction with a game app titled The Crate Escape: Seamus Unleashed.

The song and the game will launch August 26, which is both National Dog Day and the day before the Republican National Convention.

In releasing the single, DEVO joined forces with Dogs Against Romney, an online advocacy group with more than 70,000 members on Facebook, to help call attention to Mitt Romney’s “crate-gate” scandal.

Have a listen:

“I can’t overstate how excited we are to have DEVO’s Gerald Casale as a partner with us in making sure every voter in America knows Mitt Romney strapped his dog, Seamus, to the roof of his car for a 12-hour trip to Canada,” said Scott Crider, founder of Dogs Against Romney. “The new DEVO song Gerald created with his bandmates is awesome, and I believe it will be the soundtrack for Romney’s defeat in November.”

DEVO recorded the song as an anthem for pet lovers and as a message to others to never forget what happened to Seamus in 1983, when the Romneys drove from Boston to Ontario with the dog crated on the roof of their station wagon.

The single will be available at all digital music retailers; the game is initially being launched as an app on iTunes.

“We are delighted to have a new DEVO song as part of our game’s offering,” said Andy Berryman, chief marketing officer for Censault, LLC, the game’s developer. “It’s exciting to break new ground in the mobile/social gaming space – first as a game that is both fun to play and promotes a positive social message, and now as a new distribution medium for popular music.”

More info on the game can be found at www.facebook.com/CrateEscapeGame.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Casale, who has raised funds for Obama in Akron through a DEVO performance, said of Romney’s nearly 30-year-old mistake, ”It’s just a deal-breaker about the man … What you want in a leader is a guy with some humanity at his core … I think any animal lover that hears the story will learn so much about the character flaw of Romney.”

DEVO may include the song in its act when it tours America this fall with Blondie, he said.

While the song may or may not become the 1970′s-80′s-era band’s first hit in a long, long time, it has already gotten off to a better start than my suggestion for a Seamus song, a reworking of the Pink Floyd tune of the same name.

Anybody who has gotten as far as chapter two of Barack Obama’s book, “Dreams From My Father,” knows that, as a child living in Indonesia, he ate some dog meat.

Dogs Against Romney has sniffed out another connection between Mitt Romney and animal cruelty: An upcoming fundraiser for the apparent Republican nominee for president is being hosted by a man once arrested in connection with the barbecuing of a dog.

It was more than 50 years ago, and the charges were dropped, but Fred Malek, who’d go on to become the president of Marriott Hotels and former finance committee co-chair of John McCain’s presidential bid, was in the crowd when five men were arrested after authorities found a dead dog, skinned, gutted and barbecued on a spit in a park in Peoria, Ill.

Charges of cruelty to animals were later dismissed against Malek and three other men after Andrew P. O’Meara testified that he alone had struck and killed the dog with a 2-by-4, skinned the animal and tried to cook it. O’Meara said he was trying to show Malek and the others how to live off the land.

In a 2006 Washington Post story, Malek explained that he and O’Meara , recently having graduated from West Point, went to Peoria in the summer of 1959 to visit friends at Bradley University. The whole group got drunk and O’Meara had killed the dog. Malek said he was not a participant in the killing or the cooking.

Malek , on Monday, will be hosting a lavish fundraiser for Romney, who more than 25 years ago strapped a crate containing the family Irish setter, Seamus, to the roof of his station wagon for a 12 hour ride.

Dogs Against Romney founder Scott Crider is making much of the connection, as is Brad Bannon, spokesman of the Super PAC Mitt is Mean.

“I am surprised Gov. Romney is going to go to this fundraiser and get money from a guy who barbecued a dog, especially with Mitt Romney’s history with dogs,” Bannon said. “It illustrates Romney’s general indifference to people and to animals. He doesn’t care about poor people, he doesn’t care about his dog, he doesn’t care about what Fred Malek does to dogs, he is the classic cold blooded corporate raider. He just doesn’t care.”

Malek worked with the administrations of both Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush.  While in the Nixon administration, he compiled, at the president’s request, a list of Jews in the federal government. In 1988,  Malek resigned from the Republican National Committee over questions about his earlier role in President Nixon’s push to oust Jews from government positions.

Malek apologized and, as with the case of the cooked dog, denied playing a substantial role in the scheme.

A member of Dogs Against Romney has posted this video on YouTube, portraying what it must have been like for Seamus when Mitt Romney transported the Irish setter in a crate atop his car on a 12-hour drive nearly 30 years ago.

“Mitt claims the dog enjoyed the ride, so I decided to test to see how enjoyable being strapped to the roof of a car in a kennel really was,” Erik Mayer explains.

The video reenactment — for which a stuff dog was used — shows “how terrifying such a ride would be … The callousness — the cruelty — of subjecting a family pet to this FOR 12 HOURS, even after the dog soiled himself in fear, is difficult to fathom,” Dogs Against Romney says on its website and Facebook page.

Romney admits to transporting Seamus on the roof of his car during a family trip from Boston to Canada. At a stop along the way, after noticing the dog had soiled himself, he hosed down the dog and crate before continuing.

“Think about it — a loving, loyal member of the Romney family, strapped dangerously atop the car, lonely, wind-whipped, uncomfortable, sick and now wet,” Dogs Against Romney said. “We believe this is wrong — and a clear indication that Mitt Romney possesses a degree of detached coldness not easily comprehended by families who love their pets.”

However old and rehashed it is, the saga of Seamus may be a character-revealing tale,  and it sure is a far cry — when it comes to reflecting the bond between man and dog — from our previous traveling dog story, the one about Ladybug.