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Mitt Romney May Hate Dogs, But He Loves Ferrets

Normal guy Mitt Romney washing some dishes. Photo: facebook.com/mittromney

Mitt Romney has received a ton of flak for forcing his diarrhea-ing dog to ride for hours on the roof of his car. But it appears that Romney is capable of showing kindness to certain animals in certain situations. Such as the time he tried to rescue a ferret from a dishwasher. From Michael Grunwald’s new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era:

[Former Utah senator Bob] Bennett says his friend Mitt Romney commiserated with him about the ingratitude of the Tea Party, telling a presumably apocryphal story about getting bitten by a ferret he had tried to rescue from a dishwasher.

Mitt said the Tea Party people are like that ferret in the dishwasher,” Bennett says. “They’re so frightened and angry, they’ll even bite Bob Bennett, who’s trying to get the country out of this mess.”

Despite the suggestion that the story was apocryphal, we consider it plausible that the incident actually happened to Romney. If he were making up a hypothetical scenario, he’d say he had rescued a cat from a tree, or rescued a dog from a diarrhea-filled crate on top of car, or something like that. Rescuing a ferret from a dishwasher is too random not to be real. And from the looks of YouTube, ferrets indeed play around in dishwashers all the time. And people sometimes turn on their dishwasher without realizing a ferret is inside. Mitt Romney saved that ferret, and we’ll be damned if he doesn’t receive his due praise.

Update: Author Michael Grunwald adds some more context on Twitter: