I'm a bit late to weigh in on the president's complaint that he's being talked about like a dog, but Glenn has a nice roundup of posts. The consensus is that the president plagiarized a Hendrix line, and that's received a lot of attention -- including from non-Hendrix-fan John Hinderaker.

I like Hendrix, and there is an obvious similarity of word choice but I don't think that ends the inquiry. As M. Simon was reminded of a Big Mama Thornton song, I suppose I have him to thank (or blame) for this flight-of-fancy post.

Music has a strange way of invoking mental associations, so the first thing Simon's Big Mama Thornton video reminded me of was not hound dogs, but the great John Lee Hooker. I made a beeline for YouTube, but alas! My favorite Hooker song ("We're All God's Chillun") was nowhere to be found.

"That's not fair!" I thought. So I had to create one. (Forgive the garbling at the beginning; my cheap-ass software doesn't convert low-bitrate mp3s to YouTube very well.)

Now, I realize that a song about how we're all God's children has nothing to do with the president's view that his critics are talking about him like a dog.

But is it really so bad to be talked about like a dog? One of my favorite topics in this blog is my dog Coco, and before that it was Puff. If I talked about the president like a dog, it would be in loving and always forgiving terms. So surely, the president cannot be including yours truly as among those who talk about him like a dog.

And what about those who talk about themselves as dogs in sympathetic terms?

Fabian's "Hound Dog Man" is a perfect example!

I think that if the president had some dog sense, he could adopt the Fabian song for propaganda purposes, and people might trust him more. What could be more heartwarming than a president who says "I wanna be your hound dog man"?

But what do I know? What the president said was "they talk about me like a dog."

Do they really? Is that strictly accurate?

To answer that, I think it is necessary to ascertain exactly how a dog talks about Obama.

Here's how one dog -- Mishka -- talks:

Surely where there's one, there are more.

I say, howl if you like Obama!