Romney Donor Barbecued Dog
Fred Malek, the president of Marriott Hotels, is a big donor to Mitt Romney. But Dogs Against Romney, a grassroots organization, has dug up a story first reported in the Washington Post six years ago, to the effect that Malek and a group of friends were arrested at at a park in Peoria in 1959 after at least one of them killed and barbecued a dog.
The men’s car was saturated with blood … After it was determined that the stains were animal and not human blood, the men said they had “caught a dog and were barbecuing it.”
Police then found the skinned animal on a spit in the park. The insides of the dog had been removed, and a bottle of liquor was found on a nearby park table. [Sheriff] Backes said the men told him they had been drinking earlier in the evening at a West Bluff tavern.
Charges of cruelty to animals were later dismissed against Malek and three other men after Andrew P. O’Meara testified that he had struck and killed the dog with a piece of 2-by-4, and that he alone had skinned the animal and tried to cook it.
The Post story explained that the reason for writing about this in 2006, more than 50 years later was that Malek, who co-chaired Sen. John McCain’s finance committee in his 2008 election campaign, also served in the Nixon administration and played a role in carrying out Richard Nixon’s hunt for Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1998, he was also involved in shady dealings that led to action by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
When the Post asked Malek about the killing of the dog, Malek said he and O’Meara had gone to Peoria to visit friends. He said they got drunk and that he didn’t know why O’Meara had killed the dog, that he was not a participant and that he was in no position to stop it.
How come he was in no position to stop it? What was the problem? Was he incapacitated? Or was he just enjoying the action too much?
While all of this has nothing directly to do with Mitt Romney, this evening Malek is hosting a major party for donors to the Romney campaign.
So, is this the kind of person with whom the governor, whose record around dogs is hardly sterling, would want to be associated?
Would he even care?