As the nation reels from the cancer death of the World's Ugliest Dog...


...Peru rushes to offer the first family some bald, toothless breed that looks like it's been roasted on a spit over a slow flame for thirteen hundred years...

First of all, Peru: who axed you?  Please mind your own business.  This is a domestic matter, and we don't need international meddling.  Secondly, as everybody knows, someone else can't choose your pet for you. It's a recipe for disaster.  I mean, think if people could do that with children.  No. 

Let's call this what it is: a passive-aggressive attempt to influence public policy in Peru's favor.  When the Obamas say, "thanks, but no thanks" to Fugly the Peruvian Hypoallergenic Wonderdog, Peru will be all up in arms.  It'll be this big international incident.  Like: "And we thought Obama was different!  We didn't think the first African-American President of the United States of America, the American Mandela, would discriminate against a dog on the basis of its hairlessness, especially a defenseless toothless breed like this one!"

And then there's the fact that this dog is the pride of Peru, a breed more ancient than the Inca pyramids.  What is a people to do when a symbol of their venerable culture, their heritage, their very identity — everything they hold dear — is ridiculed in the press and rejected by the so-called leader of the free world?  Wars have been waged over less.  Do you really want to mess with us?  Do we really want war with Peru?  What do they have that we can use?  Oil? Coffee?  More hairless hypoallergenic dogs?  We'll have some troops freeing up here soon.

Of course it could just be a cynical PR ploy on the part of the the Friends of the Peruvian Hairless Dog Association, which not only wants to dictate our domestic animal policy at the highest level from somewhere in Latin America, but also has declared that if the Obamas accept the dog, "its official name will be Machu Picchu," a plug for Peru's top tourist attraction.

Who are these people???  I don't care if you ARE the Hairless Dog Mafia, you can't name someone else's dog!  And what kind of a name is Machu Picchu for a dog anyway?  How would you like it if we sent you a dog and demanded you name it Mount McKinley?  You can name a mountain after a dog, but you don't name a dog after a mountain.  It's just not done.  Sorry.  What we have here is one of those cross-cultural failures to communicate. 

In the future they could be avoided by you not foisting your old toothless hairless national dog on us, in some supposed goodwill gesture but with all these strings attached (you've got to name it Machu-Picchu and feed it twelve raw chicken hearts a day and sacrifice a virgin kitten for it every full moon and house it in a shrine to Con-Tici Viracocha, and, um, negotiate a new U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement with us) and then inevitably blaming us for rejecting your Machu-poochoo and ridiculing you on late-night television. 

I mean, congrats!  Now all most Americans know about Peru is that it's the home of the next World's Ugliest Dog.