So you maintain that there is a White House position for Chief of Staff of the president’s dog with a salary of $102,000? Perhaps concealed from the public by clever accounting or misleading titles, but uncovered by Charles C. W. Cooke and revealed in his 3/8/13 article on National Review Online? An individual whose sole or primary purpose is to arrange the affairs of the White House dog – dogwalking, dogsitting, arranging travel, arranging appointments, that sort of thing?

Well, Dr Hurlbut, since you won’t provide any evidence for your claims other than to say ‘other people said it first’, let’s see where checking out those other people takes us:

Before Charles C. W. Cooke made the claim that there was a Chief of Staff for Obama’s dog on 3/8/13, there was a chain email, reposted on a number of websites in October and November of 2012. That email/webpost had various titles but was frequently named “Barack Obama’s 32 Month Report Card by Rich Carroll”. RIch Carroll is not identified further. Among other things, it claims that Obama is the “(f)irst President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000.00 a year at taxpayer expense”. Another version states that this is an individual “on retainer in case of so-called ‘dog-training’ emergencies,” with a “$102,000 yearly income”. No sources are given for this statement.

Looking further back in time, we find a book by Robert Keith Gray called _Presidential Perks Gone Royal_, published in June of 2012. In that work, Gray reports that the President’s dog Bo and a handler “[who] was reported to be paid $102,000 a year to walk and pick up after the first-family’s canine” flew alone together. This is in the book description on Amazon, by the way. This someone-flying-alone-with-Bo bit seems to be a misreading of a July 17, 2010 article in Maine’s Morning Sentinel newspaper, but this can’t be proven because, again, no source is given for the claim.

In the Mornins Sentinel article, which reported on an Obama family visit to Mt. Desert Island in Maine, the Obama’s arrival at the airport in Trenton, Maine was described. It was stated that Bo and the president’s ‘body man’, Reggie Love, arrived “in a small jet before the Obamas”. The paper subsequently posted a clarification that two planes were taken because the airport in Trenton can’t accommodate Air Force One, and that the first flight had other occupants, including several other staffers.

Reggie Love was President Obama’s personal aide (or ‘body man’) from 2009 to 2011. His 2011 salary was listed as $102,000 in the White House annual report to Congress on White House staff. This can be compared to Blake Gottesman’s salary of $95,000 in 2006 or Jared Weinstein’s 2008 salary of, wait for it, $102,000 as body men to George W Bush.

So, it would appear that a newspaper report about Reggie Love, Bo, and others arriving on a flight separate from that of the Obama family mutated into a claim that Bo and Love flew alone to Maine, and then to a claim that Bo and an unnamed ‘handler’ flew alone to Maine. Once Love’s name was stripped away, his position changed (in Robert Keith Gray’s book) from the President’s body man to that of “a dog walker…on hand…paid $102,000 to walk and pick up after the first-family’s canine”.

From there, Rich Carroll (whoever he is) changed things again, and now there is supposedly a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000.

Lastly, Charles C. W. Cooke writes in the _National Review Online_ that Obama has a Chief of Staff for his dog, with the same salary.

So, ultimately, I think that Cooke’s claim that Bo has a chief of staff can be traced, telephone-game like, back to a newspaper report that Reggie Love and Bo were on a plane that arrived before Obama’s plane in Trenton, Maine in 2010. Now, perhaps you would argue that Obama shouldn’t pay his body man the same amount that George W Bush paid his, or that Obama shouldn’t have a body man like Newt Gingrich’s body man Andrew Bell or Mitt Romney’s body man Garrett Jackson. But unless you can come up with some corroborating evidence, I don’t see why we should believe that the President’s dog has a chief of staff at all, much less one with a salary of $102,000.

“Does it matter what title he carries? Do we really have to obsess over that?”

Well, the whole point of Cooke’s statement, and your point in repeating it, was to invoke outrage at the hubristic excesses of the Obama administration: A Chief of Staff for a Italics Dog End Italics! How Outrageous! Salary of $102,000! My Laws! Why, He’ll Name That Dog a Senator Next!

Cooke said there was a Chief of Staff of a dog. I asked if you thought there was a White House position with a salary of $102,000 for “(a)n individual whose sole or primary purpose is to arrange the affairs of the White House dog – dogwalking, dogsitting, arranging travel, arranging appointments, that sort of thing?”, and you said that there was “an effective position, yes”.

Clark didn’t claim, nor did you, that someone on salary in the White House occasionally walks the President’s dog as a favor (or as a reward!), or that the President’s body man once rode in the same plane as Bo, or that someone once saw Bo with a Parks Service employee instead of an Obama family member. The whole point was that it is outrageous to have a chief of staff for a dog, let alone one with such a high salary – a statement that I would agree with in principle, by the way. If there was such a position in the Obama White House, it would be outrageous.

So what evidence can you present for this $102k outrage, whether you call it a chief of staff or amanuensis or batman or trainer-on-retainer? All I’ve been able to find is a telephone game of unsourced claims repeated and altered from one pundit to the next, with each alteration more inflammatory than the last. If you’re just going by Cooke’s, or Carroll’s, or Gray’s say-so, why not just own it?