From Mitt Romney’s pooch with wind in his hair to Kristi Noem’s ‘hated’ dead dog| Opinion
I was offline for eight days, hiking and hanging out with my daughter, and apparently the biggest thing that happened while I wasn’t looking is that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem bragged about shooting her puppy, then said Joe Biden should shoot his dog, too.
As you probably know, Noem made news again when she said that she didn’t know how that story about meeting Kim Jong Un got into the same autobiography in which she’d bragged about shooting her puppy, and also a goat she didn’t much like.
We can’t even write this off as another writer who has somehow failed to read her own book, since that is her voice on the audio version of “No Going Back,” which is coming out on Tuesday.
Maybe her impression that dog-killing is impressive is the natural progression from that time Iowa’s Joni Ernst ran for the U.S. Senate by talking about her tough-gal history of hog castration.
Or from Sarah Palin’s efforts to allow the inhumane aerial gunning of grizzlies. During her brief tenure as governor of Alaska, Palin also authorized a program that gasses wolf puppies in their dens with carbon monoxide.
Killing goats you don’t like and dogs that won’t hunt is just all part of life on a farm, says Noem, but no, it isn’t. Just as cruelty, which always shows weakness rather than strength, has not always been a natural part of life in her party.
Remember when Mitt Romney tried so hard to explain that his family dog kind of liked riding to Canada in a carrier on the top of their car? Seamus relaxed in the comfort of a windshield-equipped carrier.
Violence is central to facism, though, and with MAGA, we have gone from a GOP whose nominee was horrified by the suggestion that he’d treated a family pet casually to one in which someone on the vice-presidential shortlist assumed that announcing “I hated that dog,” — so bye, Cricket — would enhance her chance of getting the nomination.
A poll on puppycide does show partisan differences, with Republicans more accepting of what Noem did, and definite Trump voters even more so.
But the good news here, if you squint hard enough, is that most of those who were polled did see Noem more unfavorably after learning that her kids had to come home asking, “Where’s Cricket?”
And though she may have felt that her lie about meeting Kim Jong Un would be accepted in the same way that Donald Trump’s endless cascade of baseless allegations and self-aggrandizing twaddle has been, it wasn’t, because others just don’t get away with what he does.
If you don’t believe me, just try intimidating jurors, judges, their clerks and families, in any court in the land and see if you, too, get off with endless reprimands and no real consequences.
It’s unfortunate, of course, that the fact that we’re sometimes still wary of whoppers and mostly still down on shooting dogs passes for good news, but Cruella is not going to be her party’s vice presidential nominee.
