Bloodbath in South Dakota

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Cruelty seems to be a big part of the DNA structure of Republican politicians.  They use their power in government to actively interfere with women's most basic health care needs and place lives at risk, they defund schools and make it much more difficult for minorities and children of lesser means to get a decent education, they fight to curtail programs that feed, clothe, and house people in need, they complain about programs that feed children at school, they ban books and work to suppress free speech,  they fight against unions and oppose a livable minimum wage, they place public health at risk by actively ignoring or denying science, they ridicule and fight efforts to promote clean energy alternatives and deny climate change, they strive to tell people who they can and cannot love, they hustle immigrants onto buses and planes and ship them to remote parts of the country, they string razor wire along public waterways and encourage vigilantism to combat situations they personally do not like, they write and pass legislation to get more guns into the hands of more people,  and now, it would seem, they also kill puppies and pet goats.

South Dakota's Governor Kristi Noem, a 52-year-old Republican with a pretty face who thought she had a chance to be Donald Trump's running mate this year, has stumbled and fallen over her own words.  Noem, whose second autobiography, a book entitled "No Going Back," is scheduled to be published in May, gave an interview to "The Guardian" newspaper in which she went into detail over some of the things she had written about in her new book.

One of the stories Kristi Noem, a wife and mother of three, told was of "Cricket," a fourteen-month-old dog, a "wire-haired pointer," that she had bought to use for hunting pheasants.  Poor Cricket, whom the press has been referring to as a "puppy," proved to be too exuberant for hunting pheasants, so Kristi Noem took the sensible step of shooting the bouncy puppy dead and burying her in a gravel pit.   Apparently some construction workers witnessed the assassination, and that may be why the politician and author felt compelled to mention it in her book -  better to bring it up herself, in her own words, than have some scurrilous reporter dig it up and report it in a way that would make Noem appear to be cold and brutal while she was busy running for Vice President.

(Is a fourteen-month-old dog a puppy?  I have a thirteen-month-old dog at my house, and she is definitely a puppy!  The answer is yes.  They quit chewing things and begin to settle down at about two years - if you are lucky!)

The same day that Noem whacked her puppy, she went on to shoot the family's pet goat whom she described as "nasty and mean" - and foul smelling.  While sitting with the reporter from "The Guardian" recounting that day of unbridled bloodlust, the South Dakota governor also mentioned that "we"just had to put down three horses a few weeks before the interview that had been in "our" family for twenty-five years.

(Are there grandparents in the family that somebody should be checking on?)

It is unclear why Kristi Noem chose to mention the killings of the puppy and the goat in her memoir because stories like that tend to put most people off, but one reporter speculated that she may have been encouraged to include them by her very close personal friend, Corey Lewandowski, a political operative and Donald Trump's first campaign manager, who might have convinced the South Dakota governor that appearing tough would make her more attractive to Trump as a potential running mate.

Cricket would probably beg to differ.