What Counts as a Political Scandal?
Why Kristi Noem’s dog unites Americans
Kristi Noem killed her dog and then decided to tell the world about it.
In an upcoming book — presumably designed to help her win the Republican nomination for the Vice Presidency — the governor of South Dakota tells the story of a 14-month-old dog named Cricket. Cricket was an unruly pet, killing a bunch of chickens and biting people. According to the Guardian, here’s what happened next:
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done.”
After shooting the dog and disposing of its body in the pit, Noem then killed a “nasty” goat that she didn’t like. She botched that killing, wounding the goat and having to go to her truck for another shotgun shell to finish the job.
In the annals of political miscalculation, this has to be a hall-of-fame performance. Noem was likely trying…
