It’s amazing to see the intersection of dog ownership and presidential politics — particularly when it comes to how uneven the media coverage can be.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem may not be running for president, but she’s a potential running mate for Donald Trump. At least, she was, before she wrote in her memoir that she once shot and killed her dog.
As PJ Media’s Rick Moran noted, in Noem’s yet-to-be-released memoir, she writes about how she killed her dog Cricket. It wasn’t a mercy killing of an aged dog who would have otherwise died a long and painful death, it was she was untrainable, and messed up a pheasant hunting trip. According to Noem, she “hated that dog” and Cricket was “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”
“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
According to the story, Noem took Cricket to a gravel pit, where she shot her.
The disturbing story was likely included to demonstrate her decisiveness when it comes to difficult tasks, but even if you try to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that there are some details missing from the reports about what she wrote about the incident, it’s hard to see what details could have made the situation seem better. The dog was merely 14 months old, and to write the dog off as untrainable at that age seems absurd.
I’ll give her this, though. She was honest about it, unlike Joe Biden. Joe Biden has had his share of problematic dogs. Upon coming to the White House, his German Shepherd, Major, became aggressive, biting several Secret Service agents before being given to a “family friend” so they could start over with a new German Shepherd puppy, Commander. In other words, their dogs were purely props for the media, completely expendable.
Despite all the resources Biden has at his disposal, Commander similarly proved to be unsuited to White House living, started biting people, and was eventually removed from the White House. They blamed the incidents on the high-stress environment at the White House — an excuse that simply doesn’t pass the smell test because the Obamas, Bushes, and Clintons all had dogs at the White House without similar problems. Biden now had two dogs with problems. Something didn’t add up. Not that the media seemed to care. Heck, they didn’t even care when a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Secret Service revealed that Joe Biden mistreats his dogs and has even punched and kicked them. From where I sit, that was the key to the puzzle.
But, for the media, that wasn’t as controversial as when Donald Trump was president and decided not to get a dog.
“I wouldn’t mind having one honestly but I don’t have any time,” Trump said in 2019. “How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?”
“I don’t feel it,” he added. “It feels a little phony to me.”
To the media, this was practically a scandal. The media always finds a way to make dog ownership (or lack thereof) a liability for Republicans. The same thing happened to Mitt Romney in 2012, when it came out that he had put his dog Seamas in a carrier on the roof of his car during a family trip. But, Barack Obama’s past eating of dogs while living in Indonesia? That was a nonstory.
I certainly can’t defend Noem’s actions with Cricket, but it’s hard to take the outrage from the left seriously when they simply refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden abuses his dog.
