Former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards devised one of the greatest dictums in American political history: "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy," to which we must now add, "or a dog I shot."
The bed is optional, thank goodness. But knowing when to take your lumps and move on is still mandatory — a lesson Gov. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) is learning late and the hard way. PJ Media's own Rick Moran has the details of what happened on Saturday but, since then, Noem has doubled down.
"I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old [sic] story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book — No Going Back," Noem posted to Twitter/X on Sunday. "The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned."
This next part is not one of the easiest things I've ever had to write.
Noem continued by reminding people — voters and the people who inform them, actually — that "South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down. Given that Cricket had shown aggressive behavior toward people by biting them, I decided what I did."
"Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never passed on my responsibilities to anyone else to handle. Even if it’s hard and painful. I followed the law and was being a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor."
In Robert Heinlein's 1973 sci-fi classic, "Time Enough for Love," hard-living hero Lazarus Long said, "When the need arises — and it does — you must be able to shoot your own dog. Don't farm it out — that doesn't make it nicer, it makes it worse."
Life on the frontier — whether pioneering a rough and tumble sci-fi world or just running a ranch in South Dakota — isn't for the squeamish. However uncomfortable some people find it, Long's advice is probably correct, particularly in places that don't enjoy luxuries like Laps of Love. Dear friends of mine, one of whom is actually a vet, recently had Laps of Love visit their home to help with the final hours of their 17-year-old dog.
But Noem's story reads nothing like any of that, and it's some kind of ill-fated miracle that it made it to publication before someone realized that it reads like a woman who had lost her patience with a "less than worthless" 14-month-old pup — and killed it.
Is that an unfair summary? Probably. But it's exactly the kind of summary a story like Noem's is going to get from people on the Left who can't resist taking down a juicy target, but also Republican rivals on the Right. There's a Hollywood trope called "shoot the dog." That's an incident early in the story — it rarely involves shooting a dog — where the villain does something villainous to establish that he is, indeed, a villain.
Fair or not, Noem wrote her own "shoot the dog" moment and put it in print for the whole world to read. Making herself the villain is a huge self-own and one no number of explanatory tweets can undo. "There's no coming back from this, Kristi," my RedState colleague Ben Kew concluded on Sunday. And he's right because Kristi Noem got caught with a live boy, a dead girl, or shooting a dog.
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