The ancient historian Plutarch warned:
“And the most glorious episodes do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men.
“Sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles.”
Those needing a modern demonstration of this truth need only turn to the story now igniting the Internet—especially X: South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s proud confession of shooting her 14-month-old wirehair pointer named “Cricket.”
Kristi Noem
The confession (“I hated that dog”) comes in her new book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, which will be published in May.
The British newspaper, The Guardian, obtained an advance copy and published excerpts from it. And that’s when the firestorm erupted.
Cricket’s “crimes”: Being disobedient, being a poor hunter during a pheasant hunting trip and later attacking and killing a neighbor’s chickens.
According to Noem, she hoped to calm the young dog down. But Cricket had other ideas, ruining the hunt and “going out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life.”
Cricket
Noem called Cricket, which didn’t lead to the desired response. So she tried an electronic “shock” collar. That didn’t work, either.
Then, on the way home after the hunt, Noem stopped to talk to a local family. And that was when Cricket became the hunter Noem wanted her to be.
She leaped out of Noem’s truck and attacked the farmer’s chickens—“grabbing one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”
For Noem, Cricket—who didn’t want to kill pheasants—now behaved like “a trained assassin.” Noem grabbed Cricket, but the dog “whipped around to bite me.”
As the chickens’ owner wept, Noem apologized and wrote the family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them disposes of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime.”
Through it all, writes Noem, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy.”
For Noem, Cricket’s “crimes” were unforgivable—and utterly deserving of the death penalty: She was
- “untrainable”
- “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and
- “less than worthless…as a hunting dog.”
So Noem got her shotgun and led Cricket to a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Her family also owned a male goat—unnamed in the book—that was “nasty and mean” because it hadn’t been castrated. Worse, it smelled “disgusting, musty, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothing.
She dragged the goat to the same gravel pit. But just as she pulled the trigger on her shotgun the animal jumped and was only wounded. Noem went back to her truck, got another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”
At that point a school bus dropped off Noem’s children. “Hey, where’s Cricket?” her seven-year-old daughter, Kennedy, asked.
Most responses to the slaughters were furious and unforgiving:
- Rick Wilson, a member of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, called Noem “deliberately cruel” and “trash.”
- Ryan Busse, the Democratic candidate for Governor of Montana, said: “Anyone who has ever owned a birddog knows how disgusting, lazy and evil this is. Damn.”
- Meghan McCain, daughter of former U.S. Senator John McCain: “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc – but not from killing a dog.”
- Podcaster Tommy Vietor called Noem “Jeffrey Dahmer with veneers”, a reference to a famous serial killer and a recent scandal over Noem’s cosmetic dentistry treatment.
In March, she posted a laudatory video about cosmetic dental surgery that she had received in Texas. She claimed that a team of cosmetic dentists had given her a smile she can be proud of.
She’s being sued for not stating she had a financial interest in the product she was hustling.
In a post to X (formerly Twitter) Noem wrote: “What I learned from my years of public service, especially leading South Dakota through Covid, is people are looking for leaders who are authentic, willing to learn from the past, and don’t shy away from tough challenges.
“My hope is anyone reading this book will have an understanding that I always work to make the best decisions I can for the people in my life.”
Among the “tough challenges” Noem wants to take on is becoming Vice President nominee to Donald Trump. Trump has already wrapped up the Republican nomination for President. And this has set off a scramble among Republican politicians to become his running mate.
It may be that Noem expected her admission of killing a defenseless dog and goat as the best way to prove to Trump that she can be as ruthless as himself. She might even be hinting that she would be willing to attack his opponents as brutally as she dealt with Cricket.
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HEROES, JOKERS AND LIARS
In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on January 17, 2025 at 12:13 amArizona United States Senator John McCain knew firsthand about torture.
A Navy pilot during the Vietnam war, he was shot down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967, and captured. He spent five and a half years as a POW in North Vietnam—and was often brutally tortured. He wasn’t released until March 14, 1973.
So he had strong feelings when he learned about President Donald Trump’s pick for director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
John McCain
This was Gina Haspel, who, in 2002, had operated a “black” CIA site in Thailand where Islamic terrorists were often waterboarded to make them talk.
After the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., no one knew if other attacks were about to occur. Or where. The FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA) and other Intelligence agencies were under huge pressure to discover—and foil—any future plots.
The administration of President George W. Bush ruled that waterboarding was not a form of torture, and thus did not violate the Geneva Convention.
Gina Haspel
But for John McCain, waterboarding was torture, even if it didn’t leave its victims permanently scarred and disabled.
As a result, when Haspel’s name was put up for nomination, McCain quickly made clear his opposition.
Enter White House Special Assistant Kelly Sadler, who handled surrogate communications.
Aware that the 81-year-old McCain was dying of brain cancer, Sadler joked to intimates about the Senator’s opposition to Haspel: “It doesn’t matter. He’s dying anyway.”
Leaked to CNN by an anonymous White House official, Sadler’s remark touched off a furor of criticism—and demands for her firing.
McCain’s daughter, Meghan, said on the ABC talk show, “The View”: “Kelly, here’s a little news flash … we’re all dying. I’m dying, you’re dying, we’re all dying. And I want to say, since my dad has been diagnosed … I really feel like I understand the meaning of life, and it is not how you die, it’s how you live.”
Not to be outdone by Sadler, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney went on the Right-wing Fox News Network to personally attack McCain.
Torture, he said, was effective: “The fact is, is John McCain—it worked on John. That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John.’
“The fact is those methods can work, and they are effective, as former Vice President Cheney said. And if we have to use them to save a million American lives, we will do whatever we have to,” said McInerney.
There’s no evidence that McCain ever betrayed the United States during his captivity.
CNN correspondent Jake Tapper angrily replied to McInerney’s slander: “First of all, no one calls him ‘Songbird John’ except for crazy people and jerks—and I’m using my language carefully here.”
Meghan McCain responded to McInerney’s attack: “My father’s legacy is going to be talked about hundreds and hundreds of years. These people: Nothingburgers. Nobody is going to remember you.”
Her comment echoed a remark by former President Harry S. Truman about Indiana United States Senator William Jenner. Jenner, a Right-wing Republican, had attacked the patriotism of George C. Marshall, who, as chief of staff of the United States Army, was rightly called “the architect of Allied victory” in World War II.
Asked by biographer Merle Miller for his opinion on Jenner, Truman responded: “In my opinion, General Marshall will go down as one of the great men of his time. And, of course, people like Jenner, they aren’t even a footnote in history.”
Others were equally outraged. South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of McCain, said: “Ms. Sadler, may I remind you that John McCain has a lot of friends in the United States Senate on both sides of the aisle. Nobody is laughing in the Senate.”
And Meghan McCain added during her appearance on “The View”: “I don’t understand what kind of environment you’re working in when that would be acceptable and then you can come to work the next day and still have a job.”
Of course, for anyone familiar with Donald Trump and his vicious reactions to even the smallest opposition, Sadler’s jibe at McCain should come as no surprise.
Donald Trump
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump infamously said of McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
This from a man who sought—and got—five draft deferments during the Vietnam War. And who has compared his reckless sex-life during the 1970s to risking his life in service to his country.
Officially, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to confirm or deny Sadler’s joke: “I’m not going to get into a back and forth because people want to create issues of leaked staff meetings.”
Unofficially, Sanders was furious—not at the joke about a dying man, but that someone had leaked it. After assailing the White House communications team, she pouted: “I am sure this conversation is going to leak, too. And that’s just disgusting.”
Since past is usually prologue, this serves as a warning of what the United States can expect for at least the next four years.
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