Kristi Noem Would Have Shot Biden's Dog Commander, Too

05/05/2024 21:08

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem — still facing widespread backlash after admitting in a new memoir that she once shot and killed her own dog (and a goat) instead of coming up with a non-lethal solution to the dog's lack of training — said Sunday that President Joe Biden's bite-happy German shepherd, Commander, should have been killed as well.

During an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS's Face the Nation, Noem continued to try to defend her decision to gun down her dog Cricket in a gravel pit after the then 14-month-old wirehair pointer had attacked a family's chickens and then attempted to bite her when she tried to intervene. For some indiscernible reason, the governor and Trump VP prospect included the anecdote about Cricket — who she says was "untrainable" and admitted she "hated" — in her new book, No Going Back, as an example of how she would not go back. But since that detail from the book emerged, Noem has repeatedly tried to back up her rationale for killing her dog, insisting it was the only courageous, responsible, course of action appropriate for such a situation.

She thinks Biden's dog, famous for biting Secret Service agents, should have been dragged off and shot, too, she said Sunday. And the fact that he wasn't put down (Commander now lives at an undisclosed location, rather than with the Bidens) demonstrated why she was a better politician than Biden:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said "killing the dog and then writing about it ended any possibility of her being picked as VP." You talk multiple times about it. In fact, at the end of the book, you say the very first thing you would do if you got to the White House that was different from Joe Biden, is you'd make sure Joe Biden's dog was nowhere on the grounds, Commander say hello to Cricket. Are you doing this to try to look tough? Do you still think that you have a shot at being a VP?

GOV. NOEM: Well, number one, Joe Biden's dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people. So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog? And —

MARGARET BRENNAN: – Well he's not living at the White House anymore — 

GOV. NOEM: — That's the question that the President should be held accountable to. 

MARGARET BRENNAN: — You're saying he should be shot? 

GOV. NOEM: — That what's the president should be accountable to.

Noem's aim at Biden and his former pet comes amid what can only be described as a disastrous pre-publish-date rollout of her new memoir, which also includes a fictional meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (which she has blamed on the ghost writer who wrote her memoir), among other weird or questionable stories.