By Becket Adams
Sunday, May 12, 2024
The press is guilty of many things, but destroying
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s political career is not one of them.
She did that all by her lonesome, though she would have
you believe otherwise.
Noem went into hiding last week following a string of
disastrous media interviews meant to promote her new book, No Going
Back. The final straw was when she bombed in an interview with Fox
Business’s Stuart Varney. Immediately following that disaster,
which ended with the governor visibly furious and grumbling, Noem abruptly
canceled scheduled interviews with Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld and CNN’s Dana Bash.
In explaining the cancellations, Noem’s office cited a brewing snowstorm in
South Dakota, which was an odd thing to cite considering that the governor was
still physically in New York City, where Gutfeld’s and Bash’s studios are
located. She had already been in the Fox building that very day!
But what can you do? Noem’s press tour was doomed from
the start after a passage came to light wherein she boasted that she shot and
killed her family’s 14-month-old puppy, Cricket, because he was unruly. She
also wrote in her book that her Day One first step as president would be to put
down President Biden’s dog, Commander (“Commander, say hello to Cricket for
me!”). Interviewers were justifiably fascinated not just by Noem’s admission —
a politician with national aspirations proudly admitting that she once executed
a puppy in a gravel pit is indeed a rarity in American politics — but by her
effort to tie it to a larger story about fearless leadership.
Were there no other personal anecdotes available? Is she
unaware that humans are fond of dogs?
Does she think Old Yeller is feel-good
family fun? The billion-dollar John Wick franchise is a
four-movie slaughter-fest of revenge killings sparked by a puppy’s execution —
and every single person in the audience is comfortable with the killings. After
all, they killed his puppy!
The mind reels.
Elsewhere in her ominously titled book, Noem claimed to
have met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. This passage was especially
noteworthy to interviewers, given that Noem has almost certainly never met Kim
Jong-un.
Faced with reasonable questions regarding her
questionable dog-rearing skills, the wisdom of her presenting the dog-murder
anecdote as a personal triumph, and her make-believe foreign-policy experience,
the governor crumbled immediately. She responded to interviewers’ questions
with irritation, self-pity, and resentment. She stretched the dog-killing
anecdote into a multi-week scandal by not canceling what was obviously a
hopeless press tour. Regarding the Kim Jong-un anecdote, which Noem instructed
her publisher to excise entirely from the book before its press run, she
outright refused to say whether she had ever met the man. Asked point-blank
about this supposed meeting, Noem flailed, sputtering one cliché after another
about the “issues the American people care about.” The governor was asked the
same very direct question several times, and each time, she adopted an evasive
pose, spouting increasingly unintelligible pablum about “the issues.”
And before anyone suggests that perhaps Noem’s
ghostwriter did her a disservice and she wasn’t aware of what was alleged in a
book bearing her name: Noem herself recorded the audiobook. She’s read it at
least once, that’s for sure.
Worse than her ignorance, her unearned indignation, her
weaselly evasiveness, and her general inability to admit having made a mistake,
Noem has fallen back on that laziest of excuses deployed by right-wing
politicians who find themselves in a bind: It’s the media.
Following the uncomfortable interviews and the criticisms, Noem has alleged a
shadowy media conspiracy to destroy her.
But the press did nothing wrong. It’s her book. There is
no conspiracy. There is no “gotcha.” The worst anyone has done to Noem is quote
her book at her!
The self-serving “it’s the media” defense rears its head
all too often on the right. The press does have a leftward
bent, earning the collective distrust of those with a rightward bent.
Recognizing this, cynical and craven right-wing politicians tend to prey on
this natural distrust of the media even when it’s not justified. This is both
insulting and annoying. Noem landed face-first in trouble of her own making.
She has no one to blame but herself. It’s just cynical of her to believe (and
hope) that people are too stupid to see past their predispositions.
Remember when the news first broke that disgraced
Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had spent decades preying on young actresses?
Do you remember his very first statement on the matter? He denied the worst of
the allegations and then concluded with a vow to destroy the National Rifle
Association. Though it may have seemed like a non sequitur, it wasn’t. It was
an attempt, however clumsy, to distract from the worst of the allegations by
ginning up support among his peers and colleagues over a shared enemy.
That’s precisely what Noem is doing with her
the-media-is-out-to-get-me shtick. It’s an act of desperation, a ploy to
redirect the ire of her hoped-for Republican fans toward a shared enemy. “Hey,
these morons hate X thing. What if I attack X thing? Maybe they’ll forget that
I shot a puppy in the face and bragged about it.”
Noem is in a cold sweat over what may very well spell the
end of her stint in public office. It’s hard to see how she comes back from
this debacle. She can’t blame “the media” for this. It’s her book. Those are
her words. Speaking of “the media,” it’s worth noting that the newsrooms at the
center of Noem’s conspiracy include, but are not limited to, CBS News,
NewsNation, Fox Business, and Newsmax.
There’s a funny quote in Justified about this exact
sort of scenario. Look, the Noem implosion definitely has a common denominator,
but it’s not the press.
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