Noem Out, Cancels Book Tour In Wake Of NYT Piece, Amazon Reviews

Holy Ephiphany, Batman! Kristi Noem finally got it! Cricket, the 14-month-old slaughtered puppy that Noem boasted about executing in the gravel pit, entered the national psyche two weeks ago when its idiot owner revealed that 20 years prior she “hated” the dog and blew its brains out. Noem characterized this as a “tough” decision and herself as a tough decision maker and it never played that way for even one minute to anyone normal minded. Noem has spent the past two weeks solid trying to chastise people and explaining to them that it’s their problem that they just don’t see it the right way, (which is her way, a sociopathic way) but to no avail. Every interview she’s gone on has raised this issue and she has come away looking the worse for wear.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Noem’s book also contained a gem about her meeting with Kim Jong-Un, which is a bald faced lie, apparently. Noem also doubled down on that saying that she’s met “many world leaders” and she “doesn’t discuss her conversations with them.” Had she been telling the truth a mere date, time and place would have completely exonerated her. But of course she couldn’t provide that because there is none.

So today the tide turned. Today Noem cancelled not only her book tour but interviews with CNN and Fox News. If she had any class, she would issue a public apology at least to the people in her own state, but don’t hold your breath. The best speculation that can be made at this time is that this New York Times article broke today and the reporter describes going to South Dakota and talking with canine professionals to get the truth. This is the apparent nail in the coffin.

Noem’s account has raised legal questions as well as dog-training questions. Did Noem break the law? When I called the spokesman for South Dakota’s attorney general, Marty Jackley, though, he pointed simply to the state’s seven-year statute of limitations.

“Since it happened about 20 years ago, there’s nothing we can do,” Tony Mangan, the spokesman, said. Asked if Noem might have broken the law at the time, Mangan said any answer would be “pure speculation.”

Davenport, a self-described “common sense” Republican who did not vote for Noem, said she worried her governor’s story would reflect poorly on the state’s thriving world of pheasant hunting.

“We don’t go out shooting our dogs. We don’t shoot our goats, either,” Davenport said. When a dog must be put down, she said, “We actually have a mobile vet out here that can come to your house.”

Confetti doesn’t like loud noises, she said, so she’s not much of a hunting dog, but she’s very social. Her youngest dog, she joked, hasn’t been trained as well as her others.

“I think he’s growing up feral,” she said. “He better hope Kristi Noem doesn’t move in next door.”

And a dog trainer was one of the people interviewed. He said that Noem was at fault for not containing the dog properly and that’s why it got loose and killed the chickens. You may recall that that was the final straw for Noem, but nowhere in her account of the situation does she take responsibility for not handling the dog properly.

Russell Nelson, a Democrat who trains and sells gun dogs at Clover Leaf Pheasant Farms in Estelline, S.D., said he was very careful to make sure the right dogs went to the right families. And, what’s more, it’s important not to let a dog who doesn’t come when called get loose.

“It was certainly her fault for putting the dog in the back of the truck and not being in a kennel,” Nelson said. “I was wondering how it got out of the vehicle and killed the chickens.”

A detail that Noem does admit to, and that appeared in this article, was that she had the other dogs in kennels (I assume they’re talking about a type of carrier here) but she didn’t have one for Cricket and so Cricket rode unconfined — and then Noem went ballistics when Cricket went after the chickens, although that was completely foreseeable under the circumstances.

Noem is finished in GOP politics. And well she should be. And there’s a coda to this story as well: The book dropped on Tuesday. Amazon was flooded with bad reviews. So now, today, the reviews are invisible and both Amazon and Goodreads are not taking any more reviews, And Amazon has already slashed the book price 37%, so they know they’ve got a dog on their hands, pun intended.

Goodreads, the Amazon subsidiary where bookworms share their literary recommendations and reviews, has similarly imposed “temporary limitations on submitting ratings and reviews” of Noem’s book. “This may be because we’ve detected unusual behavior that doesn’t follow our review guidelines,” an explanatory note reads when attempting to add a review as of Wednesday morning.

One Amazon review captured by MeidasTouch before the feedback disappeared was titled “Filled with lies, and violence against animals.” “She shot her puppy in the head,” the reviewer grumbled. “Enough said.”

Another one-star review under the heading “My cat loved this book” said: “He says Cricket was asking for it.” Other negative reviews appear to have consisted entirely of poop emojis, while RawStory said one person called the work “grift for VP at its best” and advised shoppers to “save a tree” by not buying the book.

Evidently Noem thought that the fracas she caused would blow over. It did not. And when the deluge of bad and hostile reviews happened yesterday and the New York Times article, she apparently decided to fold on the book tour. That’s wise. The less said about this egregious book and its “author” the better.

And as to the author? If this book was in fact ghostwritten, then any politician who wants to do one of these going forward needs to heed this as a cautionary tale. Be careful about what you sign your name to. You would not think you would have to tell somebody in politics something that basic, but evidently that’s the takeaway from all this.