And they said Richard Nixon was an attack dog!

What would be the fun of politics if it didn’t touch a raw nerve now and again, like Lawrence Olivier drilling for oil inside Dustin Hoffman’s mouth! (“Is it safe?”) 

Some think Kristi Noem was auditioning for Trump’s vice president when she wrote the requisite political campaign autobiography. Instead of Obama’s Dreams from my father, the South Dakota governor could have called her confessional, “What I Did at the Gravel Pit.” (To be followed by “Who I Did at the Gravel Pit.”)

Growing up in rural Sun Prairie in the 1960s, we paid the town drunk to buy us a case of Pabst and enough to get himself a pint of hooch for his troubles. Repaired to the nearest gravel pit and shared our guilty treasure with the dog. Good clean fun! Kristi Noem took her pup to the pit and popped it. Croaked a 14-month old wirehair pointer named Cricket because it was too full of energy to be useful as a hunting dog. 

“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote in her book. W.C. Fields hated dogs AND children but shot neither. That’s called restraint — a character trait now out of fashion, apparently.

 Getting ahead of the story?

Maybe Gov. Noem did what George McGovern’s original pick for veep should have done: get it all out in the open so that you can tell it your way before Fake News Anderson Cooper twists it all out of proportion. We can speculate that Tom Eagleton would not have sank the ticket if he had been forthright: Yeah, I had shock treatments and I have the scorch marks to show for it! You should try it some time, Tricky Dick! (Who knows?)

Could be that our Kristi NO-EMpathy was testing out the Trump paradigm. If the head of the ticket could shoot that guy in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, shouldn’t the vice president be able to shoot a dog — HER dog — in a gravel pit in the Badlands?

Popular culture has elected more dogs as heroes than governors. We cheered when Lassie Came Home, cried when Old Yeller died. Asta looked like he could trade martinis with Nick and Nora.   Dorothy could never have left Oz without Toto. We’d hate to think any Dalmations were shot to get the number down to a manageable 101.

Truth to tell (an occasional feature here at the Werkes), rare was the family dairy farm that didn’t have too many barn cats back in the day. Catch as many as you can, drop them into a burlap bag with a stone for weight … well, you can guess the rest. But we’re talking dogs, Blaska! Man’s best friend! Truth to tell (twice in the same blogge?) some dogs went feral. (Few farm dogs were leashed.) Developed a taste for beef on the hoof. That can’t be unlearned. Cattle were a livelihood, not a weekend sport.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: If Kristi Noem had shot Joe Biden’s dog, that might be a different story. Old Commander, it seems, has developed a taste for Secret Service agents — 24 and counting. Where is the nearest gravel pit?

Is Kristi Noem a straight shooter?