Gone Fishin' ... ish

Even a few days in paradise cannot keep me from writing about Kristi Noem, our corrupt Supreme Court, the protests on college campuses or serving up an aquatic-themed musical interlude

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

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I probably should have mentioned this in my Monday post, but I’m on vacation this week. (Here’s a picture of the view from my balcony, where I’m writing this post as my children frolic below.)

Still, 87-degree sunshine and the bluest ocean I’ve ever seen will not prevent me from completing my appointed newsletter tasks.

Kristi Noem … Dog Murderer

Kristi Noem has published a book in which, and I’m not making this up, she tells of dispatching a misbehaving puppy by shooting it in the head and dumping the body in a gravel pit.

What’s most amazing is that Noem boasts about the killing.

“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done.”

No, it did not have to be done. Noem could have been given the dog (Cricket) up for adoption. If she had to be put down, she could have been killed humanely, not shot and dumped in a shallow grave.

And yet, there’s more to the story.

“After it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

… Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.

Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”

At that point, Noem writes, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.

“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”

Remember, this isn’t an opposition research dump from a rival Republican or Democrat — Noem wrote this in her memoir.

I’m convinced that she thinks these stories increase her stature in the modern Republican Party. “She’s such a badass that she will kill a puppy.” Considering Trump’s long-professed hatred of dogs, maybe this gives her a leg up in the race to be his running mate.

But it also speaks to the performative machismo that so dominates the GOP today. Everything is about projecting strength and toughness, and there are seemingly no limits to how far Republican politicians will go in casting themselves as a cross between John Wayne, Dirty Harry, and Walter White. As a woman in a party dominated by misogyny, Noem likely believes that she has to go even further than male politicians.

Even in her response to the overwhelmingly negative reaction this story is receiving, Noem brags about being “politically incorrect.”

But killing a puppy (not even a dog, but a puppy) is not politically incorrect. It’s pure sociopathy. I hope and pray that even for Republicans, it’s a bridge too far.

As a palate cleaner, this is my dog Baxter after he found a ball at the local dog run and refused to give it up.

He’s such a good boy!

Our Corrupt Supreme Court

On Thursday, the Supreme Court took up Donald Trump’s claim that he should be immune from prosecution for any crime he commits in office — and gave it a shockingly sympathetic hearing.

Before the Supreme Court heard arguments on Thursday on former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution, his stance was widely seen as a brazen and cynical bid to delay his trial. The practical question in the case, it was thought, was not whether the court would rule against him but whether it would act quickly enough to allow the trial to go forward before the 2024 election.

Instead, members of the court’s conservative majority treated Mr. Trump’s assertion that he could not face charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election as a weighty and difficult question.

… The conservative justices did not seem concerned that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, said his client was free during his presidency to commit lawless acts, subject to prosecution only after impeachment by the House and conviction in the Senate. (There have been four presidential impeachments, two of Mr. Trump, and no convictions.)

Liberal justices asked whether he was serious, posing hypothetical questions.

“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him,” Justice Jackson asked, “is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?”

Mr. Sauer said “that could well be an official act” not subject to prosecution.

Justice Elena Kagan also gave it a go. “How about,” she said, “if a president orders the military to stage a coup?”

Mr. Sauer, after not a little back and forth, said that “it could well be” an official act. He allowed that “it certainly sounds very bad.”

I have to admit that I am a little shocked by this. I know this Supreme Court is deeply corrupt. Still, I didn’t think there would be this many sympathetic justices in the conservative bloc to the bogus and un-American argument that the president of the United States is above the law (to her credit, Judge Barrett pushed back pretty hard on Trump’s lawyer).