Puppy killing to court the mob.

MAGA & the glorification of gratuitous violence.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or binge watching the Hunger Games movies at 49 years of age because your daughter was watching the original film and you’d never seen it and the next thing you knew you were completed invested, glued to the screen and literally ignoring everything else going on in the world around you for a disconcertingly significant chunk of your weekend, you know that newly-toothed South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem murdered her 14-month old puppy because it wasn’t “trainable” and then bragged about it in her new book.

Because all of that seems totally sane doesn’t it?

No. Of course it doesn’t. It’s as contrary to sanity as Instagram is to reality. Or as a Kardashian is to aging naturally. Or Jason Miller is to not looking like he has a partially shaved scrotum for a head, but I digress.

My point is that it was insane, ok.

And for a NY minute, the craziest thing happened. Democrats and Republicans agreed. We actually agreed that it was horrific. We can’t agree that school shootings are bad, that xenophobia is bad, that Putin conquering Europe is bad, or that a rapist, criminal conman traitor running for president after inciting an attack on our Capitol is bad. But on puppy murder being bad — much like our alignment on the understanding that Ted Cruz is a fucking doubchebag, we had some legit solidarity.

For a minute anyway.

Cricket’s murder SHOULD be a cautionary tale about the fastest way to end a political career.

It did appear to be at first, but now, I’m not so sure.

Because Kristi seems to have decided to just ride it out. She’s not gonna let a little dog slaughter story bring her down. She’s gonna tweet and tv-hit right on through it. In fact, she’s gonna go even further by suggesting in her book and in her tweets and on her tv-hits, that President Biden’s dog Commander should be shot too.

(Yes, really).

And she’s gonna go on Fox and OANN in her Botox-frozen, filler-plumped face, theatrical makeup and shitty-ass hair extensions night after night until the awfulness of all of it gets soaked up into the regular discourse of polite society like a countertop juice spill did in those Bounty paper towel commercials from the 1980s.

Because we’re talking about a party who seemed at first to have jumped from the SS Insurrection Inciter, only to turn around and chain themselves to the sinking ship’s rails a few years later.

So, if Kristi’s calculus is correct, and Lordy is giving that dumb, evil bitch credit of any kind damn near impossible for me, and mirroring the same “tweet through it” strategy that Trump uses to normalize his criminality helps her normalize being an animal-killing, habitually lying sociopath, then what she’s doing is far better for her than retreating to her South Dakotan ranch to hold up with the man she’s being cheating on while a horde of hungry news crews tracks her every move.

She’s been the butt of many jokes in recent days. She’s inspired viral dog-loving posts from every corner of the universe, she’s been vilified, mocked and deservedly derided, but here’s the problem… she doesn’t seem to have remorse about any of it. Scratch that — not only doesn’t she have remorse, she’s using the story of shooting her puppy in the head to illustrate her ability to make “tough decisions.” Yes, really.

She truly believed and believes still, that this horrific story will make her look “strong” to the MAGA cult. That it will ultimately make her even more appealing to them. She looks the part, she loves guns and she won’t let some innocent puppy’s face deter her from shooting it if it’s displeased her.

She put it in the damn book after all.