Icarus, South Dakota style

We're barely a state away out here in northwest Iowa, but it seems to me that the Kristi Noem story had madness written all through it for a long time already. Her treatment of the state's significant Native populations was perfectly nutty. During Covid, when several of the tribes shut down access, the then-governor threw a fit and ended up alienating herself from a significant region of the governor's domain. 

Her memoire badly required a sane editor, someone to tell her that the way she handled her pup's lack of hunting skill or initiative or whatever, did not need to be shared with the world. How any story from her younger years could be more memorably insane than that one--the way she simply shot him to apparently put him out of his misery; she said she had it figured that he'd never be what she wanted him to be. Yikes.

Nonetheless, with her stunning good looks, she kept moving up Trump's ladder, maybe because he rather liked someone--a beautiful woman!--who'd just shoot her dog if  he didn't hunt, or at least he liked a woman who seeming understood how to draw attention to herself far from the madding crowd--he liked a looker who reminded him of himself.

But Governor Noem was a small-town girl with some small-town values, an ardent anti-abortion voice, who seemed to want to take those values with her in Washington or wherever the ICE job took her. Scary. Seemed to me she was way out of her league.

Perhaps the most horrific moment was created by her determination not to tell at least something of the truth about the two anti-ICErs who were killed in the Twin Cities during the ICE messes. She insisted they were the enemy, agitators who, apparently got their just reward, death, for getting in the way of the ICE jam the whole region became. In the style of her benefactor, she simply would not show empathy or sadness. She was Trump-tough. They were agitators.

The rumors of her having an affair with one of her boss's favored attack dogs only made things worse. Some people know the truth about Noem and Lewandowski, but whether or not there were trysts--many or few--she got painted with a scarlet letter early on, a badge she must have regretted, wherever the heat of passion may have taken her. 

And now, it turns out her handsome high-school sweetheart husband is hanging around shadowy websites that specialize in cross-dressing and other whacko fetishes that make him look as over-the-top as his gorgeous, madcap spouse. Life wasn't like this in good old Castlewood, SD. 

I think they should go home. My guess is that the people who knew them both before Kristi's wild ascent to power might just be most willing to forgive--and maybe even forget. 

We don't share political persuasions, of course, but I can't help thinking they should go back to the insurance business he ran and she should go on long rides with those horses she loves and stay away from hunting with dogs. 

There's an Icarus-level tragedy here, or so it seems to me. She--and her hubby--got burned when they flew far too close to the Don.