I shot the bird dog (but I did not shoot the gross hippie)

Kristi Noem is having a heck of a week:

First came Noem’s disclosure about shooting and killing her 14-month-old wirehair pointer, Cricket, for misbehaving. Then, just as the dog-killing news cycle was cresting, the Dakota Scout reported on an anecdote in “No Going Back” that on its face is highly improbable: Noem’s claim that she met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while serving as a back-bencher in Congress.

“Through my tenure on the House Armed Services Committee,” Noem wrote, “I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders. I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”

In fact, the only part of this that checks out is Kim “having no clue about” Noem — because they never met.

Noem’s spokesperson, Ian Fury, seemed to concede that the Kim story was false Thursday night: “We’ve been made aware that the publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released.”

I realize goats smell bad and have generally bad personalities, but is there no goat advocacy organization in these United States? Because Kristi’s Goat has now suffered what Zizek would probably call a double erasure.

Also, what are the odds that Noem met with some Chinese leader and then consciously decided to “punch up” the story, as they say in Hollywood? As opposed to making a genuine, highly understandable mistake, given the extreme physiological similarity that afflicts the entire East Asian population? Or a third hypothesis is that Noem had next to nothing to do with the actual production of the book she “wrote,” and didn’t even bother to read it before its release sunk her brilliant career, in the wake of her classically sociopathic failure to read the room?