The Kristi Noem Puppy-Murdering Kerfuffle Is Beyond Parody

South Dakota's ghoulish governor admitted that she shot her own 14-month-old dog, Cricket, for being "untrainable." Congress responded today by creating the "Congressional Dog Lovers Caucus."

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem admits in her forthcoming memoir, obtained by the Guardian, that she shot her 14-month-old old puppy, Cricket, in a gravel pit on her property for being “untrainable.” She wrote that Cricket had ruined her pheasant hunt by “chasing all those birds and having the time of her life,” which is apparently a capital offense on Kristi’s estate.

Judging by the swift backlash to the dog-murdering anecdote, Noem also appears to have killed her own political career, at a time when she was reportedly gunning to be Trump’s VP pick. So she went on Fox News last night to attempt damage control. “Well, you know, how the fake news works,” the governor told Sean Hannity. “They leave out some or most of the facts. I hope people buy the book and they find out the truth of the story, because the truth is that this was a working dog and it was not a puppy.” [A 14-month-old large breed dog—a wirehaired pointer, in this case—is definitely still a puppy, but regardless, this woman is an absolute ghoul.]

Congress responded to the kerfuffle on Thursday by establishing a bipartisan “Congressional Dog Lovers Caucus,” whose purpose is to…well, I don’t think it has a purpose other than for members of Congress to establish that they don’t also murder puppies. “Given recent dog-related news, it’s evident that both sides of the aisle reject animal cruelty and support protecting man’s best friend,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida said in an earnest statement announcing the caucus.

Now, I often find myself thinking about The Campaign, an 2012 comedy starring Will Farrell and Zach Galifianakis as an embattled congressman and the rival candidate being put up by rich CEOs to run against him. But watching the Kristi Noem dog scandal unfold this week, the movie felt downright prophetic, like when a headline from the Onion becomes real.

Farrell plays Cam Brady, a disingenuous, dick-pic-sending North Carolina politician who would be running unopposed again for his seat, except that he was just exposed for cheating on his wife. Galifiniakis plays Marty Huggins, a naive, eccentric tour guide who’s obviously ill-suited to run for Congress in the South, except that he’s the son of a former politician, and the corrupt men looking to oust Brady have no other viable options with eight weeks to go until the election. So they send a cutthroat campaign manager (Dylan McDermott) to try to make over Marty’s image into something more electable—which involves forcing him to replace his two beloved pet pugs, Poundcake and Muffins, with a chocolate lab and golden retriever pair named Sergeant and Scout. “They will wear bandanas,” the campaign manager declares, noting that pugs are a “Chinese” breed and that labs and goldens are “the two highest polling dogs.”

So the campaign kicks off, and at one point, as Huggins and Brady are elbowing each other out of the way to try to kiss a baby in the crowd after a debate, Brady takes a swing at Huggins and accidentally punches the baby in the face. The movie cuts to Bill Maher and Chris Matthews—who play themselves—mocking the incident on cable news and noting that Huggins has suddenly jumped 11 points in the polls after Brady’s baby-punching scandal. Later in the campaign, Brady accidentally punches Uggie, the cute Jack Russell Terrier from the Academy Award-winning movie The Artist, and everyone agrees that punching a dog is the point at which Brady has somehow lost his own easily-winnable seat in Congress.

My point is, while there is nothing funny about what Kristi Noem did—it’s unimaginably sick and disgusting—politically speaking, the idea that an ambitious governor with national aspirations would openly admit to having KILLED A PUPPY is such an incredible own goal that you really have to laugh at her. Being pro-dog is the absolute bare minimum, Politics 101 qualification a person has to have to even consider running for office, which was underscored by the fact that Congress immediately felt the need to establish a Dog Lovers Caucus after Kristi's memoir surfaced. There is so much dark and actually consequential shit happening in politics right now—abortion bans, violence being unleashed on student protesters, child labor laws being rolled back, fascism in general—that it feels silly to even discuss a random governor having killed her pet. It’s just that the bar for our elected officials is already so wildly low that when one of them can’t even do the bare minimum to clear it, I feel like I am actually living in a Will Ferrell movie.