GOP are concerned about dogs (just not the one Kristi Noem killed)

Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged GOP have found another culture war to wage as they face a shellacking in November’s mid-term elections: dogs versus Islam.

Randy Fine, a Republican congressman whose preferred soubriquet for himself – The Hebrew Hammer – is unaccountably even sillier than his actual name, has faced calls to resign after posting, and then doubling down on, that he would choose dogs over Muslims if he was forced to choose.

Fine wrote on, inevitably, X: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one”.

The congressman was responding to Nerdeen Kiswani, a US-Palestinian activist, who had written an apparently satirical (if admittedly not that funny) X post saying: “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”

This prompted Fine to make his inflammatory comment, following it up with “We will not be shamed into being conquered like the Europeans. I choose my dog”, and then doubling down on TV. He told the hard right Newsmax channel: “If they’re gonna make us choose between our dogs and them going home, the choice is easy, and people should know: Democrats like AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] are saying ‘we are going to get rid of your dogs’.

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“Americans need to keep that in mind when they go to vote in November.”

Curiously, though – and leaving aside that Ocasio-Cortez has never said that anyone is going to get rid of any dogs – Fine appears to have had little to say about one of his party’s leading figures who has actually got rid of a dog.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary currently directing Trump’s MAGA militias ICE, admitted killing her dog Cricket, a wirehair pointer, in a book two years ago. In No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, she tells of killing Cricket, she said, to illustrate her willingness in politics as well as life to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless… as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.” She writes how got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done.”

For some reason, though, Fine appears to have said nothing about the killing of an actual, real dog compared to those referenced in a fatuous social media post by an activist being a bit silly.