Babydog to speak at RNC

A little levity this morning following a weekend of chaos. My thoughts on the assassination attempt were simply to leave a post on Saturday night and open it up to all readers. They left more than 750 comments. Most of them said what I was thinking.

The good news this weekend is that Babydog will speak at the RNC convention in Milwaukee this week. She is listed on the official program!

Babydog is the 4-year-old plus-sized English bulldog who will appear with double-plus-sized Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia, where I live. He is running for the Senate to replace Democrat Joe Manchin and give Republicans a majority.

Babydog is the real star of the Justice family.

The Washingtonian sent Sylvia McNamara to deepest darkest West By God Virginia to do a profile on her and it was pretty darned good.

She encountered Babydog before a gubernatorial press conference and chatted with Justice:

“She’s a good girl, isn’t she?” the governor mused, peering down at me from his chair.

“She’s so good,” I said. “Is she trained?”

“No, never trained her a day.”

“She doesn’t sit? Doesn’t do paw or anything?”

“Doesn’t do it.”

“Like, if you tell her to sit, she won’t?”

“Well, she may if you’ve got some food.”

The creature beneath my hands was Babydog, a four-year-old English bulldog, 62 pounds, soft and hefty with rolls of fat that glide atop her body when she moves. She’s sunny and affable. Quiet. Sweet. Perhaps the greatest retail politician West Virginia has ever known.

Babydog got that name because Justice’s grandson, then 2, didn’t know the word puppy. He called her a baby dog. That became her name.

She fits a governor who did not want to live in the governor’s mansion in Charleston, preferring to live in Lewisburg, a beautiful town in Greenbrier County, which is more than an hour away by car. He owns the historic Greenbrier resort. A Democrat sued and Justice agreed to live in the mansion a few days a week. Lewisburg is the better place.

He still coaches the girls’ basketball team at Greenbrier East High. He’s 6-foot-7 so he may know something about the game.

Justice was a billionaire who ran for governor as a Democrat in 2016 and won because he supported Trump and the Republican held off his support. Justice no longer is a billionaire and he no longer is a Democrat.

Babydog goes everywhere he goes or maybe the governor goes where Babydog goes.

The dog is popular. The Washingtonian story said:

At that point, Justice insists, there was “surely no grand plan” to roll his puppy out for the public. But during the early pandemic, as she tottered around the house, he grew to like her company and began to sporadically bring her to work. In early 2021, she mugged for the cameras at his second inauguration. A few weeks later, she appeared at his daily Covid briefing to predict the score of the Super Bowl. During a May heat wave, the governor’s office tweeted a picture of her wrinkly face grinning beneath a wet towel, urging West Virginians to stay cool. The public seemed to like her—a winsome young bulldog bringing levity in a difficult time—so when the governor needed to plug the new Covid vaccines, she was a natural asset to deploy.

The governor’s slogan for getting the shot was “Do it for Babydog.” We did.

AP reported:

Babydog made another memorable appearance at the Capitol in 2022, when the governor hoisted her up during his State of the State address and pointed her rear end at the camera. Days earlier, singer and actress Bette Midler, on what was then Twitter, had called West Virginians “poor, illiterate and strung out” after U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., refused to support a bill promoted by President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress.

“Babydog tells Bette Midler and all those out there: Kiss her hiney,” Justice said to a standing ovation from the crowd, which included state Supreme Court justices and members of the Legislature.

The state’s highest court was still reeling from a scandal that sent three of its five justices packing — including the chief justice who went to prison. They are not exactly good role models right now.

The dog is so popular that she began popping up in new murals in the state Capitol. Some in the mediocre media tried to turn this into a scandal on the level of the one that brought the chief justice down.

But West Virginians are not illiterate or strung out. That scandal fizzled. Besides, she made the murals look better.

Babydog had surgery for ACL in February and recovered. Of course she did. She is literally a bulldog.

They say if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog, so Jim Justice is good to go. I hope he commutes from Lewisburg as a senator.

West Virginia Democrats, who lost the Legislature in 2014 after 84 years of control and no progress, hate the guv and the dog.

Mike Pushkin, chairman of the state party, said, “The governor has a very cute dog. Everybody loves the dog, but he uses that to distract from the fact that he’s not a very good governor.”

I don’t know why anyone would dump on a dog.

The Washingtonian reported:

“Make no mistake, Jim Justice is not popular because of Babydog, but Babydog does make him more popular,” said Bill Bissett, a political strategist who heads the West Virginia Manufacturers Association. “It’s actually been joked about in political circles that the governor gets an extra ten points [on his approval rating] because of her.” The obvious reason is that Babydog humanizes him. “People think, ‘Well, the guy loves this dog and takes it with him everywhere he goes, so he can’t be that bad,’ ” explained Democrat strategist Mike Plante.

Now I know why Democrats hate Babydog. She humanizes Jim Justice, and that is the last thing Democrats want for their opponents. They are a party that de-humanizes people in a playbook that plagiarizes Stalin and dozens of other dictators.

I meant to write this post as a fun piece about a tubby dog who became the state’s mascot. Instead I wound up explaining what happened on Saturday night.

Democrats demonized Trump for more than a decade — going back to 2011 when he dared shove Obama’s false claim 20 years earlier of being born in Kenya back into his smug face.

Then Biden cut back on Trump’s Secret Service protection and waited.

The Lord intervened and shoved Trump out of the way. Now Trump is re-writing his speech. A new Trump will emerge. He said:

The reality is just setting in. I rarely look away from the crowd.

Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?

This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world together.

The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would have been two days ago.

Maybe a new politics will emerge as well.

* * *

Cheats for today’s poll: Javier Milei is the president of Argentina. Allyson is the daughter Corey Comperatore died protecting at the rally. And 50 Cent gave Trump permission to use his song, Many Men in the campaign.