Purse heist

I literally cannot stop thinking about Kristi Noem’s purse. I know that there are far more important news stories than this one, but a story involving a handbag is always going to be my top headline, especially when it’s a story about a Cabinet Secretary’s handbag, and really especially when so many aspects of that story do not add up. The whole thing is suspect. The whole thing is off. 

First of all, let’s talk about where the Secretary placed her very expensive Gucci bag. No woman I know puts her handbag on the floor - anywhere, not even in her own house - let alone on the floor of a restaurant. That alone is enough to make me very suspicious, very suspicious indeed. Secondly, who carries three grand, her passport, and her medication out to dinner with her family? That’s a go bag, not a handbag. And the Secret Service! The woman has a Secret Service detail. I know that the Secret Service doesn’t hover over protectees when they’re out in public with their families, but should they not have noticed a dude sneaking up behind her and absconding with her bag? I think they should have, and I think they would have. There’s something very very off about this whole story. 

The thing that bothers me is that I’m not sure what’s going on. My theory is that they’re trying to build a case that DC is dangerous and crime-ridden, to justify a federal takeover of the city. Several people have suggested that it was a planned theft of her phone, orchestrated to prevent investigators from seeing her texts or Signal chats. I’m not sure why she’d care about that since the Justice Department is obviously not going to prosecute a Trump official for carelessness about information security. That train left the station with Signalgate. Another possibility is that she is just stupid and silly - but this isn’t a zero sum game. Any of a number of theories about this incident could be true, and she could also be just stupid and silly. 

Someone’s going to find that bag in a trash can somewhere. Secretary Noem’s makeup bag and her Vuitton wallet and whatever other random trinkets she was carrying will still be in the bag, but the passport, the cash, the IDs, the keys, and the phone will all be gone. And we’ll probably never find out what really happened, and who really took that bag, and why. 

Meanwhile, I wonder who paid for dinner.