Back in April, West Virginia governor Jim Justice announced that 8 murals were being added to the rotunda of the state capitol building in Charleston, and the first 4 were unveiled last week on West Virginia Day/161st state birthday celebration.
I think they’re kind of awful, a treacly mess of sentimentalism and fantasy, with an emphasis on only white people and white history, and not at all in keeping with the architecture and era of the building, but it is what it is. Here’s one of the artist’s renderings.
See what I mean?
Justice has a lot of haters—and rightly so—so in addition to the online mockery of the finished project, someone noticed an anomaly:
The new murals at the Capitol show Civil War battles, Harper's Ferry, glassblowing, quilting … and it looks like Babydog. pic.twitter.com/7ONF2hsVcX
— Amelia Knisely (@ameliaknisely) June 21, 2024
This wasn’t a project that Justice was gifting to the state from his own bank account. This was public money—and quite a lot of it, $500,000—in . And he had to make it all about him.
Oh, he said he knew nothing about it:
“I was just as shocked as anybody,” Justice said. “When I walked out there, I was sitting in the chair or on the stool, and I kept looking up there and everything and I kept saying ‘my gosh.’”
Justice said he noticed that in one of the murals in the rotunda’s semi-circular spaces above doorways, “There was this little dog, and I can’t see that well now, and I couldn’t really determine if it looked like Babydog and everything.”
[deletia]
But Justice said this week that there’s no reason anyone should think he was the driving force behind placing an image of his own dog high atop the Rotunda.
“To think we just decided we were going to put Babydog in the thing, I mean that’s ridiculous,” Justice said. “But we should just be happy about the fact that we’ve got murals there that surely need to be there. And we should be happy about the fact that that little bulldog really has brought a lot of happiness and a lot of big smiles to all of us.”
But he’s also a serial liar, so here we are.
Then on Tuesday Randall Reid-Smith, the state Secretary for Arts, Culture, and History explained how the dog ended up in the mural:
“People will always remember Babydog, and so that is creating history,” Reid-Smith said today on MetroNews’ “Talkline.”
OK—no. No, no, NO. That is not history. Jim Justice’s dog did not exist at that point in history. Just no.
And it gets worse:
Reid-Smith said the mural project was approved by the Capitol Building Commission more than a decade ago. More recently, the secretary said, an ad hoc committee of some of the governor’s top employees looked at drafts of the mural, concluded there should be more representation of wildlife and determined that a good addition would be an image of the governor’s well-known dog.
“I would love to take all the credit, but we had a committee and we were looking at the first renderings of the murals,” Reid-Smith said, describing some changes that were made after first drafts of the murals were produced.
On a scene depicting Seneca Rocks, “there was no wildlife. It was an outdoor scene, and so we were talking about what we could put there. So we wanted the elk because of the elk initiative. The cardinal. And then they said a dog — and all of us at the same time said ‘Babydog,’ and so that’s how it came about.”
OK, hold on. The mural project was proposed in 2009, and then approved in 2010, but the $500,000 price tag was too high. But suddenly the money was found in 2024, when Justice was featuring his dog all over his Senate campaign. And the Capitol Building Commission was not involved in this decision:
Reid-Smith did not describe further involvement of the Capitol Building Commission, which now has different members. The dog whose likeness is portrayed was born in 2019, a decade after the Capitol Building Commission provided initial approval of the mural project.
The secretary said a different group of executive branch representatives reviewed the specific mural scenes: himself, state Museums Director Charles Morris, Administration Secretary Mark Scott, senior adviser Ann Urling and Rebecca Blaine, director of intergovernmental affairs.
“There was unanimity that we should have a dog in it, and then we all thought about Babydog,” Reid-Smith said today.
There is no indication that group had meetings open to the public.
So it now appears that Justice broke the law and bypassed the committee set up to make sure governors didn’t try end runs, and sent a bunch of his boot lickers to Reid-Smith and they all had a mutual spontaneous decision to represent native West Virginia wildlife with a domesticated dog. Are we seriously supposed to believe this nonsense?
It’s weird that there’s no money for West Virginia University anymore. And there’s no money for the foster care program even as the state is now investigating the tragic death of a child in the system. There’s not enough money for state Medicaid funding. But there’s a cool half million for a non-essential project that features the governor’s political campaign mascot.
And the question that reporters need to ask the members of the ad hoc committee and the secretary of Arts is: did Justice offer the money in exchange for the inclusion of his dog? Because I think that’s the simplest explanation.
Jim Justice is wholly unfit for the US Senate. He is a liar, a tax cheat, and he abuses public tax dollars.
Speaking of art, here’s the first song of a great album about Andy Warhol:
thanks!!