“It’s a hell of a thing to kill a man. You take all he’s got; and all he’ll ever have.” From the movie, Unforgiven.
“She’d tell a lie when the truth would work better.” Droll back-country aside.
How did our country reach such a crisis during relative prosperity? Affordability issues exist, but no mass unemployment and no wars killing our young people. Yet we endure an armed masked militia in middle America staking claim to American cities that did not request them.
In Minnesota, strutting Commandant Greg Bovino exhorted his federal jackboots in Minneapolis to be “Professional, legal, ethical and moral…and less lethal…you’re on camera…”, ending with an ejaculation that ‘this is our fucking city.” Surely, Bovino felt secure when Vice President J.D. Vance (presumably initials not for ‘Juris Doctor’—a degree for law school grads) declared that ICE agents possessed absolute immunity after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good.
We have seen the appalling videos of the murders of Good and Alex Pretti, yet Trump’s Administration asks us to believe their lies instead of our eyes. But President Trump’s predilection to hire attractive female subordinates rather than savvy ones finally caught up with him.
When Good was shot dead by an ICE agent, Kristi Noem wearing a 10-gallon cowboy hat branded Good as a domestic terrorist who weaponized her vehicle and attempted to run down the agent. Noem got a second bite of the serpent’s apple when she declared that Alex Pretti … “approached officers with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm this individual, but the armed suspect reacted violently. Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots.”
Meanwhile, U.S Attorney General Blondie Pam Bondi attempts to lock up journalist Don Lemon for covering a protest that disrupted a church service. This same top U.S. law enforcer amateurly botched a politically motivated prosecution against former FBI Chief James Comey. A federal magistrate refused to jail Lemon, which stunned Bondi who must have taken a powder when her law school taught the First Amendment’s freedom of the press.
President Trump ran afoul of the NRA—a powerful PAC that had the Right’s back—when he said that Pretti should not have carried a legally registered weapon to a protest. Indeed, NRA and rabid 2nd Amendment advocates contend that our forefather’s predicated our right to bear arms on the people’s need to protect themselves from an authoritarian government.
President Trump and his minions take pride in their blunt shoot from the hip rhetoric, eschewing any semblance of tact. It makes for good theater. But now their lack of discretion hoists them by their own petards.
Meanwhile, Loyalists strain to find something to cling to from the wreckage. Purportedly authentic footage reveals that days earlier Pretti harangued ICE agents and kicked a bumper of one of their vehicles. If so, perhaps Pretti was gassed about ICE gunning down Good.
But this thin reed of ‘justification’ collapses of its own light weight construction: Pretti was filming ICE but backed away when agents approached; he tried to shield a woman slammed to the ground by a bully ICE agent; he was pepper-sprayed and mugged by a half dozen agents who then unloaded an assassins’ dozen of bullets into him. Can anyone reasonably contend that our government’s execution of Pretti for the ‘crime’ of haranguing and kicking a bumper somehow absolves it for killing a defenseless man?
Despite the above, we hear from those who defend not their country—but rather their political dog in the fight: “Right or Wrong”. An odd sentiment from those who fear Big Government that has now grown incarnate in the form of uniformed and unidentified masked thugs and politicians masking murder with bald faced lies and hypocrisy.
Many voted for Donald Trump for President not as an endorsement of him, but rather in reaction to far Left politics, an inflated economy, the Democratic party nominating an incapacitated Joseph Biden and then substituting surrogate Kamala Harris. This same group of respectable Conservative voters must now rein in the Far Right by purging any Republican who acquiesces in Trump’s Poisonous Politics.
Let us recall the words of Senator Carl Schurz who declared in 1871: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”