But that’s the Trump administration, I reassured myself, not the American people.
Americans aren’t so easily fooled.
Americans are different.
Alas, my comfort was short-lived, as I made the mistake, then, of sinking into social media. There I encountered ordinary Americans who believed the Trump administration without question. Ordinary Americans who blamed Ms. Good, who repeated the things they learned from the government, like that she was a paid agitator, a far-left radical who got what she deserved. Ordinary Americans who said the armed agent who killed an apparently unarmed woman was a hero, defending his nation from undesirables. Ordinary Americans who, soon enough, lay the blame for the whole thing on Democrats, antifa, Gov. Tim Walz, Jews, women and gays.
Past or present, it’s not the leaders who disappoint me. It’s the led.
Which brings me back to that flea market find, to that old diary I didn’t buy. I was a young, broke writer at the time. I opted to spend what money I had on the old typewriter.
But I miss those days.
I miss the comfort of believing Germans were different.
I miss believing that we Americans could never be led by a fearmonger to commit atrocities he claimed were necessary and good.
I miss believing we are not like them.
One agent told the couple that they needed to get out of the area. Ms. Jackson said she and her husband responded that they were trying to do exactly that, but their path was blocked by agents coming up the street.
Then, agents let loose on the crowd, the couple said.
The crowd-control grenades went off around them and one tear gas canister rolled beneath the car, Ms. Jackson said. A concussive blast — from the tear gas canister or another device, she wasn’t sure — rocked the vehicle, she said, setting off the airbags and trapping the family as acrid smoke billowed around.
“It felt like our lungs was burning,” Mr. Jackson said, noting that two of his children had severe asthma. “Water didn’t help. Nothing helped at that moment.”
The couple said they were able to get their children, ages 6 months through 11 years, out of the car only after Mr. Jackson kicked open a door. Ms. Jackson, blinded and unable to breathe, circled the vehicle pulling out as many of her children as she could, she said.
Bystanders arrived to usher the family into a nearby house, she said, while others set about removing the 6-month-old, who was briefly trapped in his car seat.
The fat and impotent Donald Chump is clearly unbalanced but long before all that, he was just stupid. He remains ignorant to this day. And that explains the losers and liars he's used to assemble a Cabinet. Never has a team of less qualified people been put together and allowed to do so much destruction.
The worst of the worst -- that's the best description for Chump's Cabinet and, goodness, has it been on display.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's 'experience' was pretty much limited to killing her dog and publicly humiliating her husband.
Needless to say, that did not prepare her for the office she currently holds.
Senator Maggie Hassan: Secretary Noem, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff recently said that the Trump administration is actively looking at suspending habeas corpus. Last week, you were asked about this and I want to clarify your position because it's obviously really important to get this right. So, Secretary Noem, what is habeas corpus?
Secretary Kristi Noem: Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and --
Senator Maggie Hassan: No. No. Let me -- let me stop you, ma'am. Habeas corpus, excuse me, that's incorrect.
Secretary Kristi Noem: President Lincoln used it.
Senator Maggie Hassan: Excuse me. Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people -- including American citizens -- and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea. As a Senator from the Live Free or Die state, this matters a lot to me and my constituents and to all Americans.
Grasp that this idiot doesn't know what habeas corpus is and, worse, she's so stupid, she's convinced herself that the US Constitution says it is a right granted to the president.
Do we all get how stupid she is? She wasn't qualified for the office and she's been in it for months acting under the mistaken belief that habeaus corpus is a right of the US president and that this is via the Constitution. If she were an attorney, that kind of 'error' and the way she has applied it could get her disbarred.
Instead, as NPR's Martin Kaste observed on January 9th, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, "And I think what's not normal here is the way the federal officials have been publicly passing judgment on a case that's still being investigated. For instance, just today, the vice president posted a video that appears to have come from a device being held by the agent who shot Renee Good on Wednesday. It shows Good smiling and saying she's not mad at the officer. But Vance called the video evidence that the officer was in danger. So there seems to be a real disconnect right now on the basic level of what the evidence means." Fat and little Vice president JD Vance is a professional troll but his efforts this time are especially outrageous. John Grosso (NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER) observed:
Yesterday (Jan. 7), 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and killed in a residential Minneapolis neighborhood by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. Good was a mother of three and an U.S. citizen.
Today, JD Vance has taken to social media to justify the shooting and blame Good for her own death.
Though the full circumstances of the situation are still coming to light, widely available video evidence shows the horrific moments before, during and after shots were fired into Good's car. Videos of the shooting and the ensuing aftermath are graphic and disturbing. After Good was shot, her car accelerates, slamming into another car and a pole. In one video, a person can be heard identifying themselves as a physician and offering to help only to be angrily denied by an unidentified ICE agent saying: "I don't care."
The Trump administration was quick to demonize Good. Within hours of the event and before a formal investigation could even be launched, Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem labeled Good's actions as an "act of domestic terrorism." President Donald Trump on Jan. 7 labeled her as "disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer." Trump went on to say that the ICE officer was lucky to be alive and "is now recovering in the hospital."
[. . .]
As a Catholic, Vance knows better than to peddle this brand of gaslighting and agitation. Vance knows that, by virtue of her humanity, Good was endowed with inherent dignity, made in the image and likeness of God. Vance knows that only God can take life. Vance knows that protesting, fleeing or even interfering in an ICE investigation (which there is no evidence that Good did) does not carry a death sentence. Vance knows that lying and killing are sins.
Vance knows. He doesn't care. Vance’s twisted and wrongheaded view of Christianity has been repudiated by two popes. His Catholicism seems to be little more than a political prop, a tool only for his career ambitions and desire for power.
The vice president's comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith. His repeated attempts to blame Good for her own death are fundamentally incompatible with the Gospel. Our only recourse is to pray for his conversion of heart.
Mike's response to Vance's outrageous lies, "As a Catholic, I'm sick of this little bitch distorting my religion. He needs to be excommunicated. I'm not joking. He is presenting as a Catholic -- he's been a Catholic for about five minutes -- and he is distorting our beliefs and our teaching. Two popes have repudiated him -- Pope Francis and now Pope Leo. Excommunicate Vance, don't let him speak for the Church or pose as a Catholic. Whatever crap he was raised before distorted his damn mind. We cannot allow him to pervert the Catholic faith."
At AMERICA: THE JESUIT REVIEW, James T. Keane writes:
After Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed in her minivan by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, Vice President JD Vance called her murder “a tragedy of her own making” and claimed that Ms. Good, a community activist and a mother of three, was “part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”
Mr. Vance claimed further that Ms. Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer” who shot and killed her, an assertion contradicted by video evidence taken from multiple angles.
Why the obvious lie? Because, similar to Ms. Kirkpatrick and Mr. Haig, Mr. Vance recognizes the potential for this atrocity to turn American public opinion against President Trump’s brutal campaign against undocumented immigrants, particularly because Ms. Good is an American citizen, was apparently denied medical assistance by ICE agents after the shooting and, according to the video evidence, posed no real threat to the shooter. Not even the most fervent supporter of the arrest and deportation of undocumented migrants, one assumes, would defend such Gestapo-like tactics.
The answer? Blame Ms. Good for her own murder.
Mr. Vance’s boss, President Trump, has engaged in further deceit and hyperbole in support of that same goal, claiming that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense.” She made for an easy culprit for a man desperate to justify ICE’s actions. After all, she was already dead.
The murder of the churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 was not an isolated incident; they shared the fate of tens of thousands of other Salvadorans, including Rutilio Grande, S.J., St. Oscar Romero, and the six Jesuits and two laywomen who were murdered by the Salvadoran military in 1989 in San Salvador. Eventually, the overwhelming evidence of these murders became too much for American politicians to justify, and U.S. funding for the Salvadoran military government dried up. It just became impossible to believe the lie anymore.
On the 40th anniversary of the martyrdom of the churchwomen of El Salvador, Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., preached at a memorial Mass in Rome on the impact of their witness. “Theirs, mysteriously but without doubt, is the triumph because vigorous, courageous acts of solidarity and compassion persist in dreadful, risky conditions,” he said. “Brutal claims failed and fail to stop the evangelizing.”
Let us hope the same will happen in Minneapolis. Nothing can bring Renee Good back; her 6-year-old son is without his mother now, her partner a widow. The masked man who killed her simply drove away. Nor is her death an isolated incident: All over the country, we hear and see more and more examples of violent attacks by masked ICE agents who seem to face no accountability for their crimes. And we hear the brutal claims used after the fact to justify them.
How long before it simply becomes impossible to believe the lie anymore?
