Few things call out someone being a tyrannical dullard as does their kvetching: “Look what you made me do.”
President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem share the 2026 “No Bull Please Prize” for creating the sorriest-ass excuse for incompetent leadership since FDR signed Executive Order 9066, sending more than 100,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps.
All three have blamed Renee Good for her own shooting death Jan. 7 in Minneapolis.
Vance point blank said Good was responsible for making ICE officer Jonathan Ross shoot her through the windshield of her own car.
He called her “brainwashed” and “a victim of left-wing ideology.”
And more.
“I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement — a lunatic fringe — against our law enforcement officers,” Vance said.
He nearly broke out in his own version of “Cell Block Tango” by singing, out of tune, “She Had It Coming.”
A very large part of this musical farce, complete with ICE cosplay costumery and tough-guy — and for Noem, tough-lady — blocking and choreography is pegged to the idea that liberal complainers are the “enemy in the United States.”
Noem has made Minnesota protesters out to be “domestic terrorists.”
Have none of these people ever been to Minnesota, and especially Minneapolis? Even coming from the friendly West, I can’t help but marvel every time I’m there how cordial and polite everyone there seems to be. These are people who fight over who gets to turn last when they all get to a four-way stop-sign together.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, where Iranians are literally burning down that country in protest of their version of the Trump administration, Trump is threatening to start a war with his Iranian peers to protect those liberal domestic terrorists.
It isn’t that the nation’s threadbare threesome just doesn’t get it and keeps missing the point. They are trying to subvert how our nation’s police forces were created to operate.
Despite Herculean efforts by fog-headed conservatives to deny it, police, local or federal, can only enforce the law, they cannot define it or impose punishment.
That is the job of the courts. It’s that pesky separation of powers thing that keeps galling Trump and his acolytes.
It may well be that Good violated local, state or maybe even federal laws by interfering with police operations while she was protesting them. But even if the punishment for such scofflaw behavior was the death penalty, ICE agents don’t get to be the ones to impose it. Ever.
In journalism 101, we’re taught, as reporters, not to inaccurately promote the wrong-headed idea that cops decide what happens to criminals. To be sure, police cannot arrest someone “for” a crime. Doing such a thing would mean they were convicted by police for the alleged crime. Police arrest suspects “in connection” with a crime, and prosecutors — very, very separate from police — work to have a court — very, very separate from police — charge a suspect with a crime and decide their fate.
It’s not just semantics. It’s the very foundation of the American justice system. This is what set us apart from King George III.
Just as important, local and federal police are supposed to be trained to avoid mayhem and death while carrying out their duties.
No, really.
Aurora is the poster child of what happens when police aren’t trained to do that, or they don’t follow that training. Even after the catastrophe of police arresting and ultimately killing Elijah McClain for being Black and out walking at night in a sketchy part of town, the police department here continues to kill bad guys and just messed up guys while trying to enforce the law.
Law enforcement experts here and across the country never vary from the sage advice that police and the public are safest when cops plan, and think, and do all they can to prevent opportunities for violent confrontations.
What Noem’s cosplay clowns from ICE are doing is the opposite of sanctioned and logical police training. They have been directed to agitate the communities they strike in their very public, kinky, masked-up mayhem parades.
It’s like watching a third-rate video game, “Crawl of Doodie.”
Police and their bosses cannot decide who gets to decide to live or die. That’s what happens in Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China.
Would I advise anyone to intervene in a shambolic police operation from inside a car? Hell, no.
Would I advise an officer to race up to soccer-moms inside of cars and try and rip them out from behind the wheel at gunpoint?
No, because someone would almost certainly get wrongly shot and killed.
I’m not brilliant. I just know how police, law enforcement, the law and reality work.
Clearly, the Trumpster fire raging at the White House does not.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
