Dear Friends,                                                                                              How could you?

It’s unfair to hold young women to higher standards, and yet, think of this: Karoline Leavitt is 28, she has a small child and is expecting another. She frequently speaks of her devout Christian faith. Renée Good was 37 when she was killed, she left behind three children and her widow. If all you knew about Leavitt was what I’ve just written, what do you think she would think or say about the killing of Renée Good?

What has she said? For starters:

“I think the more evidence that comes out shows the officer was justified, and President Trump was right about this all along. Now, of course, there is plentiful video evidence to show that the officer was struck by the car—that this deranged lunatic woman was trying to ram him over with her vehicle and was using that vehicle as a weapon, which justifies domestic terrorism. Unfortunately, we are seeing these incidents play out in American communities across the country, where you have these organized, paid antagonists who are part of these groups that are actively, unlawfully, impeding lawful enforcement operations. They are harassing and targeting ICE agents, trying to make it impossible, again, for them to carry out their duties. That’s what was happening in this case.”

Everyone knows, including Leavitt, Bondi, Noem, all Republican members of both Houses, and even Trump, they all know there is no giant “extreme left” organization, no vast mass of paid agitators. Everybody knows. Instead, there are increasingly large numbers of Americans who are following the good old American tradition of protesting abuses of power. Ok, Leavitt has to be very, very careful in what she says. She wants to keep her job. But even putting aside the lies about paid agitators, Leavitt knows everything and more that we know about Renée Good. She’s seen the videos.

She knows, we know, that the woman we have all seen in the video, smiling, and saying “I’m not mad at you”, seconds before she was shot, never had any idea of running over federal agents or anyone else. We all know this just from the video. And then, when we read more about her, we are only more certain. Everybody knows that she was not a deranged lunatic woman. Leavitt knows this.

No organized group has any plan to run over federal agents with their cars – there aren’t any such groups. Individual protesters have no such idea. The entire “vast left-wing domestic terrorist conspiracy” is an absurd lie designed to deflect attention from the real domestic terrorists, White Supremacists and Christian Nationalists, who will be Trump’s brown-shirts whether or not they actually join ICE.

Everybody knows, also, that Karoline Leavitt’s job is to lie, not just once in a while but all the time, day in day out every time she opens her mouth. We know this, they know this, she knows this. She knew what the job was when she took it. And, yes, that means that she’s in a tough spot now – if, that is, she is any longer capable of grieving the death of another young woman. If so, then she knows that she has crossed yet another line in the measure of human failure, and it may be absolute, a point of no return.

No one wonders about Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem in this way. They crossed that line of failure long ago. No one is in the least surprised by what they’re saying, no one expects anything from them other than more lies, more bigotry, more malice and cruelty. I don’t know about Bondi, Noem seems to have been far along this path long before she became a Trump flunky.

And Trump? The word “expectations” doesn’t arise, his entire life is failure. 

But Leavitt? I had a tiny little thought in the back of my mind … maybe? She can’t challenge the DHS-Trump account of what happened – she’d be out of a job. I’m not even going to start on the Christianity thing, it’s none of my business. But if she’d just faked and fudged just a little bit … I wouldn’t think well of her, but I would imagine that she still had just a little shred of human decency in her.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby