Dan Sullivan suggests ‘both sides’ deserve blame for killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti

Four days after masked federal gunmen shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the employees in Sen. Dan Sullivan’s word factory manufactured an AI-like treatise that says everybody needs to just get along.

Sullivan said that “all sides need to focus on de-escalation and lower the temperature so the violence in Minneapolis dissipates.”

“A good start is that both sides now appear to be engaging constructively to lower the temperature in Minnesota, which I have encouraged since the beginning,” Sullivan’s office quotes him as saying.

Both sides did not shoot and kill Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Masked federal gunmen did that.

Sullivan said ICE must “adjust its tactics and procedures” to prevent additional killings.

Sullivan’s office put 497 generic words in his mouth that manage to avoid and obscure every real issue raised by the killing of these two people.

Sullivan didn’t mention their names, the circumstances of their murders or how multiple videos show the Trump administration repeatedly lied about both victims to justify the shootings. He suggests that Minnesota police were obstructing federal agents.

And he blames Joe Biden for allowing illegal immigrants into the country, claiming that is the “broader context.”

He wants accountability, investigations, an end to violence and he supports law enforcement, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment and Trump’s leadership. He doesn’t like people who say ICE officers are Nazis and says that kind of talk is corrosive.

“This rhetoric undermines public safety and further erodes trust between civilians and law enforcement,” the Sullivan word factory says.

You know what really undermines public safety and erodes trust?

The execution of two people who would be alive today if federal agents had behaved appropriately and if their superiors had not treated this as a political showboating exercise.

As conservative columnist George Will puts it, nothing about ICE can be trusted.

“The current administration, by erasing the distinction between police work and military operations — by allowing marauding ICEmen to pose as police — has grievously wounded the dignity of policing,” Will wrote.

“Today, it is more than prudent, it is good citizenship to assume that everything ICE says, and everything the administration says in support of its deportation mania, is untrue until proved to be otherwise. Or, as (Kristi) Noem might say, until it has been ‘adjusted,’” Will wrote.

Sullivan is silent about what his call for accountability really means, which is nothing. The Republican Congress holds no one in Trump’s circle accountable.

In Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s opinion, accountability means that Noem should probably resign.

“Accountability goes all the way to the top, and I think you have a secretary right now that needs to be accountable to the chaos and in some of the tragedy that we have seen,” she added.

I expect that the “both sides now” product of the Sullivan word factory will become the standard response by his office to anyone who writes objecting to the behavior of the masked federal gunmen and their supervisors. It is not a real response to complaints.

It will replace the old Sullivan letter that he continued to send to constituents in the wake of the two killings.

Many readers have forwarded me copies of Sullivan’s old term paper defending ICE, which they received even after complaining about the deaths in Minnesota.

“ICE agents operate at significant personal risk and have sacrificed much to protect the American people,” his office said to those who wrote objecting to the killings of Good and Pretti.

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