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I spent two days chopping down Washington’s Crossing the Delaware after warm weather did to it what cold weather could not do, stop the general’s capture of Trenton, New Jersey.

His boat and his boots are now in my amateur rendering of a Honda Pilot that’s been in the news.

I jotted down some remarks to offer people looking for an alternative to the smiling phantom who won’t say boo about how Ayatollah Trump, with his new Nobel Peace Prize, is sending untrained but armed and masked officers to Minnesota to terrorize Minnesota residents. This has included Denfeld High where my daughter teaches. 

These were Renee Good’s last words. “I’m not mad at you.

Bang, Bang, Bang. (I spoke these so loudly people jumped but I missed one bang. Renee died minutes later with four bullet holes. Two in her chest, one in her arm, and one in her head. Washington is investigating her wife.

If you want to know why I have run against Pete Stauber for the last 4 elections you can drive by my house or you can skim the book I published two years ago Not Your Usual Republican.

Pete’s unending emails harp on his favorite slogan about preserving our way of life. Pete and I have a very different idea of what our way of life has been. His unsporting goal-lift earned his team a national collegiate hockey championship and a trip to the White House to meet President Ronald Reagan.

He’s forgotten the part about almost getting his head blown off as a Duluth policeman in an America where extremists have stopped reasonable regulation of firearms.

My way of life started 25 years before Pete was born. Harry Truman, who integrated the army, was president of the United States.

In 1958, a few years after the Supreme Court ordered Topeka, Kansas, schools to be integrated, my parents bought a house in a neighborhood where Loman Hill Elementary was about to be integrated.

To facilitate the integration, my 2nd grade class was dismissed to the playground. From the jungle gym I watched a long line of black children walking from segregated Buchanan elementary to their new school. Our new school.

My way of life included learning songs like “This land is your land” by Woody Guthrie and the anthem made famous by Martin Luther King: “We shall overcome.”

Mine was a family of liberal Republicans. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party was a liberal party. Liberal means tolerant, generous, open minded.

My mother’s family had a black neighbor, Larry Lapsley an escaped slave. My great grandfather, Thomas Robb, proudly called himself a “Black Republican” thumbing his nose at people who would call him a N***** lover.

In World War I my grandfather was an officer in the segregated all-black 369th Infantry. The Germans called them hell fighters. America called them the Harlem Hell fighters.

My Grandfather gave speeches refuting the racist allegation that black soldiers lacked courage. He saw the Hell fighters in action.

The 369th Infantry fought longer and harder than any other American outfit in the Great War. The grateful French awarded every man among them the coveted Croix de Guerre medal. The U.S. military gave my white grandfather the Congressional Medal of Honor.

During WW 2 my grandfather, the Kansas state auditor, learned that his college alma mater didn’t want to enroll a Japanese-American citizen. He wrote the college president and told him firmly that no American citizen should be denied admission to Park College.

Pete Stauber’s way of life brings shame to America. He approves of thugs detaining brown skinned residents for secret deportations. He venerates our anti-Christian American president’s plans to invade Greenland as though he were Putin invading the Ukraine or Hitler invading Poland.

His president’s way of life was buying newspaper ads demanding the execution of five innocent black men. He and his father Fred Trump were taken to court for refusing to rent apartments to black Americans. Let’s not forget his broken promise to release pedophile Epstein’s dirty secrets.

Turning a blind eye to racism is the least of Pete’s sins as an American. For an instant after January 6th’s attack on Congress Pete and dozens of other Republican Congressmen seemed ready to call Donald Trump out for trying to prevent a fair election. But that courage melted in minutes and Pete went on his knees to Trump. 

My old campaign literature not only called Pete Stauber a traitor it pointed out that he broke his oath to God to defend America’s laws.

I think it’s fair to say Pete Stauber has Renee Good’s blood on his hands.

NOTE: Since this column was written, a second Minnesotan has been gunned down after helping a woman pushed to the ground by an ICE officer. Sent to make Minneapolis more safe, ICE is now responsible for 2 of the city’s 3 murders this year.

Read more of Welty at lincolndemocrat.com.