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A video drawing Facebook views sounds star-studded, politically speaking, if you believe the posts caption.

It promises starring roles from FBI Director Christopher Wray; U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who was fired over text messages critical of former President Donald Trump; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who the caption claims cant quite keep it together.

"CR.O.WED E.R.U.PTS as Jim Jordan drives Wray to SH0CKING charing Strzok decisionClinton cries," the March 25 post says.

It was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

First of all, this video is more than 5 years old.

Its a clip of a December 2017 House Judiciary Committee hearing about FBI oversight. Jordan questioned Wray about Strzok, but the hearing didn't end with Wray deciding to charge Strzok. No crowd erupts. And Clinton is not even there.

We rate this post Pants on Fire!

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Politicians dont cry in this video, despite the captions promise of ... - PolitiFact

Perhaps the rarest creatures in American politics are those who can accept that our political order might be designed, and reasonably so, to thwart what their hearts desire.

That it is, for instance, possible to support legal access to abortion but also accept that there isn't really a right to it in the Constitution, or to oppose capital punishment but also accept that the Constitution as written clearly permits it, or to support particular gun-control laws but also accept that some of which is proposed in that area is inconsistent with an honest reading of the Second Amendment.

The absence of such conflicted (and thus reasonable) thinking was especially evident in the reaction to the indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg--most of which has been based on what one thinks of Trump, not the merits of the legal case brought against him, as if that which should matter most matters not at all.

If you opposed Trump, then the indictment was justified, if you support him, it wasn't.

But, again, it is possible to hold two ideas at the same time; in this case, and given the circumstances and facts as we so far know them, perhaps necessary: to both despise Trump and also believe that his indictment constitutes a spectacular abuse of prosecutorial power.

It becomes virtually impossible for those who hate Trump to acknowledge that the case against him in New York is an exceedingly dubious one, because what matters is Trump, not the case.

Since Trump is deplorable, any legal indictment of him must be justified, whatever the particulars. So goes what passes for the logic.

Many of the same folks who (appropriately) condemned "Lock Her Up" when directed at Hillary Clinton (containing as it did the banana-republic suggestion that the law should be used against your political opponents), now seem to have no problem with the concept when directed at Trump (even though an objective observer could plausibly conclude that Clinton's alleged legal transgressions regarding her email server and classified material were of greater consequence than Trump's alleged falsification of business records as part of a hush-money payment).

Charles Lipson, writing in The Spectator U.S., effectively summarizes Bragg's approach when noting, "He had to do it with the thinnest of evidence, the weakest of legal theories. He focused on a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations has expired. Using a novel legal theory, he wants to tie that misdemeanor to other alleged crimes and package them all as a felony. ... That's not how our justice system is supposed to work. Prosecutors are not supposed to begin with the target and then look for a crime."

Indeed, perhaps the most damning evidence that Bragg's indictment constitutes a case of politicized justice was the fact that an array of far more seasoned federal prosecutors as well as the Federal Election Commission (FEC) examined the same evidence and concluded there were insufficient grounds to justify even one count at the misdemeanor level, but Bragg, who had been elected on a promise to get Trump, lest we forget, was able to somehow find no less than 34 felony counts.

Sheer quantity is thus apparently expected to create the kind of perception of guilt in the public eye that quality and actual legal merit can't.

All of which brings us back to the degree to which an ugly "ends justify the means" dynamic has overtaken our politics in the Trump age, in which the unsavoriness of Trump has provoked a similarly unsavory resistance; to the point where just about any means can be justified in bringing him down, even if it means undermining the integrity of our criminal justice system in the process.

It is possible that the only thing which has threatened our democracy more in recent years than Trump has been the response to him, and Alvin Bragg has now taken that response into genuinely dangerous uncharted territory.

The idea that one party can legally target a former president (and, in Trump's case, also declared candidate for president) of the other party without reciprocity is the epitome of shortsightedness and navete.

The age of hyper-polarization and tribalism thus threatens to bring us a new normal consisting of serial impeachments and criminal indictments of presidents, current and former.

Yes, cleansing the body politic of the menace Trump is important, but how we go about it, and whether those methods preserve the cherished principles of our political order, matters even more.

Trump in that sense isn't so much a threat to the rule of law as a test of our commitment to it.

The great irony in all this is that the Manhattan D.A., having cut in line with the flimsiest of cases, will now make it politically more difficult to prosecute Trump on other, potentially stronger and more significant ones (including possible mishandling of classified documents and encouragement of election fraud in Georgia).

Additional irony is found in the spectacle of a prosecutor with a reputation for being "soft" on crime finally deciding to prosecute someone.

That that someone is Donald Trump is the only thing which explains it all.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Excerpt from:
Into the abyss - Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The reason the United States reached its present astonishing condition is that a not wholly inadequate but complacent bipartisan consensus was moving the country slowly to the left and appeared to a large number of citizens to be favoring the educated middle-class and the scientifically and financially innovative higher income groups over the traditional working and middle classes and substantial numbers of the traditional minorities.

For some unexplained reason, few of the polls disclosed the vulnerability of the bipartisan governing majority. Donald Trump, long one of Americas most famous and controversial businessmen and celebrities, had been polling comprehensively for many years by 2015. He had developed the theory, after a near-death financial experience, that he could generate a large income by levering on and hyping his own name.

This process was commercially successful, and he suspected that it could be politically successful, also. To this end, he changed his official party designation seven times in 13 years waiting for an opportunity to take an open nomination in a year when the White House would not be defended by an incumbent president.

All will remember the howls of mockery and incredulity that greeted his descent on the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. It became clear as soon as the primaries began that he had tapped into an unsuspected vein of electoral resentment.

The bipartisan arrangement that Mr. Trump called the swamp is best illustrated by the fact that in the eight terms, 32 years, ending in 2012, one member or another of the Bush and Clinton families had been president, vice president, or Secretary of State, and a member of each family was seeking the presidency in 2016.

Mr. Trump won almost all of the Republican primaries in every region, but incredulity rose and defied unfolding events. The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, wrote of dropping him like a hot rock. The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was the overwhelming favorite to win even though the polls started fairly close and narrowed steadily toward election day.

As Mr. Trump alleged in his powerful and measured speech on the evening of April 4, after his indictment, Mr. Trumps enemies had begun even before he was inaugurated, the unconstitutional process of using the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other parts of the Justice Department to persecute and defame him.

We now know that the heads of the national and central intelligence agencies and the FBI lied or dissembled under oath and that senior officials of the Justice Department knowingly signed false affidavits to justify illegal intercepts on the Trump campaign and transition team. We now know that the strenuous effort to pretend that concerns about the Biden familys financial relations with Ukraine and China were unfounded was an outright fraud that was conducted even though a grand jury had been investigating the same matters for many months.

We now know that President Biden has lied repeatedly to the public about his knowledge of these activities. The failure of the United States attorney in Delaware to produce any findings at all on an investigation of more than three years into the Biden familys questionable finances is as disquieting about the failure of justice to operate impartially as is its failure to be roused to any action at all about then candidate Hillary Clintons destruction of subpoenaed evidence.

We now know that neither President Trump nor his organization had any involvement in encouraging illegalities at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. We also know that then-Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Mayor Bowser of the District of Columbia declined President Trumps urgings that they accept 20,000 national guardsmen that he was prepared to provide as reinforcements because of his concern that hooligans could infiltrate the large crowd of his supporters that he had invited to Washington to object legally to voting irregularities in the late election.

We now know that both of the Trump impeachments were completely unwarranted. We also know that it is unlikely that he would have been defeated in the 2020 election if there were not millions of unverifiable, unsolicited, mailed ballots voted anonymously in drop boxes; or that he would have been defeated if the publics awareness of the proportions of the Bidens overseas financial dealings had not been improperly suppressed by the FBIs partisan collusion with major social media platforms.

We now know how feeble and frivolous is the New York district attorneys spurious indictment of Mr. Trump and we know, because Mr. Trump told us, that the special counsel looking into the preposterous FBI raid at Trumps home in August and the classified document incident that was invoked as the pretext for it, and into the January 6, 2021 events, is engaging in the United States prosecutors customary threat to indict those who do not, with full guarantees against prosecution for perjury, ransack their memories successfully to find inculpatory evidence against the former president.

It is all a disgraceful picture of systematic lawlessness by one of two national political factions of almost equal strength against the other: an act of usurpation and perversion of the institutions of justice accompanied by a total collapse of professionalism and integrity in the national political media, all with no precedent in American history.

His supporters, and the few uncommitted people in the middle, are deeply concerned that this abuse of the justice system and failure of the free press could destroy constitutional government in the United States.

The only positive elements in this crisis are that the vigorous reaction of the old establishment shows that it is not decadent and easily defeated: it has fought tooth and nail with an early and constant recourse to rank illegalities to defend its position. A vigorously abusive governing class is preferable to a defeatist one.

The other positive element is that the forces for change are equally determined; even the most inflamed Trump-hater will acknowledge that he has proved to be a foe of undreamed-of formidability. Nothing in his prior career with its frequent instances of outright hucksterism would have prepared those who did not know him well to expect that Donald Trump would be so indefatigable.

In a phrase of third-party candidate George Wallace, much more accurately applied here, Trump has shaken the American political establishment by the eye-teeth, and he has already received more votes for president than anyone in American history.

Now one of these two protagonists must win. For the sake of all the goals identified by Mr. Trumps opponents, particularly the preservation of the Constitution and the integrity of the American political system, it is Donald Trump that must prevail.

The truth that dare not be uttered, is that he is now leading all the polls. His enemies, in their blind and mindless outlawry, are turning him into the last man standing, the only recourse and salvation for those who believe in the Constitution and in the continued greatness and moral distinction of the United States of America.

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The Truth That Dare Not Be Uttered About Trump - The New York Sun

There have been 135 mass shootings so far this year in America. Its barely April. Ban assault weapons now.

That was the claim from former Democratic presidential candidate and US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

It looks like shes using stats compiled by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which had recorded 135 mass shootings so far this year at the time Mrs Clinton tweeted.

But what counts as a mass shooting is hotly disputed.

The GVA tally includes any incident in which four or more people were injured, whether or not anyone died.

If we restrict the count to only those incidents where there was at least one fatality and three non-fatal injuries, the number of mass shootings in the archive falls from 135 to 86 so far this year.

But the GVA is not the only source of mass shootings data.

The magazine Mother Jones compiles its own list and has more stringent criteria. By its definition, an event only becomes a mass shooting if three or more people die.

By Mother Jones estimate, there have been four mass shootings in the US so far in 2023. Those are the school shootings in Nashville and Michigan, as well as the two that struck around Lunar New Year celebrations in California.

The second part of Mrs Clintons tweet urges a ban on assault weapons.

Theres no settled definition of this either, though in 1994, the US Department of Justice described them as semiautomatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition that were designed and configured for rapid fire and combat use.

Its not clear how many of the 135 mass shootings Mrs Clinton refers to involved assault weapons. However, all four of the incidents in the Mother Jones database this year did involve semiautomatic firearms, according to reports.

Some gun control campaigners argue that assault weapons allow shooters to fire more bullets in quick succession, therefore increasing the possible death toll.

And a 2019 peer-reviewed study found that mass-shooting related homicides were lower between 1994 and 2004, when a ban on assault weapons was in place across America.

But as FactCheck has previously reported and as the researchers themselves note the evidence is observational. In other words, it cant tell us whether its the assault weapons ban that caused the reduction in shootings and deaths.

And another major study of thousands of scientific papers by the Rand Corporation found inconclusive evidence that such bans lead to fewer mass shootings.

Indeed, assault weapons are only used in 16 per cent of mass shootings, according to gun control campaign group, Everytown. By contrast, handguns are the predominant choice for those carrying out a mass shooting, which suggests that limiting access to those firearms might be a better use of campaigners time.

Hillary Clinton said there have been 135 mass shootings in 2023 already. This is supported by data from the Gun Violence Archive. However, that organisation uses a broad definition of what counts as a mass shooting and includes incidents in which there were no fatalities. A more stringent definition at least three deaths is used by the website Mother Jones, which has recorded four mass shootings this year.

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FactCheck: is Clinton right that there have been 135 mass shootings ... - Channel 4 News

The subject of a third major political party in the United States brings out generally predictable reactions: cynicism in cynics, fantasy in fantasists, partisanship in partisans. But it is worth remembering that there already has been a very successful third party: the Republican Party, which skyrocketed to power very shortly after its founding in 1854, with the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, winning the White House in 1860. By contrast, the Libertarian Party, founded in 1971, has topped out at 3.3 percent in presidential electionsand that was in 2016, when the partys ticket comprised two moderate Republican former governors (Gary Johnson and William Weld) running against two corrupt and contemptible New York Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The Libertarians have not had much success in state legislatures or town councils or school boards. The Greens and the other exotic minor parties are for hobbyists, the political equivalents of people who build miniature ships in bottles or collect stamps.

The Republican Party emerged from the wreckage of the Whig Party because the Republicans believed in something and the Whigs did not: When it came to the most important issue of the dayslaverythe Republicans had a firm position, if a painfully moderate one, while the Whigs could not quite figure out what they should think about it. The Republicans were not a radical abolitionist party but a conservative anti-slavery party that ended up being the political home of radical abolitionists because the abolitionists had nowhere else to go. Lincolns position on slavery was, in fact, much narrower than many of those of us who admire him might have wanted from him at the time: He did not propose to abolish slavery but only to prevent its spread in the hopes that it would die out on its own; a constitutionalist might concur with Lincolns assertion in his first inaugural address that as president he did not have the power to interfere with slavery in the southern states, but Frederick Douglass was not wrong to fault him for going beyond that to add that he would not be inclined to use such power if he had it. The word politician has a disreputable odor on it, but Lincoln was a gifted and wily politician, a politician of the first order, and it was such a politician that the convulsing republic needed. A saint would have simply denounced slavery as an unbearable moral evilwhich, of course, it wasbut it took a politician to work against that evil while also working to ensure that the United States would remain the United States, enduring even through the treachery of the slave power and the brutality of the Civil War. It was Lincolns saintliness that failed him and us, setting the course toward a Reconstruction that was too conciliatory and insufficiently reformist.

A compromise position is not necessarily a position that lacks moral clarityit may be, and often is, a position that recognizes the limitations of the current political situation and that does not indulge the adolescent tendency to pine for the impossible. At the same time, a position that is uncompromising or even extreme often is one that lacks genuine clarity, moral or political.

The Republican Party in our time is a confused and debased thing. Trump and Trumpism have made that worse, but the decadence of the GOP did not begin in 2016. Faced with the great moral question of their day, the Republicans of Lincolns time offered moral firmness tempered by realism; faced with the great moral questions of our timeabortion, Russia, the attempted coup detat of 2021Republicans offer moral hysteria instead of moral firmness, delusion rather than realism. (It does not help that on two out of three of those big issues, a great many Republicans are on the wrong side.) But even on abortion, Republicans are now unsteady. In the pre-Dobbs era, Republicans could organize themselves around the outrage that was Roe vs. Wade, as naked a piece of judicial usurpation of the lawmaking power as modern American history has to offer. But with Roe vacated, Republicans have been made to give up the thing they are good atoppositionand instead try to do the one thing that they have shown themselves more or less incapable of for 30 years or moregoverning.

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Meet the Whigs - The Dispatch