#Two police shootings, two different outcomes and other commentary

Centrist: Two Police Shootings, Two Outcomes 

The charging decisions in the police shootings of Daunte Wright in Minnesota and Ashli Babbitt in DC were announced within an hour of each other “with strikingly different conclusions,” observes Jonathan Turley at USA Today. While Babbitt was “at the forefront of a riot, there is no claim that she was threatening any officer or possible person with serious bodily injury or death,” but the Department of Justice declined to prosecute. Meanwhile, a jury will have to decide “whether a possible split-second mistake legally constitutes a conscious choice of an officer” in the Wright case. Neither shooting appears justified, “yet in one case, an officer is charged, and in the other, the officer is cleared.” These cases “capture the uncertain line” of when “mistakes or errors by police are criminal matters,” but “the Babbitt decision leaves more questions than answers.” 

From the right: The Critical-Theory Ambassador 

“The US ambassador to the United Nations is supposed to speak for American values and interests,” but new envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s recent remarks indicate she “is going to speak mainly about the faults of her own country,” fumes The Wall Street Journal editorial board. “Her recitation of America’s sins” and claims that we are racist to our roots “could have come from China’s Global Times” newspaper. She seems to have forgotten about “American progress on race since the Founding, such as the Civil War that ended slavery or the civil-rights movement.” Instead, she spoke of President Biden’s decision to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council as if America were morally equivalent to “offenders” like Cuba, China, Russia and Venezuela. Bottom line: Thomas-Greenfield imagines “her job is to bring critical race theory to the world.” 

Conservative: Dems’ Hopeless Demographics 

“Democrats know they can no longer win by the old agreed-upon rules, constitutional or otherwise,” argues Daniel McCarthy at Spectator USA — hence “the desperation of their struggle to abolish the filibuster and federalize election law” and their “dreams of packing the Supreme Court.” Demographics “were supposed to save” the party, which is “why race-baiting has become” its central stratagem. “They try to terrify Asian Americans with insinuations that white Americans are targeting them with violence, when the reality is that whites, Asian, Hispanics, blacks and everyone else is most at risk from the lawlessness that Democrats have tolerated.” In 2020, former President Donald Trump, supposedly “the embodiment of white diabolism,” won “a greater percentage of Hispanics and blacks than liberal-sensitive Republicans” John McCain and Mitt Romney. The GOP, then, should “try a right-wing message to minorities” and leave the Democrats to their party’s woke furies. 

Liberal: Don Has Thumb on the GOP 

Former President Donald Trump’s recent insult to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is unlike most intraparty “dust-ups,” where fellow senators rally around their colleague, contends Jeff Greenfield at Politico. Indeed, “there’s always been something different about Trump and the Republican Party — in part because he seems to have a stronger connection to its voters than the party leadership does.” After seven Republican senators voted to convict him of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” GOP leaders “watched, to their horror, as Trump, like Freddy Krueger, emerged whole and ready to inflict fatal political wounds on those who defied him.” The only option now is to strike a “truce,” because “asking Trump not to insult those who have ­offended him is like asking him not to exhale.” 

Culture critic: The Unbearable Lightness of Woke 

The left has long claimed to speak to power, but its outrage-mongering these days mostly reflects a combination of opportunism and “intellectual bankruptcy,” writes Carl R. Trueman at First Things. Leftist race and gender theories “are now pathways to promotion, to lucrative book deals, to New York Times op-eds and to well-paid speaking gigs. . . . Now one merely needs to recite the liturgy — white privilege, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc. — to establish one’s critical credentials” and take down potential competitors. “The new New Left seems to prefer games of ‘gotcha!’ to anything resembling real critical thinking. Of course, the left can do so with impunity because it is so powerful.” 

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board