(PS: Fuck Bill Clinton, of course. That should go without saying.)

It also feels like the Clinton statement is intended to—and likely will—give other Trump critics, both within the Democratic Party and among other elite circles, permission and encouragement to be more aggressive themselves.

The Obama statement feels like a significant but still incremental shift in posture, while Clinton's reads as a major rhetorical escalation.

Maybe I've missed something, but this seems like a dramatic escalation in Clinton's public posture. The Obama statement feels like an incremental advance.

This is my thinking as well.

And probably a good sign. I think Obama is a lagging indicator but tempered by a sense of caution. Clinton has a real talent for discerning the direction of any wind.

My impression is that the Clinton statement is grounded not only in a sense of the gravity of the situation but also in a sense that this is a moment of weakness for the Trump administration's assault on the constitution—and on the American people.

The Trump project is teetering. This was a nudge.

And Clinton's statement goes much further than the Obamas' in stating flatly that American democracy is at immediate risk of collapse.

First, Clinton refers to Good and Pretti as "peaceful protesters and citizens exercising their constitutional right to observe and document law enforcement." The Obama statement offered no similar defense of their actions.

Obama is more restrained than I'd like, yes.

I mean, paragraph four largely answers that question.

(Note that I'm not endorsing or embracing this strategy, if that's what it is. Just describing it, tentatively.)

I'm not endorsing his strategy. I'm describing it, tentatively.

This statement can be read as a checklist of which actors Obama sees as legitimate, which ones he doesn't, and which ones he's reserving public judgment on.

Read in that light, it's an interesting checklist.

Feels like today's statement is consistent with that hunch.

My tentative hunch is that Obama sees his appropriate role in nudging the country forward as limited unless and until everything fully collapses, at which point he'll likely have some moral and institutional authority to draw lines about what is and isn't legitimate government action.

Of course, she encouraged me to avoid getting murdered, and I reminded her that it’s not a super easy thing to control.

Lynching was a form of state-aligned terror designed to enforce a white supremacist order. White people were lynched as part of that project.

Yesterday’s murder was state-aligned terror designed to enforce a white supremacist order, even if the victim was white.