The Charlie Hebdo case has given our usual suspects plenty of opportunity to cover themselves in glory. Charles C. W. Cooke finds a roundabout way to a what-France-needs-is-more-guns argument:
Certainly, things might have been different if the events had unfolded in heavily armed states such as Oklahoma or Texas — or, for that matter, if someone in an adjacent office had been possessed of a rifle of his own.
He's also pissed that New York City isn't flooded with Saturday Night Specials like in the old days -- then they'd be really safe! Cooke might like to study up on local history a little.
My favorite, though, is Cooke's colleague Matthew Continetti on the subject (h/t Adam Serwer):
Nor do I recall liberals standing up for the critics of global warming and evolutionary theory, of same-sex marriage and trans rights and women in combat, of riots in Ferguson and of Obama’s decision to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants. On the contrary: To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too.
These people have not been deprived of their "right to offend" -- they have been offensive, and the people they offended took offense. I don't remember any of these guys getting shot by black-masked liberals. They did get called names, but I'm not finding anything in the Constitution that protects them from that. Well, what can you expect from someone who wrote a whole book about the "persecution" of Sarah Palin by the "elite media," which left her begging for scraps at the side of the road.
I applaud the sentiments of the surviving Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and like to think Obama, in skipping (to the harrumphs of dumbbells) the Paris march headed by international free speech celebrities, has provided his own concurrence.
UPDATE. Commentary announces in a pouty headline that because Obama didn't go to Paris, he is "No Longer Leader of the Free World." Guess now it's Bibi Netanyahu, huh? Oh, who am I kidding -- for Commentary it was always Netanyahu.
UPDATE 2. The Crazy Jesus Lady snarls:
The march was, at bottom, a preening and only symbolic show? When has this White House ever shown an aversion to preening and symbolic shows?
Yeah, remember when he marched in Ferguson? Also, where's his flag pin?
UPDATE 3. As you might expect, Fedora of Freedom Roger L. Simon raises the crazy stakes:
Now I admit that was just a supposition. Just because I’ve never heard [Obama] link Islam and terror doesn’t mean in his heart of hearts he doesn’t. Though not a genius, he does have an IQ in triple digits and sees what’s right in front of his nose, I assume. He just interprets it differently. But why?
Is someone whispering in his ear?
Senator Dianne Feinstein has just informed us that, yes, there are Islamic terror sleeper cells in our midst in the USA. If that’s true, I wonder why Feinstein wasted so much of her time wounding the CIA during the last weeks of her tenure as Senate Intelligence Committee chair, but never mind. Could there be one of those cells in the White House?
And in case you were charitably disposed to think he's kidding --
I started this post thinking it was kind of funny...
Of course, "bullshitting" is not quite the same thing as kidding.