© Jack Cashill
WND.com - January 14, 2015

Simply put, Obama was not about to pass up the NFL’s most watchable weekend—all four of my teams won, by the way—to march for a cause he does not believe in.

From his emergence on the national scene in 2004, Obama has been all about suppressing speech. As the titular head of the various progressive subcults—black, Hispanic, environmental, feminist, socialist, gay, and (bizarrely) Muslim—he has either endorsed or ignored any number of assaults on speech by his subalterns.

Historically, Obama’s progressive shock troops have contented themselves with hectoring and humiliating those who say something askance.

They “bork” Clarence Thomas. They deny Carrie Prejean her Miss USA title. They get Brendan Eich fired from Mozilla. They force Donald Sterling to sell the San Diego Clippers. They boot Larry Summers from his president’s gig at Harvard.

Of late, however, they have been getting more aggressive. Weeks after the Chick-fil-A flap in 2012, Floyd Corkins II, a volunteer at a gay rights center, stormed the offices of the Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington.

With a gun in one hand and a large bag of Chick-fil-A sandwiches in another, Corkins opened fire on the FRC’s black security guard, Leo Johnson, who tried to block his way.

Although shot in the arm, Johnson managed to tackle and subdue Corkins and prevent what could have been a massacre.

After his arrest, Corkins told authorities he wanted to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in victims' faces.” He had chosen FRC for its support of Chick-fil-A. In his pants’ pocket he had a list of the other pro-Chick-fil-A-friendly targets.

It took hours for the White House to respond and then Obama offered lamely, “This type of violence has no place in our society.”

By contrast, Obama interrupted a critical foreign tour of Malaysia to denounce Donald Sterling’s "incredibly offensive racist statements," whatever they were exactly.

Lest anyone overlook the origins of Sterling’s buffoonery, Obama added, "The United States continues to wrestle with the legacy of race and slavery and segregation.”

Wrestling with that legacy, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, an ex-con and aspiring jihadist, boarded a bus in Baltimore in December 2014 bound for New York City. He was a man on a mission.

After arriving in New York, Brinsley posted online precisely what that mission was. “I’m Putting Wings On Pigs Today,” he wrote. “They Take 1 Of Ours. Let’s Take 2 of Theirs.”

His post cited two men whom the media—with Obama’s help--had improbably elevated to martyrdom in the last few months, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and closed with a much too accurate prediction, “I’m Putting Pigs In A Blanket.”

Two hours later, Brinsely secured his own place in the hard left pantheon when he shot and killed NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos before taking his own life.

Brinsely’s jihad followed a month of marches and less savory madness—all White House endorsed or ignored—in which the marchers abandoned the passive “Hands up, don’t shoot” mantra for the pro-active, "What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now."

The urge to punish is not limited to the crazies. In September 2014, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined the chaotic throngs marching through Manhattan in their Sisyphean protest against climate change.

When asked about certain industrialists said to be endangering the environment, Kennedy exploded, “Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely.”

Nor is imprisonment of those who violate the orthodoxy just a progressive wish dream. In 2012, when confronted with a new offense to the Prophet Muhammad, Obama officials took the unprecedented step of arresting the offender.

Although they found a more legally viable charge than Islamophobia to hang on Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, they clearly punished him for his impolitic take on that benighted cult.

On the very night of the attack on the Benghazi consulate, Hillary Clinton released a memo indicting “inflammatory material posted on the Internet."

Although unmentioned in the memo by name, the Internet sensation that allegedly did the inflaming was the trailer for Nakoula’s amateurish video called Innocence of Muslims.

A week after the attack, despite ample evidence to the contrary, Barack Obama was still blaming the video. Inexplicably, he chose the occasion of the Late Show with David Letterman to finger the perpetrator.

“Here's what happened,” Obama told Letterman. “You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who--who made an extremely offensive video directed at Muhammad and Islam.”

The usually irreverent Letterman seemed taken aback. “Making fun of the Prophet Muhammad!” he said solemnly. “Making fun of the Prophet Muhammad,” confirmed Obama.

Imprisoning Nakoula served two purposes for the Obama administration. The first was to signal to the Muslim world Obama’s willingness to suppress any anti-Muslim sentiment.

The second was to silence Nakoula—not that the media needed much prompting to deny him his voice. Their giddy quest to re-elect Obama took easy precedence over the rights of an accused Islamophobe.

As to the horrific events in Paris, what troubled Obama and his fellow travelers was not that Islamic terrorists attempted to suppress speech, but they got out a little bit far ahead of the moral curve in doing so. Their lack of subtlety was embarrassing.