Barack Obama has received the condemnation of Fox and Friends hosts Steve Doocy, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and Brian Kilmeade, combined I.Q. unknown.  Obama has let down the world, I guess, because he didn't attend the mass demonstration in Paris, which featured approximately three million, seven hundred thousand people and "over forty" world leaders.  The leaders linked arms and walked like it was Paris 1968.  Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority was there.  Benjamin Netanyahu, fresh from ordering a war against Palestinian civilians, was there.  Angela Merkel of Germany was there.  No Obama, or Biden, or even John Kerry.  A U.S. ambassador walked among the great, representing Washington, D.C., but that's seen by the many critics of this faux pas as a hardly adequate representative supposed to make a show of solidarity for liberty and the pen's freedom. 
     On January 7, 2015, two brothers, Muslims, carried out a massacre at the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris.  The magazine had published cartoons featuring depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.  As we've seen in the past, this can generate gunfire.  The Prophet is not to be depicted, although I wonder how it's even possible to depict Muhammad, since no one alive knows what he looked like.  Let's say he had a beard, but beyond that, who knows?  It's like drawing or painting Jesus of Nazareth.  No one knows what Jesus looked like, although he certainly didn't have blue eyes.
     That some Muslims can be offended by a depiction of the Prophet has been long known, but a fraction of that group take it to lethal levels.  They are fundamentalists, and like all fundamentalists of whatever religion, their senses of humor about their faiths are non-existent. 
     For two days Paris went into major cop mode, a la Boston after the Marathon bombing.  Talking heads on the news in America spoke of ISIS carrying out massacres here, al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula working its plots on our soil.  The War on Terror, maybe no longer called that in official circles, thrives as the first world continues to bomb and exploit the third.  Some of those first world leaders linking arms in Paris are among the bombers and exploiters.  It would've been appropriate for Obama or Biden to link arms with a killer like Benjamin Netanyahu, showing anyone who can perceive irony, leaders who employ terror tactics condemning terrorism.
     Doocy, Hasselbeck, and Kilmeade, aglow with smugness, easily allowed their contempt for Obama's lapse in not joining the parade overshadow any comprehension of Obama's own role in the overall shittiness of the world situation as regards the whirlpool of stateless and state terrorism, and how this war, call it World War Three, is pulling us all down while the climate changes badly. 
     In American news the narrative on the huge Parisian demonstration tended to focus on the Obama Administration's fuck-up, ignoring the vast crowd expressing their shock and disgust at the massacre, and their support of free speech.  But I say, who gives a fuck that "forty plus" world leaders linked arms?  How supportive of free speech are some of those leaders in their own countries?  How supportive of free speech and the free exchange of ideas are Steve Doocy and his doltish co-hosts, considering how much their network, Fox News Channel, propagandizes?
    
                                                                              Vic Neptune