Death of the Fifth Republic

Terrorism in France

• Two heavily-armed Muslims attacked the offices of the satirical Paris weekly Charlie Hebdo this morning, killing twelve people, including the magazine’s two most famous cartoonists. The attackers were heard to shout “Allahu Akbar!” and “The Prophet is avenged!” CNN reports that the killers’ motives are still unknown.

Motives unknown? Um....yeah....we think we can help you there. Of course, the White House was unsure also:

• White House press secretary Josh Earnest refrained from calling the attack on a French magazine "terrorism" in an interview this morning on CNN:
  
  The CNN host asked, "Josh, when you talk about countering the message, you keep using the word violence. I mean, this is an act of terrorism, that's what the president of France called it -- an act of terrorism. You're referring to ISIS and other bad actors, it doesn't really matter who it is at the end of the day. You know you're fighting a very large group of people of somewhat similar concern. Do you see this as an act of terrorism, and is this something that has to be condemned on that level?"
  
  "Based on what we know right now it does seem that's what we're confronting here. And this is an act of violence that we certainly do condemn, and if based on this investigation it turns out to be an act of terrorism, then we would condemn that in the strongest possible terms, too," said Earnest.

Someone finally poked Obama in the ass and he called it terrorism, as if that was some shocking revelation to everyone else who saw the video and read the media reports coming in from overseas.

That didn't stop MSNBC from comparing the assassination of cartoonists in a free society to Jerry Fawell suing Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine. That's almost exactly the same, except for the semi-automatic weapons and the body count.