CAN YOU IMAGINE FOX NEWS IF THIS WERE OBAMA?

If this had been President Obama, and not a prime minister who's a conservative and who therefore gets a free pass from the U.S. right-wing media, we'd never hear the end of it from wingnuts:

Stephen Harper spent about 15 minutes hidden in a Parliament Hill closet after a gunman stormed Centre Block where he and the rest of the Conservative caucus were guarded by MPs who'd fashioned sharp spears from flagpoles, sources say.

After they heard gunfire outside their meeting room door Wednesday, members of Parliament snapped close to 15 flagpoles to make weapons.

Some positioned themselves on risers that flanked doors, ready to attack an assailant.

"There were 15 flags up at caucus and all but two were taken down," one MP recalled.

"These guys were up there holding these spears ready to impale anyone who came in," the source said....

Mr. Harper, meanwhile, had been whisked into a closet in the Centre Block room shortly after the gunfights outside began....

A closet? A closet? Oh, man, the words "Obama" and "closet" would be linked in the righties' minds till the end of time. Yes, lefties would respond that George W. Bush was flown around the country in a desperate attempt to keep him away from the events of 9/11, but it wouldn't matter: the image of legislators sharpening spears and the sergeant-at-arms killing the gunman while the head of state cowered in the closet would be indelible.

And that's on top of this:

The Canadian police acknowledged on Thursday that the gunman who traumatized the capital in a deadly shooting rampage had not been identified as a security threat despite his criminal record in three cities, embrace of extremist ideas and intent to travel to Syria.

The police also conceded that they did not even know that the gunman, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, had been in the capital for nearly three weeks....

"The R.C.M.P. did not even know Mr. Zehaf was in Ottawa," Commissioner Paulson said during the lengthy news conference. "We need to look at all operations to deal with this difficult and hard-to-understand threat."

The police, he said, had only learned about Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau's Syrian travel plans from his mother after his death. Nor was he among the 93 people that the national police forces monitor as being likely to travel abroad to join organizations recognized as terror groups under Canadian law.

(In earlier posts, I was wrong about that last point.)

Oh, and Stephen Harper may have called the attack terrorism, to the delight of right-wing American pundits, but Canadian police are talking about motives other than MUSLIM MUSLIM MUSLIM EVIL EVIL EVIL:

All the commissioner could offer as explanation for the violence of Wednesday was a combination of Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau's growing frustration over delays in his passport application, his apparent sympathies for radicalism and his "difficult circumstances," which appeared to include drug use, unemployment and mental health problems.

"ISLAMIC EXTREMISM"!!! WHY WON'T YOU JUST SAY IT?!!!!

Right-wingers in America portray Obama as willfully perverse because he doesn't act and speak the way they demand he does. Well, here are Stephen Harper and the Canadian police acting in ways that fit American righties' caricature of Obama and his administration. Where's the mockery?