| thismeintiel said: While I agree he did wrong in violating his probation, let's be honest here, he was made a spectacle and scapegoat by the Obama administration. While I'm not sure if he would have gotten 1 full year plus four extra years probation under normal circumstances (I've heard lawyers debating that he wouldn't), but I 100% know they wouldn't have made his arrest the big media event, with about a dozen or so cops, that they did. |
Sure. There would be no possibility of a media circus if no one cared about it, though, and I'm not convinced it was a result of the administration coming down on him for the politically incorrect nature of his video rather than prosecutors going hard after him for such a flagrant violation of his probation terms. And it didn't help his case that, true to form, he kept lying to investigators about the nature of his involvement.
But I don't doubt that Obama's (and Clinton's) condemnation of the video followed by Nakoula's prosecution and imprisonment gives some extremists the impression that violence can get the U.S. government to censor whatever offends them, and so only encourages them to do it again. That couldn't have happened if the government had refrained from commenting on the content of the video at all and instead simply reiterated a commitment to protecting free speech while condemning butthurt-inspired violence.
