To say the progressive’s response to Tuffy the Clown’s Obama show is extreme is an understatement.

Will McMahon, a student at the University of Missouri – Columbia, reminds the outraged that “dissent is the highest from of patriotism.”

Last week a great crisis began to unfold in these United States. A crisis so severe and so threatening to our way of life that politicians from both sides put aside their differences and joined together to resolve it. This was no trifling matter like the national debt, or the US’s stand off with Russia, this was much more important. Last week, in a moment of sheer horror, a rodeo clown cruelly mocked the President Obama.

My first reaction to this great outrage (well, that is after a good laugh) was: who cares?

It seemed to me to be nothing new at all. Politicians are routinely mocked, often in very crass and offensive ways, as they always have been and, if healthy political dissent is to continue, always will be. Nobody seemed to mind when a clown wearing a George H.W. Bush mask was gored 1994. His son, George W. Bush was mocked, often very offensively, as well, with a likeness of his severed head appearing in the first season of Game of Thrones, to say nothing of the relentless comparisons to Adolf Hilter and even a movie about the fictional assassination of the erstwhile president. Politics is an ugly business. What happened at the state fair didn’t strike me as that noteworthy, or even unusual at all.

Boy was I wrong.

Both republicans and democrats have condemned this act of Lèse-majesté. The guilty clown has been banned for life from the state fair, and all clowns in it forced to undergo “sensitivity training.” The NAACP even went so far as to call on the DOJ and the Secret Service to investigate the rodeo clown. All this despite the apologies the fair, the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association and the clown himself. The uproar has served to shore up a news cycle softened by the August recess and by the president’s fourth vacation this year. We are given respite through misdirection away from concerns for embassies destroyed or evacuated in the face of filmmakers and an Al-Qaeda on the run. This week’s set of the never ending road bumps in the implementation of Obamacare can be forgotten for the moment.

…There 314 million people in the United States and all of them are allowed to express political dissent. As long as that remains the case some will choose to do so offensively. President Obama is the elected leader of free country not a king. If Bush era liberals are to be believed, dissent, even when it is crass and disrespectful, is the highest form of patriotism.