Rep. Randy Weber (R-Tx) took the cake with a bizarre tweet complaining that "even Hitler thought it more important than Obama to get to Paris. (For all the wrong reasons.) Obama couldn't do it for right reasons."   But there was no reason for the president to race across the Atlantic to tromp with other foreign leaders who claimed to have a sudden awakening on the value of freedom of the press.

While Obama's record on press freedom is not as disgraceful as Egypt's, or Turkey's, or Gabon's, he has shown enough duplicity on this subject to gain easy admission into the hypocrites' club. His administration spent almost six years hounding courageous New York Times' reporter James Risen over material in his 2006 book, A State of War. Last June, the Justice Department persuaded the Supreme Court not to hear a free-speech case involving Risen and leaks he received regarding national security. But the Supreme Court's refusal to consider Risen's case ensured that the Justice Department and the White House would continue to have a stack of cards that could legally trump the right to know the truth about federal abuses.

Obama still periodically pirouettes as the civil-liberties champion that some Americans remember from his 2008 presidential campaign. Yet in early 2013 the Justice Department secured a secret "search warrant for a Fox News reporter's emails that invoked the 'suspect exception' by portraying the reporter as a criminal participant in the crime of the leak to the reporter," the New York Times noted. In his highly touted national-security speech in May 2013 at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, Obama declared that "a free press is essential for our democracy. That's who we are. And I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable."