Clay Cane writes at CNN that San Francisco Forty-Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick has gone too far… by criticizing Hillary Clinton.

But here is where Kaepernick lost me: His remarks to the press segued into a rant of the type you hear from the conservative right. He said: “I mean, you have Hillary who’s called black teens or black kids super predators. You have Donald Trump who’s openly racist. I mean, we have a presidential candidate [Hillary Clinton] who’s deleted emails and done things illegally and is a presidential candidate. That doesn’t make sense to me, because if that was any other person, you’d be in prison.”

Oh, that’s the line in the sand. That’s the crazy talk.

Cane credits Kaepernick for “using the art of protest to spark a national dialogue.” (This is probably the first time sitting down has been described as art.) There are a lot of controversial things a person can do to “spark a national dialogue.” Of course, the national dialogue that ensues is more often focused more on the controversial form of protest, and less on the actual problem spurring the protest.

A lot of Kaepernick’s defenders are hiding behind the trite straw man ”he has a First Amendment has a right to do this” — who’s arguing otherwise? Who’s arguing he should be arrested for failing to stand up during the anthem? — but Cane offers a conditional defense that spotlights a fascinating “red line” that is not to be crossed. He writes, “I believe the FBI knows more about Clinton’s emails than Kaepernick.” The idea of law enforcement as a whole treating one group of citizens more leniently than others is plausible to Cane, but concluding the FBI took it easy on Hillary Clinton because she’s powerful and well-connected and the Democratic nominee for president, as Kaepernick suggested, is beyond the pale. Kaepernick can indict the entire country for the actions of police officials and other acts of injustice committed in today’s society, but when it comes to Clinton, any accusation that hasn’t been proven in a court of law is nonsense talk.

Hey, is there any possibility that the real standard is that he likes it when Kaepernick criticizes the country as a whole or a Republican like Donald Trump, but not the Democratic nominee?