Have the media and Obama’s re-election team made the leap that all of us are stupid, just because a lot of people are? The drumbeat has started that Republicans, and those on the ‘right,’ are politicizing the tragedy and should be ashamed of themselves. Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager for Obama’s re-election effort, said it, and now Joe Scarborough on MSNBC has said it, so look for this to be picked up and parroted throughout the media.
Here’s a little refresher:
Left-leaning media outlets reported this case, from the outset, not just as a ‘murder,’ but a racially motivated murder. They didn’t have (and still do not have) a shred of evidence that this was so, but hey, who cares? The goal was to get things stirred up, and that they did.
They initially reported that the shooter was white, so a bit of a wrench was thrown into things when they found out that Zimmerman is only half white. (Good indication of how much investigation they actually did into the facts of the case before they took it and ran with it, don’t you think?) They solved this by calling him a ‘white Hispanic’ henceforth, with the order of the words being no accident, of course.
Sharpton (whom MSNBC considers a worthy mouthpiece) and Jackson and the usual hustlers who couldn’t care less about blacks who are killed by other blacks, or whites who are killed by blacks, descended on Sanford, spewing incendiary rhetoric and whipping crowds into frenzies.
While screaming about justice and how Zimmerman was a ‘vigilante,’ various parties, from obscure ones to the likes of Spike Lee and Roseanne Barr, have publicized the addresses not only of Zimmerman, but of his parents, sending them into hiding. (Lee at first refused to apologize when it was discovered he had tweeted the wrong address for Zimmerman, sending a bewildered older couple into hiding.) The New Black Panther Party issued a bounty for Zimmerman's 'capture' and witnesses were terrified of being identified.
As we all know, President Obama has inserted himself into this, and we have had a Democratic member of the House wearing a hoodie onto the floor of the chamber, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation demanding a Justice Department investigation “and an arrest.” Not, you will note, ‘an arrest if it’s warranted,” but an arrest. Why are they even calling for an investigation?
And yet Cutter and Scarborough (and there will be more, you can be sure) have the absolute gall to point fingers at Republicans/conservatives for ‘politicizing’ the tragedy. Scarborough was particularly upset about Trayvon’s social media posts and pictures being scrutinized, and what he considers a ‘blame the victim’ mentality.
I don’t care how many tattoos Trayvon had, or gold teeth, or whatever. I don’t think they ‘prove’ anything about what did or didn’t happen that night. As far as has been reported, Trayvon had no criminal record, which is the most salient fact about him.
But the dishonest and corrupt media precipitated this scrutiny by trying, from the outset, to shape public perception with selective, slanted, and overly emotional coverage. If Trayvon’s tattoos, gold teeth, etc., don’t matter, why did they deliberately hide them? Why did they deliberately use a picture that was years old? We know the answer. They wanted to create a narrative in which an innocent, sweet boy was mercilessly gunned down because he was black, and anything that might have contributed to the impression that he wasn’t a sympathetic victim had to be suppressed.
If I should need to reiterate—I do not believe that anything that’s been revealed about who Trayvon Martin was, five years after that widely disseminated first picture was taken, constitutes “evidence” of anything. And while I don’t believe—at all—that his shooting was racially motivated, I believe it was avoidable, and that a tragedy has occurred, and the investigation should proceed.
But for the people and organizations who deliberately orchestrated a media firestorm to now start complaining because everyone didn’t just shut up and swallow what they were fed, almost defies belief. They started this conflagration, so their lamentations about where it’s spreading ring pretty hollow.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Trayvon Martin
Okay, this one will be pretty short. Unlike some people, I'm not prepared to rush to judgment, not prepared to decide that the tragic incident which resulted in a young man's death is for sure a 'murder,' not prepared to agree that it's on a par with Emmet Till's murder, not ready to agree it's proof that nothing has changed in this country, not prepared to agree with the increasingly hysterical emotion that passes for activism these days.
What I do agree with is that a tragedy has occurred, Martin's family deserves a thorough, competent and impartial investigation, and George Zimmerman should be held responsible for whatever degree of culpability an investigation and subsequent trial, if there is one, is assigned to him. But I also believe he is entitled, like everyone else, to the presumption of innocence and to due process of law.
'But he should be arrested!' people are screaming. They say that law enforcement failed to do its job. But these same people would be outraged if someone to whom they were sympathetic was arrested without probable cause, and as I understand it, the standards for probable cause in this case were not met. (That said, if the local law enforcement were planning to consider the case closed rather than continue to investigate and try to determine what happened, with an arrest to come if it's warranted, they would be in the wrong. It certainly sounded as if Zimmerman could have avoided a confrontation if he had used better judgment.) But at the scene, the police were confronted with an injured, bleeding man who claimed self-defense, who had already called 911 to report somebody suspicious in his neighborhood, which had been subject to an increasing amount of crime as more houses became vacant. I just read three different articles about this, and none of them even mentioned Zimmerman's injuries or that he had apparently been knocked to the ground. Doesn't need to be mentioned, I guess, if your goal is to stoke the fires. Under this set of circumstances, an arrest was not immediately warranted, but that doesn't mean one was never going to occur, and I've heard nothing to indicate Zimmerman is a flight risk or was refusing to cooperate.
For those who think I am saying the man is innocent--no, I'm not. I don't know that, any more than do those who are sure he's guilty, but that's not stopping _them_. An investigation, conducted by an agency in whom all involved can have confidence, should proceed without delay. But those who are ranting for 'justice,' those like Farrakhan who are making veiled threats of general violence and those who are making explicit death threats to Zimmerman, and those like Sharpton who never seem to have any outrage about racially motivated violence unless the victims are black, don't even know the meaning of the word.
What I do agree with is that a tragedy has occurred, Martin's family deserves a thorough, competent and impartial investigation, and George Zimmerman should be held responsible for whatever degree of culpability an investigation and subsequent trial, if there is one, is assigned to him. But I also believe he is entitled, like everyone else, to the presumption of innocence and to due process of law.
'But he should be arrested!' people are screaming. They say that law enforcement failed to do its job. But these same people would be outraged if someone to whom they were sympathetic was arrested without probable cause, and as I understand it, the standards for probable cause in this case were not met. (That said, if the local law enforcement were planning to consider the case closed rather than continue to investigate and try to determine what happened, with an arrest to come if it's warranted, they would be in the wrong. It certainly sounded as if Zimmerman could have avoided a confrontation if he had used better judgment.) But at the scene, the police were confronted with an injured, bleeding man who claimed self-defense, who had already called 911 to report somebody suspicious in his neighborhood, which had been subject to an increasing amount of crime as more houses became vacant. I just read three different articles about this, and none of them even mentioned Zimmerman's injuries or that he had apparently been knocked to the ground. Doesn't need to be mentioned, I guess, if your goal is to stoke the fires. Under this set of circumstances, an arrest was not immediately warranted, but that doesn't mean one was never going to occur, and I've heard nothing to indicate Zimmerman is a flight risk or was refusing to cooperate.
For those who think I am saying the man is innocent--no, I'm not. I don't know that, any more than do those who are sure he's guilty, but that's not stopping _them_. An investigation, conducted by an agency in whom all involved can have confidence, should proceed without delay. But those who are ranting for 'justice,' those like Farrakhan who are making veiled threats of general violence and those who are making explicit death threats to Zimmerman, and those like Sharpton who never seem to have any outrage about racially motivated violence unless the victims are black, don't even know the meaning of the word.
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