Time for a reality check on the ‘politicizing’ of the Trayvon Martin tragedy

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.