By Ben Shapiro
3/28/2012
The facts of the Trayvon Martin case are still unclear. But that hasn't stopped the all-knowing, all-seeing President Obama from voicing his opinion of the situation. "You know," said Obama, "if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. All of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen."
Leave aside the fact that Obama's race is completely irrelevant to the situation -- when French Jews were killed in Toulouse last week, Joe Lieberman didn't see fit to announce that those Jews looked like his relatives. Leave aside the media's insane portrayal of Trayvon as a saint, despite his record of graffiti, probable jewelry theft and violence, and drug possession. Leave aside the fact that while Obama's theoretical son may have looked like Trayvon at age 12, he would likely look nothing like Trayvon at age 17, what with the tattoos and gold grill.
Focus instead on the last part of Obama's statement: "All of us have to do some soul-searching."
No, Mr. President. We don't.
Obama implies that we all share some collective guilt for Trayvon's killing. And this is a favorite tactic of the left: We all created the "climate" that led Trayvon Martin to bang George Zimmerman's head on the pavement and led George Zimmerman to shoot Trayvon point blank. The "climate" argument allows for all sorts of political maneuvering and situational exploitation. It allows MSNBC hosts to go on the air and blame Rush Limbaugh. It gives leeway for congressmen to invite Trayvon's parents to the Hill to pander to minority members of Congress about Florida's "stand your ground law" -- a law that had nothing to do with the killing if Zimmerman is really as guilty as his opponents suggest, and a law that may have saved Zimmerman's life if the situation went down as Zimmerman and witnesses suggest.
But, of course, none of this actually has to do with Trayvon Martin's death. The death was either the fault of Zimmerman or Martin or both. It wasn't the fault of my 82-year-old Jewish grandmother recovering from eye surgery. It had nothing to do with the Vietnamese family in Downtown Los Angeles trying to keep a grocery running. Neither Trayvon nor Zimmerman were Rush Limbaugh listeners. This absurd "we're all guilty" mentality is just another way for liberals to escape the bottom line conclusion: individuals, not societies, are responsible for the acts they undertake.
But as Rahm Emanuel might put it, in every tragic death lies a liberal opportunity. When Communist Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK, liberals quickly blamed it on a supposed "climate of hate" -- Jackie Kennedy even said she was disappointed that the assassin was a "silly little Communist." When nutcase Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords, the left quickly suggested that it was overheated rhetoric that had led to the shooting. When Islamists riot in the Middle East, President Obama suggests that it's all our fault for backing Israel. Every bad act has a culture-wide root cause, and that root cause is almost invariably conservatism -- even when the facts show that the root cause was Communism, degraded pop culture or hatred of the West.
Which truly means that the left doesn't care about the individual bad acts. The left didn't care about Lee Harvey Oswald. They cared about all the conservative opponents of JFK. The left didn't care about Jared Loughner. They cared about Sarah Palin, who had nothing to do with the sick freak. The left doesn't care about George Zimmerman. They care about everybody who opposes President Obama and the liberal agenda -- which is why Obama inserted himself into this story in the first place.
President Obama's rhetorical flourish was far more than a rhetorical flourish. It was an active attempt to change the narrative, to magnify the Trayvon situation into an "America is racist, and you're part of it" meme. What's the cure for that ill? Why, voting for every liberal line item, including the Obama re-election, of course!
Obama's words are an injustice. They are unjust to Martin and Zimmerman, who deserve a full factual inquiry rather than racial grandstanding. They are unjust to the Florida police, whose jobs are complicated by having to worry about national unrest over this individual case. And most of all, they are unjust to Americans, who have nothing whatsoever to do with Martin's death -- but whom Obama can milk for political gain so long as he blames them at large for every bad act under the sun.
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