Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The Zimmerman Case Was Going To Produce Heartache

According to a Politico headline Hillary Clinton said the George Zimmerman verdict brought ‘deep heartache’. The text of the story does not have a direct quote. The quotes from the Hill do not directly refer to the verdict. I wish she had said that no matter what the verdict was, it would have brought deep heartache. Zimmerman and his family and many others, including me, were convinced he was innocent, and any guilty verdict would have given us deep heartache. I am sorry Trayvon died and for his family and friends. I am also sorry for all the bigots who thought Zimmerman was guilty, for their anger, their sadness, their ignorance and their bigotry.

Eugene Robinson is one of those ignorant bigots.  Here is his key paragraph:
Our society considers young black men to be dangerous, interchangeable, expendable, guilty until proven innocent. This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid.
Ann Althouse shows how not to be ignorant and bigoted in her reply.  Here is her key paragraph:
Here's my response to what you just said. I think our society demonstrated great care toward Trayvon Martin, even to the point of putting Zimmerman through a trial that should not have happened. That is, it was an excess of care for Martin, a bending-over-backwards to show that we care about Martin and all the young men he was seen to represent. And now, after an extensive, careful trial, and a jury verdict that clearly hewed to well-honed instructions about evidence and burden of proof, you still want to use it to assert that we don't care. If that's the kind of conversation we get when we try to respond to the invitation to have a conversation, can you see why it's something we avoid?
I am not sorry at all for the President, who either should have kept his mouth shut or should have said that Zimmerman looked like a relative also. Zimmerman's great grandfather was black after all. From what I can tell, Zimmerman was blacker than Homer Plessy, plantiff in the separate but equal case, Plessy v. Ferguson.  I am not sorry for the Holder, Perez and the other Justice Department hacks who should resign from the bar and politics. I am not sorry for Sharpton, Jackson and the not-always hoodless members of the black KKK who need to take up missionary work overseas and stay out of race issues in America.  Zimmerman took a black girl to prom. He tutored black kids.  And he worked hard defending a black man from bad police work and bad prosecution.

I am also not sorry for the prosecution, who should be disbarred and subject to criminal prosecution and civil suit for violating people's rights.