In the first years of the tv show Saturday Night Live, the character Emily Litella (played by Gilda Radner) would discourse angrily about something, but it always turned out that she had gotten it wrong simply because she misheard it. The one I remember was her righteous snit about a campaign that she thought was about firing the handicapped, only to be told the campaign was really about getting people to hire the handicapped. She would then meekly say, “Never mind.”
Our media are guilty of the same business with respect to the George Zimmerman trial. (See here for a timeline of their misdeeds.) They thought it was a simple case of a white profiling and shooting a black. But it wasn’t that simple, for Zimmerman wasn’t exactly white, he didn’t profile based on race, and the shooting occurred only after a fight that Trayvon Martin initiated. As far as I know, every single mistake they made in this case was in Martin’s favor.
But don’t expect the media to apologize and say, “Never mind.” They will continue to believe that Zimmerman was guilty of something, if not some degree of murder, then of profiling. Yet, as someone has pointed out, if Zimmerman had become president in 2004, the media would have championed him as our first black president.
Anyway, the continuing anger of the left over Zimmerman is strange because one would think they would be relieved that the incident wasn’t what they initially thought. It means that the wanton shooting of a black teenager just because he was black doesn’t happen these days. That they continue to believe that this is exactly what happened, despite plenty of information being available to contradict them, seems to be a yearning to have the facts exactly as they think they ought to be. It seems to be a yearning for the days when Jim Crow laws ruled.
But the exact opposite is true (and has been for a long time; wasn’t this what was going on in Bonfire of the Vanities?). What we have instead are cases in which the media and race hustlers have whipped up a frenzy on dubious grounds. This is just our era’s version of The Ox-Bow Incident, except that so far they are doing it in a courtroom (with the victim getting off) and not through mobs.
By the way, here is the opinion of one black man on the whole business. And let me also remind people that progressives, by their own standards, aren’t so progressive compared with the right. This is one of the theses I argue for in my book on soccer. I saw who has supported soccer over the last forty years and who hasn’t. If you’re going to claim you respect other cultures, then that means showing some respect for their sports, and the American left has yet to do that. As always, my demand is that leftists be more critical of themselves than of others.
Our media are guilty of the same business with respect to the George Zimmerman trial. (See here for a timeline of their misdeeds.) They thought it was a simple case of a white profiling and shooting a black. But it wasn’t that simple, for Zimmerman wasn’t exactly white, he didn’t profile based on race, and the shooting occurred only after a fight that Trayvon Martin initiated. As far as I know, every single mistake they made in this case was in Martin’s favor.
But don’t expect the media to apologize and say, “Never mind.” They will continue to believe that Zimmerman was guilty of something, if not some degree of murder, then of profiling. Yet, as someone has pointed out, if Zimmerman had become president in 2004, the media would have championed him as our first black president.
Anyway, the continuing anger of the left over Zimmerman is strange because one would think they would be relieved that the incident wasn’t what they initially thought. It means that the wanton shooting of a black teenager just because he was black doesn’t happen these days. That they continue to believe that this is exactly what happened, despite plenty of information being available to contradict them, seems to be a yearning to have the facts exactly as they think they ought to be. It seems to be a yearning for the days when Jim Crow laws ruled.
But the exact opposite is true (and has been for a long time; wasn’t this what was going on in Bonfire of the Vanities?). What we have instead are cases in which the media and race hustlers have whipped up a frenzy on dubious grounds. This is just our era’s version of The Ox-Bow Incident, except that so far they are doing it in a courtroom (with the victim getting off) and not through mobs.
By the way, here is the opinion of one black man on the whole business. And let me also remind people that progressives, by their own standards, aren’t so progressive compared with the right. This is one of the theses I argue for in my book on soccer. I saw who has supported soccer over the last forty years and who hasn’t. If you’re going to claim you respect other cultures, then that means showing some respect for their sports, and the American left has yet to do that. As always, my demand is that leftists be more critical of themselves than of others.
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