In response to Chris Wallace is Wrong About Obama’s Trayvon Statement:

I spent a lot of time crawling through the full text of President Obama’s remarks, after hearing the first few attempts to rewrite what he said, read deeper meaning into it, and pump it up into a great Olympian pronouncement on race in America.  As you noted, the basic premise of his speech implies a racial element to the confrontation between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman that simply did not exist.  It’s as though he wants us to compromise with the people who think Zimmerman is a murderous racist who hunted and killed Martin to slake his bloodlust, and concede that maybe Zimmerman is just kinda sorta racist, or an unwitting victim of institutional racism.

Of course, since Obama’s a machine politician with an agenda to push, he also made a point of digging into those “Stand Your Ground” laws, implying they filled Zimmerman with false confidence and made him trigger-happy: “I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws
to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may
encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies
that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential
altercations.”

A moment later, he rephrased and restated the same dopey point: “If we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone
who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if
there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to
be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d
like to see?” Of course, Trayvon Martin is the one who had abundant opportunities to peacefully exit from the situation; instead, he made a point of ambushing and attacking George Zimmerman, who ended up pinned to the ground with no way to retreat.  The “message to society” Obama should be concerned with is the one that makes a 17-year-old think it’s okay to confront and assault someone who “disrespects” you.

Then there was the moment when Obama said there was “a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of
scenario that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and aftermath might
have been different.”  If that’s not straight-up race-baiting, I don’t know what is.  Something tells me the swooning Obama groupies have already deleted that line from their memory banks.

Note also that Obama didn’t address any of the outrageous slanders being perpetrated by Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or the rest of the “Trayvon was murdered for being black” agitators.  His little speech very conveniently ignored the fact that racial tension is being deliberately ratcheted up by these people, and he wouldn’t dream of directly confronting them, or making a strong statement that it’s wrong to turn the Zimmerman case into a racial psychodrama.