In what can only be described as gushing coverage of President Obama’s racially-divisive remarks about the Zimmerman case Friday (where he once again injected race in a situation where there the evidence proves race wasn’t involved), the Associated Press goes through Obama’s racial history, but ignores any context that might put the president in a negative light.
AP writer Christine Armario, naturally, refuses to identify the Hispanic George Zimmerman as Hispanic. Instead, she writes, “Martin was black. Zimmerman identifies himself as Hispanic.” But her reporting on Obama’s past is just as Orwellian:
It wasn’t the first time Obama has spoken about race to the nation. He delivered a speech on race during his 2008 presidential campaign after controversy arose around comments made by his former pastor. And the issue has surfaced from time to time during his presidency, including in 2009, when he invited black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the white police sergeant who arrested him for disorderly conduct for a 40-minute chat on the Rose Garden patio.
This is all true. But what the AP apparently doesn’t want its readers to know is that Obama’s 2008 speech on race was a defensive one necessary to tamp down the furor after America discovered that the then-presidential candidate’s mentor and pastor of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, was an anti-American racial demagogue.
The 2009 situation involving Gates and the white police sergeant was also a clean-up in aisle six for Obama. This was the first instance of the president sticking his nose into a local crime to stir up racial division (a warm up for the Zimmerman case.) When asked about the case by a reporter, and before having all the facts, Obama accused the police of having “acted stupidly.”
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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