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We’re cursed with a president who can’t shut up. Jennifer Rubin has a couple of posts on his Zimmerman/Trayvon comments.
… Even his analysis of African Americans’ troubles seemed condescending and defensive:
“Now, this isn’t to say that the African American community is naïve about the fact that African American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system; that they’re disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact — although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.”
The violent past is responsible? Perhaps Obama might concede that a breakdown in the family, a coarsening of the culture and a host of other facts might be responsible. But today was all about seeing things, you see, from the narrow perspective of race.
The president acknowledged partway through his remarks that the conversation about race he and his attorney general are urging is better done without politicians. Precisely. So why was he there? Anti-racial bias is at an all-time low, interracial marriage is rising and, as he pointed out, with each successive generation race becomes less of a big deal.
The presidency is not a parochial office, yet Obama fosters a view of America that says African Americans can’t help but see the country in terms of race. That is a sad and depressing view of our country. It suggests that African Americans can’t judge their fellow citizen individually, by the content of their character. It doesn’t require that we grow beyond the past or that we see things as they are now.
The president at the very end argued that “those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature, as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions.” Too bad he doesn’t follow his own advice.
Ms. Rubin has more.
… Despite his background in constitutional law, the president seems to have little sense of the division between politics and law. It is all one big blur, and when convenient, legal cases are simply another opportunity to stir his base. He feels no compunction about running roughshod over defendants’ right to due process. Every case is just fodder for the cause of the moment, a way of winking at his base. (Yeah, we know he’s guilty. We’re on the same side.) And if the country is all the more polarized, well, so be it.
It is one and the same with Obama’s desire for Supreme Court justices who operate with “compassion.” Once again, the impartial administration of justice is sacrificed at the altar of progressive politics. Never mind that justices’ oath of office compels them to treat rich and poor alike.
General issues (race, gender, gun rights) don’t necessarily fit specific legal cases. We try individuals, not causes. Great societal issues should not displace the particular facts and law at issue in each case. (Hence the media infatuation with the “stand your ground” statute, which was entirely irrelevant in a case of simple self-defense.)
In this administration we have seen unprecedented efforts not, as the president lamely called for after the trial, to “widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities,” but to tear them asunder. Someday maybe we’ll get that post-racial presidency.
Peter Wehner on why this trial and its aftermath is so discouraging.
… What we’re seeing from the left is post-modernism on full display. The facts, the truth and objective reality are subordinate to the progressive narrative. In this particular instance many liberals so want the killing of Trayvon Martin to be driven by bigotry–which would serve as both an indictment of racial attitudes in America and turn a horrible mistake into a “modern-day lynching”–that they will make it so, even if it requires twisting the truth into something unrecognizable. What matters, after all, is The Cause. And everything, including basic facts, must be bent to fit it. This kind of systematic deconstruction of truth is fairly common in college liberal arts courses all across America. But when it becomes the primary mode of interpretation in a murder trial, it is something else again.
Most of us, when we hear the words “justice must be done,” believe that what is right, reasonable, fair and in accordance with the facts be done. But some on the left have something else in mind. For them, justice is a tool in a larger political struggle, a means to an end. Justice can be at odds with reality if reality is at odds with liberalism. Which is why the efforts to turn the Zimmerman verdict into a racial miscarriage of justice is so discouraging and so damaging.
William Jacobsen says the Feds want Zimmerman any way they can get him.
This no longer is about George Zimmerman, it’s about a Department of Justice serving political interests.
There’s a reason we stand up for the rights of individuals like George Zimmerman against an overreaching State.
It’s not just about the individual. It’s about all of us, and the reality that there but for fortune could go you or I.
The highly politicized Department of Justice desperately wants to bring federal charges to placate the race-agitators, and has joined in the witch hunt.
Via The Orlando Sentinel, DOJ solicits email tips in Zimmerman civil rights probe (h/t readers and commenters):
“The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday afternoon appealed to civil rights groups and community leaders, nationally and in Sanford, for help investigating whether a federal criminal case might be brought against George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, one advocate said.
The DOJ has also set up a public email address to take in tips on its civil rights investigation….”
Power Line gives us a view into the freak show in the Ivy League.
It should come as no surprise that some of the very worst rants about George Zimmerman’s acquittal are coming from an Ivy League professor. The competition is stiff, but will be hard-pressed to keep up with Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Zimmerman verdict has caused Butler to conclude that God is “a white racist god with a problem” who “is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.”
There are conclusions Butler could have reached short of equating her caricature of Zimmerman with God. She could have settled for the less flamboyant view that there is no God. But flamboyance, one suspects, is what landed Butler the Ivy League gig and appearances on CNN and MSNBC.
Butler might also have concluded, years ago, that God is a black god with a problem who guns down young blacks. After all, there is a near-epidemic of shootings of young African-Americans by other African-Americans. …
The Daily Caller has more from this “professor.”
… As Campus Reform notes, Butler doubled down on her comments with a tweet on Monday saying, “y’all take care of the KKKlan Twitter egg avi’s till I return. I see my sheet they don’t like me calling out their racist god #toobad.”
She’s been tweeting incessantly since, mostly about elections in 2014 and how she blocks people from her Twitter feed.
At Rate My Professors, Butlerdoes not fare well. The sample size is small, but the reviews are abysmal.
“Pathetic,” reports one unhappy student. “This teacher is pathetically bad at her supposed job. Do not give this untalented instructor any more classes.”
Another student describes her as a “loudmouth idiot with crazy Don King hair” and “poorly substantiated and academically unsound” opinions. …
National Review piece on the crazy prosecutor at the center of the Zimmerman trial.
Angela Corey, by all accounts, is no Atticus Finch. She is “one hell of a trial lawyer,” says a Florida defense attorney who has known her for three decades — but the woman who has risen to national prominence as the “tough as nails” state attorney who prosecuted George Zimmerman is known for scorching the earth. And some of her prosecutorial conduct has been, well, troubling at best.
Corey, a Jacksonville native, took a degree in marketing from FloridaStateUniversity before pursuing her J.D. at the University of Florida. She became a Florida prosecutor in 1981 and tried everything from homicides to juvenile cases in the ensuing 26 years. In 2008, Corey was elected state attorney for Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit, taking over from Harry Shorstein — the four-term state attorney who had fired her from his office a year earlier, citing “long-term issues” regarding her supervisory performance.
When Corey came in, she cleaned house. Corey fired half of the office’s investigators, two-fifths of its victim advocates, a quarter of its 35 paralegals, and 48 other support staff — more than one-fifth of the office. Then she sent a letter to Florida’s senators demanding that they oppose Shorstein’s pending nomination as a U.S. attorney. “I told them he should not hold a position of authority in his community again, because of his penchant for using the grand jury for personal vendettas,” she wrote.
Corey knows about personal vendettas. They seem to be her specialty. When Ron Littlepage, a journalist for the Florida Times-Union, wrote a column criticizing her handling of the Christian Fernandez case — in which Corey chose to prosecute a twelve-year-old boy for first-degree murder, who wound up locked in solitary confinement in an adult jail prior to his court date — she “fired off a two-page, single-spaced letter on official state-attorney letterhead hinting at lawsuits for libel.”
And that was moderate. …