4 Big Lies The Right Loves To Tell About The George Zimmerman Trial

Huge demonstrations held nationwide following the infamous George Zimmerman trial verdict show that many Americans feel outraged over the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by the self-appointed and armed neighborhood watch vigilante, George Zimmerman. They are equally outraged by the racially-charged “Stand Your Ground” law, which proved instrumental to his successful defense. While we freshly mourn Martin’s untimely death and revile Zimmerman for walking free, top conservatives and their right-wing media are hard at work stirring up their usual vile and potent brew of hate, fear, and vitriol.

The following four lies stand out in particular for their pervasiveness, as well as their falseness:

(1) All this public anger over Zimmerman walking out of the courtroom scot-free is President Obama’s fault; (2) The black guy President Obama’s also to blame for Zimmerman going to trial in the first place; (3) President Obama plans on filing a federal civil rights suit against Zimmerman; and … here’s the kicker … (4) now that everyone hates him, poor George Zimmerman will need his gun more than ever!
Let’s break them down:

1. All this public anger over Zimmerman walking out of the courtroom scot-free is President Obama’s fault.

David Edwards from Raw Story reports that when Fox News Sunday‘s Chris Wallace asked failed GOP strategist Karl Rove for his thoughts on the Zimmerman trial verdict, Karl Rove told Fox News Sunday:

I hope that this is the end. President Obama politicized this at the beginning of it, I believe, unfortunately, by injecting himself into it and saying that if Trayvon Martin that if he’d have had a son it would look like Trayvon Martin. We need a president to bring us together, not rip us apart

So Rove and his fellow conservatives think that when Obama famously said, “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he tore our nation asunder. For what – stating the obvious? After all, unless they’re adopting, black couples do tend to have black children. It never even occurred to Rove and company that the reason Martin’s death is proving so polarizing is because so many Americans feel outraged that a grown man would stalk a teenage boy with a gun — against the local police department’s advice — just for looking black like he doesn’t “belong”; stalk him, murder him, and then turn to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law to find legal justification for doing so. Nor does it occur to them that, regardless of color or ethnicity, the events leading to the Zimmerman trial are a nightmare come true for just about every parent in America.

Here’s the video:

 

 

2. The black guy President Obama is also to blame for Zimmerman going on trial in the first place:

Apparently, July 14th’s Fox News Sunday gushed forth a bounteous bonanza of Zimmerman trial-related idiocy. Josh Israel from Think Progress offers some delightful tidbits from Congressman Steve King (R-IA), whom you may remember as the “haunted ice sculpture” skewered by “The Colbert Report” for his bizarre defense of dog-fighting. When Wallace asked King the leading question, “Should George Zimmerman ever have been prosecuted?” King winsomely responded that Zimmerman never should have gone on trial in the first place, and it’s all Obama and his justice department’s fault that our hero had to endure such a horrific ordeal:

From what I have seen of the evidence, I would say no. My sympathy goes out also to the Martin family and the Zimmerman family for this ordeal that they’ve been through. The evidence didn’t support prosecution and the Justice Department engaged in this, the President engaged in this and turned it into a political issue that should have been handled exclusively with law and order. I regret that this all happened. I’m sorry that it was turned into a race issue by the media. Otherwise, it would have been tried or not tried depending on the laws that were there. This is unfortunate.

Of course, we all know that George Zimmerman was entirely innocent, and only the black guys are to blame. Trayvon Martin had no business walking around that neighborhood while being black visiting his father, and Barack Obama had no business being black being president when Zimmerman finally murdered the quarry he’d been hunting all evening. There’s just one problem: Obama had nothing to do with Zimmerman being charged. Although local police didn’t charge Zimmerman, the U.S. Justice Department planned to conduct an investigation, and Florida’s state’s attorney immediately sent the case to a grand jury. The president didn’t make his “if I had a son” statement followed by his call for a full investigation until three days later. But, as Ronald Reagan once famously said, “Facts are stupid things.”

3. President Obama plans on filing a federal civil rights suit against Zimmerman:

Even if you haven’t read the conservative National Report‘s article about the Obama’s administration taking “the steps needed to file federal charges” against George Zimmerman, you’ve probably heard it from all the trolls lurking around on the interwebs. The article claims:

Just when we thought the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case was over after Zimmerman’s acquittal, the Obama Administration has taken the steps needed to file federal charges, thus sidestepping the well established double jeopardy, against Zimmerman. Unidentified sources within the Administration have confirmed that Obama, and Justice Eric Holder at the Department of Justice have filed charges against Zimmerman in the Federal Court system.

Oops, there’s just one problem with this: legally, the Obama Administration can’t “sidestep” prohibitions against double jeopardy, which prevents a person from being tried more than once for the same crime. But the right keeps accusing our president of overstepping his bounds and pushing the legal limits of executive privilege. Apparently, and despite Obama’s color, they seem to have confused him with George W. Bush. Zimmerman was charged with murder, found not guilty, and therefore he can’t be tried for murder again, no matter what Obama wants.

However, a civil rights lawsuit would be a totally different thing. As a neighborhood watch member, Zimmerman can be legally held responsible for discriminating against Martin due to his color, his age, and/or his appearance. Double jeopardy won’t prevent Martin’s family from pursuing a civil law suit, nor the NAACP from demanding a civil rights investigation, because these would involve crimes other than murder. But these fresh new Hells for Zimmerman have nothing to do with the president.

The article even manages to weave Al Sharpton (another blamable black guy!) into its tapestry of lies:

While Al Sharpton and the entire staff at MSNBC has advocated heavily for a guilty verdict, we on the right have been praying for an acquittal for Zimmerman who was simply exercising his right to ‘Stand your Ground’ (a Florida statute that apparently allows individuals to follow, track, then attack young Black youth before shooting them dead if feeling at all threatened throughout the process).

Never mind the fact that 22 states also have legislation similar to Florida’s insanely dangerous ‘Stand Your Ground’ law on the books. Never mind that these laws are proven to be motivated by racial bias and are basically written by the eeee-ville National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Let’s blame black people for making psychotic gun nuts want to shoot them.

4. And now, poor George Zimmerman will need his gun more than ever!

With potential new troubles looming, Zimmerman may feel grateful for small blessings. Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’Mara, told ABC News in an exclusive interview that “George Zimmerman will get his gun back now that he has been cleared of murder.” O’Mara said that Zimmerman needs the weapon ‘even more’ than before. Yep, that’s right, we’re talking about the Kel-Tec 9 used to kill Martin that fateful night back in February 2012. One can’t help but wonder whether this grisly memento mori so ardently desired by our gun-toting vigilante will still be splattered with the dead teenager’s dried blood. And why does Zimmerman want his back gun so badly? It’s because everybody hates him, that’s why. When asked whether his client plans on packing heat, O’Mara declared:

Yes. [There’s] even more reason now, isn’t there? There are a lot of people out there who actually hate him, though they shouldn’t.

You’d think that after all this, Zimmerman would never want to see a gun again, but no. Of course he hasn’t learned anything from this experience. And much like Dick Cheney back in his vice presidential days, Zimmerman’s hiding in an undisclosed location for fear of retribution. He may have avoided jail time, but now he’s discovering what Jean Paul Sartre so aptly portrays in his play “No Exit“: Hell is other people.

(Postcard by Elisabeth Parker, quote by Michael Hayne, FLORIDA lettering from vintage postcard by Curt Teich.)

Edited and published by WP.