Trayvon's Death Taught Liberals Nothing
By Jack Cashill
AmericanThinker.com
Much too quickly after the death of big Mike Brown in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, the Trayvon Martin dream team -- ambulance chasers Benjamin Crump and Daryl Parks, media hound Al Sharpton -- descended on his still warm body like so many turkey vultures.
One would have hoped that their twisted performance in Florida during the previous two years would have taught America’s liberals something -- prudence, restraint, skepticism -- but it did not. Led by their media, liberals once again rushed in where wise men fear to tread.
As expected, the media insisted on telling the same embarrassingly fraudulent story they had told in the Martin shooting: innocent teen, academically ambitious, minding his own business, profiled by racist white vigilante -- this time a cop -- and shot for no reason other than his race.
Consider the Washington Post’s August 12 article on Michael Brown. Over the picture of Brown in his cap and gown was the sappy headline, “Mike Brown notched a hard-fought victory just days before he was shot: A diploma.”
At first glance, the article looks like it might have come from the Onion or some other satirical site. Brown had been shot three days prior, and, appallingly, the Post reporters could conjure an image of Brown no more accurate than this.
To get his diploma Brown faced “the longest academic odds,” the Post reader was told. “Mike was there every doggone day,” enthused his teacher. And then, the unthinkable happened. Wrote the Post reporters, “As Brown walked down a street with a friend, the 18-year-old man was fatally shot by a police officer in this city in St. Louis’s north suburbs. Brown was unarmed.”
That was it? Brown was just walking down the street with a pal and some faceless white cop ran up and capped him?
As in the Martin case, Crump and pals conjured an emotional icon to sum up the injustice. For Martin, it was the hoodie. For Brown, it was the hands waving in the air. In 2012, NBA players took to wearing hoodies in solidarity. On Monday, the defensive backs of the Washington Redskins came through the tunnel with their hands up. As the USA Today reported, they were “referencing reports that Brown had raised his hands in surrender when he was shot and killed earlier this month by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer.” Sigh!
Progressives in the media and elsewhere felt empowered to repeat this nonsense because they refused to accept the transparently just verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman last summer. The dream team led them down the rabbit hole. Said Crump after the verdict, “Trayvon Martin will forever remain in the annals of history next to Medgar Evers and Emmett Till, as symbols for the fight for equal justice for all.”
Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, was brutally lynched for allegedly flirting with a white woman in 1955 Mississippi. The courageous civil rights leader Evers took a bullet in the back from a racist assassin in 1963 Mississippi. The marijuana-addled Martin took a bullet to the chest while gratuitously bashing in the head of an Hispanic man he did not know in a multi-ethnic Florida community.
“I do not accept the [verdict],” Jesse Jackson told the world. He too compared this trial to Emmett Till’s. “Not one black lawyer on either side, not one black on the jury, not one male on the jury, and so something about it was stacked from the very beginning,” said Jackson, fully ignoring the fact that one of the six jurors was black.
The nation’s media could not resist the urge to join the mob. The day after the verdict the New York Post summed up newsroom sentiments in a one word headline, “Trayvesty.” The U.K. Guardian headline announced “George Zimmerman Skirts Justice With All-White Jury.”
The “Till” card got a ton of play, all of it preposterous. “Trayvon Martin is Our Emmett Till; Our Jury Selection Process Is No Better Now That It Was In 1955,” read the misbegotten headline of a Daily Kos article that denounced the “all-white jury.” The New York Daily News asked, “When will it all end” at the end of a list that began with Emmett Till and ended with Trayvon Martin.
NBC’s go-to source on the Zimmerman trial, attorney Lisa Bloom, had the chance to set the record straight in her book about the case, Suspicion Nation, but she did just the opposite. Her thesis was that a more capable prosecution team would have gotten the guilty verdict Zimmerman deserved.
As Bloom told the story, Zimmerman followed Martin after the officer told him not to, confronted him, pulled his gun, pointed it at Martin for forty seconds during which time Martin screamed in fear. An angry, panicky Zimmerman then shot and killed him. To make this fantastic theory work, Bloom overlooked major chunks of evidence and made stunning mistakes on the evidence she did present.
Her treatment of the only real eyewitness, Witness #6, Jonathan Good, is a case in point. On the night of the shooting, Good told Sanford PD investigator Chris Serino: “So I open my door. It was a black man with a black hoodie on top of the other, either a white guy or now I found out I think it was a Hispanic guy with a red sweatshirt on the ground yelling out help. . . . [The] guy on top in the black hoodie was pretty much just throwing down blows on the guy kind of MMA [mixed martial arts]-style.”
Good repeated his testimony at the trial, and it lined up perfectly with what Zimmerman told the first officer on the scene and with the screams on another 9-1-1 call. There was no case against Zimmerman. The Sanford Police knew it immediately. Bloom chose not to. She spent only one sentence on Good and got everything wrong. It read as follows: “Trayvon remained a threat after the shooting, according to Zimmerman, which is why he asked John Good, the first to come outside after the gunshot, ‘to help me.’”
After reading the Bloom book, I began to think that a whole generation of journalists may have to die off before the people in the media can begin to salvage their industry. If they keep hanging around Ferguson -- or sucking up to ISIS -- that may happen sooner than we think.