I Told You So!

[art leong]

Eddie.
You talk about a lot of stuff that sounds good to you but has absolutly no basis in law.
Fact. Under the Florida stand your ground law the person that confronts you does not have to be armed. So yes it is legal to shoot an unarmed person. If he was attacked he had every right to shoot.
Zimmerman was not breaking any law by carrying the gun.
The rest of the country does not have to comply with your california justice system.
I wasn't there. But neither were you. So let this play out in the courts and we will see what really went on.

And you should add to your list. The autopsy showed Trayvon had cuts on his knuckles similar to those someone would get from punching someone.

[Eddies66]

Originally Posted by art leong

Eddie.
You talk about a lot of stuff that sounds good to you but has absolutly no basis in law.
Fact. Under the Florida stand your ground law the person that confronts you does not have to be armed. So yes it is legal to shoot an unarmed person. If he was attacked he had every right to shoot.
Zimmerman was not breaking any law by carrying the gun.
The rest of the country does not have to comply with your california justice system.
I wasn't there. But neither were you. So let this play out in the courts and we will see what really went on.

And you should add to your list. The autopsy showed Trayvon had cuts on his knuckles similar to those someone would get from punching someone.

I just don't see this playing out in the courts, the only person that knows the truth for the 8 minutes from the time Mr. Zimmermand left his car and Mr. Martin was shot will never come out unless the defense lawyer puts Mr. Zimmerman on the stand.....that will never happen.

My comments may not have a basis in the law but you can bet this and more will be brought to bear on Mr. Zimmerman's character and creditability.

[Alan Roehrich]

Originally Posted by Eddies66

I just don't see this playing out in the courts, the only person that knows the truth for the 8 minutes from the time Mr. Zimmermand left his car and Mr. Martin was shot will never come out unless the defense lawyer puts Mr. Zimmerman on the stand.....that will never happen.

My comments may not have a basis in the law but you can bet this and more will be brought to bear on Mr. Zimmerman's character and creditability.

The law. That's where we get "justice". Yeah, you're right, your comments have zero basis in law or factual evidence.

Now we have evidence that lily white young Martin was smoking pot at the time, it was in his blood and urine.

But hey, ONLY Zimmerman's character and credibility are in question. At least according to Eddie. Martin is a saint, an innocent paragon of goodness, guilty only of "walking while black".

Well, except for the part where Zimmerman's injuries are entirely consistent with his version of the assault, a bloody nose, which was broken, two black eyes, a laceration on his forehead, a laceration on the back of his head, and various contusions.

Seems pot wasn't the only thing the medical examiner found when examining Martin, there were also lacerations and contusions on his hands consistent with striking another person with his fists. That and the nature of the gunshot wound also is consistent with Zimmerman's version of events.

Don't worry Eddie, you'll get "justice". Eric Holder's thugs will try Zimmerman for "civil rights violations". Yeah, Eric Holder, that thug who let Mexicans have guns to kill Border Patrol officers. The same thug who dismissed the case against the Black Panthers who were seen by multiple witnesses with weapons at polling places intimidating voters. No bias there, another true paragon of truth, justice, and the American way.

[Alan Roehrich]

Thomas Sowell's take on the case:

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case against George Zimmerman for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, what has happened already is enough to turn the stomach of anyone who believes in either truth or justice. An amazing proportion of the media has given us a painful demonstration of the thinking — and lack of thinking — that prevailed back in the days of the old Jim Crow South, where complexion counted more than facts in determining how people were treated.

One of the first things presented in the media was a transcript of a conversation between George Zimmerman and a police dispatcher. The last line in most of the transcripts shown on TV was that of the police dispatcher telling Zimmerman not to continue following Trayvon Martin. That became the basis of many media criticisms of Zimmerman for continuing to follow him. Only later did I see a transcript of that conversation on the Sean Hannity program that included Zimmerman's reply to the police dispatcher: "O.K."

That reply removed the only basis for assuming that Zimmerman did in fact continue to follow Trayvon Martin. At this point, neither I nor the people who assumed that he continued to follow the teenager have any basis in fact for believing that he did or didn't. Why was that reply edited out by so many in the media? Because too many people in the media see their role as filtering and slanting the news to fit their own vision of the world. The issue is not one of being "fair" to "both sides" but, more fundamentally, of being honest with their audience.




NBC News carried the editing even further, removing one of the police dispatcher's questions, to which Zimmerman was responding, in order to feed the vision of Zimmerman as a racist. In the same vein were the repeated references to Zimmerman as a "white Hispanic." Zimmerman is half-white. So is Barack Obama. But does anyone refer to Obama as a "white African"? All these verbal games grow out of the notion that complexion tells you who is to be blamed and who is not. It is a dangerous game because race is no game. If the tragic history of the old Jim Crow South in this country is not enough to show that, the history of racial and ethnic tragedies is written in blood in countries around the world. Millions have lost their lives because they looked different, talked differently or belonged to a different religion.

In the midst of the Florida tragedy, there was a book published with the unwieldy title, "No Matter What ... They'll Call This Book Racist." Obviously it was written well before the shooting in Florida, but its message — that there is rampant hypocrisy and irrationality in public discussions of race — could not have been better timed.

Author Harry Stein, a self-described "reformed white liberal," raised by parents who were even further left, exposes the illogic and outright fraudulence that lies behind so much of what is said about race in the media, in politics and in our educational institutions. He asks a very fundamental question: "Why, even after the Duke University rape fiasco, does the media continue to give credence to every charge of racism?" Harry Stein credits Shelby Steele's book "White Guilt" with opening his eyes to one of the sources of many counterproductive things said and done about race today — namely, guilt about what was done to blacks and other minorities in the past.

Let us talk sense, like adults. Nothing that is done to George Zimmerman — justly or unjustly — will unlynch a single black man who was tortured and killed in the Jim Crow South for a crime he didn't commit. Letting hoodlums get away with hoodlumism today does not undo a single injustice of the past. It is not even a favor to the hoodlums, for many of whom hoodlumism is just the first step on a path that leads to the penitentiary, and maybe to the execution chamber. Winston Churchill said, "If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost." He wasn't talking about racial issues, but what he said applies especially where race is involved.


Part II, from Thomas Sowell:



Around this time of year, I sometimes hear from parents who have been appalled to learn that the child they sent away to college to become educated has instead been indoctrinated with the creed of the left. They often ask if I can suggest something to have their offspring read over the summer, in order to counteract this indoctrination. This year the answer is a no-brainer. It is a book with the unwieldy title, "No matter what ... they'll call this book Racist" by Harry Stein, a writer for what is arguably America's best magazine, "City Journal." In a little over 200 very readable pages, the author deftly devastates with facts the nonsense about race that dominates much of what is said in the media and in academia.

There is no subject on which lies and half-truths have become so much the norm on ivy-covered campuses than is the subject of race. Moreover, anyone who even questions these lies and half-truths is almost certain to be called a "racist," especially in academic institutions which loudly proclaim a "diversity" that is confined to demographics, and all but forbidden when it comes to a diversity of ideas. The ultimate irony is that many of those who publicly promote or accept the prevailing party line on race do not themselves accept it privately. A few years ago, when a faculty vote on affirmative action was proposed at the University of California at Berkeley, there was a fierce disagreement as to whether that vote should be taken by secret ballot or at an open faculty meeting. Both sides understood that many professors would vote one way in secret and the opposite way in public. In short, hypocrisy is the norm in discussions of race — and not just at Berkeley. Moreover, it is the norm among blacks as well as whites. Black civil rights attorneys and activists who denounce whites for objecting to the bussing of kids from the ghetto into their neighborhood schools have not hesitated to send their own children to private schools, instead of subjecting them to this kind of "diversity" in the public schools.

As for whites, author Harry Stein says that many white liberals "give blacks a pass on behaviors and attitudes they would regard as unacceptable and even abhorrent in their own kind." This, of course, is no favor to those particular blacks — especially those among young ghetto blacks whose counterproductive behavior puts them on a path that leads nowhere but to welfare, at best, and behind bars or death in gangland street warfare at worst. In the introduction to his book, Stein says that his purpose is "to talk honestly about race." He accomplishes that purpose in a fact-filled book that should be a revelation, especially to young people of any race, who have been fed a party line in schools and colleges across America. He looks behind the highly sanitized picture of Al Sharpton, as a civil rights statesman with his own MSNBC program and his designation as a White House adviser, to the factual reality of a man with a trail of slime that has included inciting mobs, in some cases costing innocent lives.

Positive news also receives its due. Some readers of this book may be surprised to learn that the ban on racial preferences in the University of California system did not lead to a disappearance of blacks from the system, as the supporters of affirmative action claimed would happen. On the contrary, more blacks graduated from the system after the ban — for the very common sense reason that they were now admitted to University of California campuses where they qualified, rather than to places like UCLA and Berkeley, where they had often been admitted to fill a quota, and often failed.

Stein's book is also one of the few places where many young people will see the actual words of people like Bill Cosby, Shelby Steele, Pat Moynihan and others who have opposed the fashionable platitudes that confuse racial issues. Whether those words convince all readers is not the point. The point, especially for young readers in our schools and colleges, is that this may be one of the few times they will ever encounter a fundamentally different set of views on race — views that they have only heard referred to as coming from "Uncle Toms" or "racists."