Tom Maguire, who has been acting as George Zimmerman’s pro bono internet defense attorney since day one, has finally been forced to admit that his adopted client (and his client’s wife) are “stupid, scheming, lying weasels.” The funny thing about that is that stupid, scheming, lying weasels tend to lie and scheme about a lot of things. It’s a character trait. You could ask John Edwards about it. He knows. These scheming weasels have a tendency to sucker people into believing that they’re something they’re not. You know, like innocent.
All I wanted was for Zimmerman to face charges for wrongful death. I’m happy to let the prosecutors decide what specific counts to charge him with. And I’m happy to let the jury decide whether Zimmerman is guilty under the law. I’m not going to try to prosecute him myself.
What I find offensive is this desire I see on the right, and from bloggers like Maguire, to come to Zimmerman’s defense. What’s the best thing you can say about this guy? That maybe he harassed the wrong dude and was getting his ass kicked for it? And that’s just maybe. Because I’ve heard the tape, and it sounds a lot more like a teenager squealing to me than a 28-year old lying scheming weasel.
Anyway, because he’s an idiot, Zimmerman is headed back to jail. I’ll feel better about a potential acquittal if he stays there until the trial begins next year.
I keep coming back to the compilations of ‘loyalty and circling the wagons’ that Chris Mooney’s new book The Republican Brain explores. His AlterNet piece is a good insight into why Tom Mc and his followers have been so compelled to blindly protect Zimmerman.
I wish this author would explain why light-skinned or white Hispanics–cops or vigilante-types like Zimmerman, have evinced such a crushing need to off black youth and men. To ascribe it to prison ethos doesn’t explain it all.
I don’t know George Zimmerman or Trayvon Martin…based on factual evidence, this is an ultimate grey area…no hero, no victim…two individuals, both in pain, whose paths crossed, and whose individual filters led each to believe the other was an evil aggressor…which side reacted more violently? Right or Left? Please be internally honest.
I’m sure you’re always this reserved when the sides are reversed…
Well…no. For all the gray areas, one thing we know with perfect certainty is that Trayvon Martin was a perceived evil aggressor who was trying to get away from George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was a perceived evil aggressor who was following Martin, with a gun, after the 911 dispatcher told him not to. Don’t you think that’s relevant?
“no victim”? are you serious?
I would tend to think of the guy with three bullet holes in his chest as a victim, but that’s me.
fuck this grey area shyt.
Trayvon’s crime was WALKING WHILE BLACK.
he had iced tea and skittles.
where the fuck is the ‘gray area’?
if Zimmerman hadn’t of profiled, stalked and hunted him.
Trayvon would still be alive.
take that gray area bullshyt somewhere else
The righties who are still defending Zimmermann are doing so because the number 1 job of the righties is to protect the perceived legitimacy and reputation of their ideology. The “rightwing ideology is never wrong and never fails; it is only wronged and failed by people who incorrectly apply it”.
Earlier on in this tragic saga some prominent gasbags from the upper echelons of the wingnutosphere did throw Zimmermann under the bus so to speak. NRA blowhards and a number of pseudo-intellectuals of the Rich Lowry/Tucker Carlson class tried to make the case that the Zimmermann case was not an extended Castle Doctrine, Stand Your Ground case because Zimmermann followed Martin, etc. I suspect the boiling and virulent racism aimed specifically at black people coming from the vast wingnut ignorati simply overwhelmed that phony position and so the strategy had to change a bit.
I do now believe Zimmermann will be convicted, probably of the lesser manslaughter charge,and will serve time in prison.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the various socialist/communist splinter groups that argue that the failings of Stalin, Mao, or whichever Marxist god they embrace were all because they didn’t implement socialism/communism correctly; the USSR was a failed state because it was tainted by capitalism; and so on. It’s the exact same kind of contortions to rationalize clear failure with an ideology that cannot possibly fail.
It’s also the same rubric employed by the Cheney/Bush neocons in defense of their warmaking once it became obvious their insane agenda made things worse instead of better.
And similar to the arguments by the ‘austerity’ advocates in the financial arena in defense of that idiotic and catastrophically destructive idea.
They convince people to choose to support policies and ideas based on what they’ve duped them into believing is “supposed to be true”, rather than “what is true”. And this sort of foundation for decisionmaking never results in beneficial outcomes.
It’s not complicated. They defend Zimmerman because the scenario of a gun toting “authority” enforcing violent order upon a suspicious/menacing black youth is very important to them psychologically. I don’t see how else you can interpret their statements.
That’s pretty much how I see it, too–they defend Zimmerman because they identify with him. I was surprised at first that anyone would defend Zimmerman, but I guess I wasn’t taking into account how many people see hoodies as weapons of mass destruction.
And it was all the better to righties that Zimmerman was partly Hispanic. They could do their: “See, we aren’t racist!!” bit.
his having a black ancestor in the family tree. Fairly screams out, “Soul brother,” circa 1967, during any Sixties riot, doesn’t it? When that information came out, I imagined the sarcasm and disgust of black people all over at this new ploy. And I wasn’t far wrong. So this one missed the mark as will the others.
Some people live in a world of guns and boogeymen.
It’s a reflex with Wingnuts — they saw the word “gun” and then
SECONDAMENDEMENTFEMACAMPSONEWORLDGOVERNMENT!
http://ohhshoot.blogspot.com/
Why did lefties insist from the first day (as I did, I confess) that Zimmerman had to have broken some law and that the behavior of the local authorities in releasing him was transparently and shockingly inappropriate?
Why do they now insist, ignorant outsiders that they still are, that he anyway ought to be tried on some homicide charge or other and that he ought to rot in jail for half a year whether innocent or not while awaiting trial?
Oh, yeah.
Well, why does Jeralyn Merritt, hardly a righty, “defend” Zimmerman?
Why did I defend Kobe Bryant? Why did righties eventually side with the Duke lacrosse players?
A possible answer – I have more respect for the rule of law than for mob rule.
I don’t think you get to proclaim yourself the defender of the “rule of law” when you’ve gone to the map for the discredited local police and prosecutors, who had to have the case taken away from them and whose decisions were all reversed by higher authorities.
IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION The tribalistic defense is a proxy war for their own perceived victimization. Also known as “I hold racist views but I don’t want to be thought of as racist”.
I think a hell of a lot of it has to do with the desire to stick it to people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who in their eyes “make everything a racial issue.” But it’s not only racism at play; there’s also a version of the same thing that happened after Gabby Giffords was shot, whereby they have to act fast to prevent a news story from providing an opening to change laws in a liberal direction. They politicize because they are always on alert that liberals will politicize incidents like these, and they can’t allow that.