Zimmerman trial

Originally Posted by Lucille

It isn't the kind of media event like, say, a royal wedding which is entertainment only because let's face it, how many of us will ever be wedded as royalty?

Any thing to do with royal weddings, royal births, royal anything would put me to sleep even faster, lol

If you live in Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, you know that it’s only a matter of time until an incident between a law enforcement officer, or more rarely a civilian defending himself, and a member of a minority group flares up into citywide grievance theater complete with angry reverends on the steps of City Hall, women with stony faces holding up banners calling for justice and a media driven debate about police tactics and racism.

This sort of thing happens with depressing regularity in cities where even the most liberal residents have to choose between police overreach and being murdered. It never leads to meaningful debate or a resolution, instead it peters out with the best actors in the grievance theater picking up money and influence, the media selling a few more papers or ads for allergy relief on the drive time news and everything going back to the way it was.

The grievance theater is never really about the specific case, the specific shooting, it’s about the links between the social problems of the black community, the compromises of civil liberties necessary to keep entire cities from turning into Detroit and the inability of the media to address the sources of crime as anything but the phantoms of white racism. It’s about a black leadership that is more interested in posturing as angry activists and shaking loose some money than in healing the problems of their own communities.Grievance theater has been going national.

It’s no longer just extraordinary cases like Bernie Goetz’s Death Wish moment on the number 2 train that briefly catch hold of the national conversation. The obsessive coverage of the so-called Jena 6 case, an incident of so little internal meaning, signaled that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would no longer just be able to drive a local controversy, they now had the freedom to drive national controversies any time they wanted to.

Trayvon Martin was their big moment with grievance theater being used as part of a presidential campaign on a national level.

The fortunes of too many black politicians have been tied to white guilt and black rage. The worst sort of black politician channels black rage to score points with black supporters while playing on the guilt of white voters promising to heal the social conditions that bring out that rage and protect them from its ravages. But never before has that game been played out of the White House.The current occupant of the White House is a veteran of the corrupt urban political machine where there are only two games in town and when the money runs out, this is the one you play. The money is running out and accordingly we have been treated to an episode of grievance theater, with the man in the White House playing the familiar Sharptonesque role of healer and inciter.

What does it say about America that what was once a form of political theater rising out of the grimy urban blocks of failed cities is now a national art form? A local dysfunction has become a national dysfunction, not because every city has become New York and Chicago, but because the people at the center of power know urban politics, community organizing and racial consciousness theories and little else.

Like some Third World communist backwater, we are being governed by men and women with no understanding of anything practical, but a thorough grounding in Marxism-Leninism.

Our national government has begun to look like our urban governments. America is starting to look like Chicago and Detroit.

Detroit is dangling at the edge of bankruptcy. Chicago nearly went bankrupt in 1930. New York nearly went bankrupt in 1975. States have bailed out cities and the federal government has bailed out states. When there isn’t enough money to keep the dysfunctional political machine built on corruption and subsidies going, there’s always some larger entity to foot the bill.The problem with this current government is that it’s operating at the federal level and there is no longer any larger entity to foot the bill. All the shopworn radicalism, the cries about making the rich pay their fair share, are old hat. The rich and the upper middle-class can pay more, but there’s no amount of money that will cover a government that spends money as if there is no tomorrow.

That is the lesson that has yet to be learned from the cities whose dysfunctional politics have been transplanted to the national government. Along with the politics has come the grievance mob, the outrage machine, the outpourings of self-righteousness, the class warfare fought by corrupt pols and the rest of the bread and circuses show that has blighted the American city.Grievance theater isn’t about race, it’s not about slavery, police brutality or separate lunch counters, it’s about power and money. Black politicians are not fundamentally different from white ones. They have more in common with their white colleagues than they do with their own communities. The only difference is that they are playing with the race cards they have been dealt.

The ghetto didn’t evolve naturally, it was created through a web of national and local government regulations that played with real estate, social welfare, voting districts and the manufacturing sector to achieve the desired results.

We don’t have to have ghettos, we have them because at one point they were convenient for a number of political interests and because they were the unintended side-effect of a number of government policies. The ghetto farms black communities for votes and more importantly for subsidies. For every dollar that is taken to help minorities, a penny goes to the problem and ninety-nine cents goes to the hucksters, the administrators, the bureaucrats, the wives of influential pols hired on massive salaries to oversee some aspect of the program, the experts who monitor compliance, the affirmative action contractors who charge four times as much to build a school or provide meals, the unions who have the exclusive right to service the program, the slumlords who administer affordable housing and finally the politicians who have the money kicked back to them by all of the above.

When you look closely at where the school property tax money goes, why health care is so expensive and why so much money has to be spent on housing, a big chunk of it goes here. It’s the hole in our budget ozone layer and it can never be filled, because it is designed never to be filled. For a sizable number of influential people, both black and white, the black community’s social problems are a cash cow.

The grievance theater is their way of collecting protection money and making sure that no one pays too much attention to what’s really wrong.The problem isn’t limited to the black community.

The same phenomenon crosses over different minority communities and some white ones as well, but the race card is still the best card in the deck. It carries too many emotional triggers, too much guilt and too much hope not to use it over and over again.

The moral power of the civil rights movement still isn’t exhausted as long as hopeful white people smile at the sight of a black man in the White House as if his political power testified to their innocence.But the power can only be retained through constant indoctrination in the rituals of guilt, through repetitions of the grievance theater which reminds us that national bankruptcy is a small price to pay for peace and that we are a better people and a better nation when we vote for Obama against our own economic interests.

Grievance theater takes many forms, but its elemental form is the street production that the Trayvon Martin case has brought us.

The local productions of grievance theater have gone national and we are all compelled to watch them play out. The country has been turned into unwilling participants in a national drama that places a distorted idea of race at the center of our identity for the benefit of the same hucksters and politicians who have destroyed the city and are hard at work destroying the country.



Daniel Greenfield

I think what caught my eye about this was the media publishing photos of a supposed 17 year old Martin, calling him a child. That photo was of a 12 year old, and was pretty obviously NOT a 17 year old at all. So I just smelled a rat on the media's breath. THEY made this a media event from the start by grossly misrepresenting one of the parties involved.

by Sharpton/Jackson Directives

Well, this is an interesting wrinkle, even stated as it was back in October.

And this is a HOOT! :roflmao:

Interesting, to say the least.

Done correctly any Hitler parody is entertaining. The Peyton Manning one where colt's aren't playing him is priceless.

Many here do not like what these folks present and represent but
they are back . . . . .

Of course, GUNS are the problem. And self defense was to blame as well....

Well, we all knew this slant was eventually going to be taken concerning the Zimmerman case....

http://blogs.tallahassee.com/its-flo...rayvon-martin/



Of course, I had to make a reply to that bit of nonsense....

Seriously? Mr. Gabordi, how many instances of complete ignorance can one person make in a single editorial?

First off, what does the "Stand Your Ground" law even have to do with that case? Are you saying that Mr. Zimmerman needed to retreat before using his gun in self defense? How, pray tell? Borrow a shovel from someone and start digging a hole in the ground underneath him to try to escape the pummeling from Mr. Martin? Mr. Zimmerman wasn't "standing his ground" at all. He was LAYING on it. And had he NOT had the means for his self defense at hand, quite likely he would now be buried in it.

There is no evidence to dispute Mr. Zimmerman's claim that he acted in self defense. None. Zip. Nada. The jury very plainly saw that, which is why they reached the verdict they did. Matter of fact, the evidence presented clearly shows that he absolutely NEEDED to act in order to save his life, or at least stop a very severe beating. Are you SERIOUSLY claiming that he did not have a RIGHT to self defense under the TRUE circumstances of that incident? That Mr. Zimmerman was completely in the wrong, regardless of the fact that he was a member of a community watch program, and was fully engaged in what that volunteer position entails? To WATCH for potential troublemakers afoot in his neighborhood?

The timeline of what is believed to have transpired via supporting phone records is now public record. Simply Google the keywords and you will find several instances. This timeline is also clearly discussed in the defense's closing statements during the trial. Those FACTS point to Mr. Zimmerman having lost sight of Mr. Martin for at least three minutes during which time he was NOT pursuing him. One minute prior to those three minutes where Mr. Martin has been lost sight of, Mr. Zimmerman is responding to the 911 operator's suggestion to not follow Mr. Martin, and evidence points to him being in the process of returning to his vehicle. In the span of about four minutes where there is NO contact between Mr. Zimmerman and Mr. Martin, Mr. Martin, who clearly had the opportunity to avoid any conflict by going to ANY place he felt safe that Mr. Zimmerman was not located within, instead chose to engage Mr. Zimmerman in a physical confrontation. Evidence points to Mr. Martin delivering a "sucker punch" blow to the face of Mr. Zimmerman, knocking him to the ground. Then Mr. Martin continues the assault by straddling him and engaging in a continued physical attack by pounding Mr. Zimmerman's head against a concrete sidewalk. It is Mr. Martin who chose to escalate that incident with a physical confrontation. Mr. Martin could have even run away immediately after delivering that "sucker punch". But did he choose to do that? Apparently not. At any point, Mr. Martin could have broken off the attack, but did not and for approximately 40 seconds of continued attack by Mr. Martin, Mr. Zimmerman rightly became convinced that he was fighting for his life. He THEN pulled out his legally carried concealed weapon and shot his assailant. Mr. Zimmerman had no reason to believe that Mr. Martin was EVER going to stop while he was still living. So he did what he had to do to save his own life.

The evidence was PLAINLY displayed during the court case. ALL of the video of the entire court case is on YouTube. Did you not avail yourself, Mr. Gabordi, of the opportunity to view those FACTS before making your apparently ignorant claims in your editorial? Or is the Tallahassee Democrat only truly interested in following up this travesty they helped initiate by the obviously inflammatory photos of a Mr. Martin when he was only 12 years old as an outright lie obscuring PHYSICALLY what Mr. Zimmerman had actually been up against, by further trying to obfuscate the truth with comments designed to rile people up into a furor?

Please cease with the emotional rhetoric unsupported by factual evidence. And your obvious anti-gun bias, Mr. Gabordi, is plainly visible in your editorial. Please READ the actual text of the Stand Your Ground/Castle Doctrine law. It is excellently written and goes a very long way to turning the tables in favor of the victims rather than coddling the predators who make such laws absolutely necessary in real life.