Liberal Lynch Mob

Our national media have chosen to make the George Zimmerman trial a national spectacle. There are dozens of interracial shootings every year, but this one has been seized upon to inculcate some sort of lesson about our collective soul. The left, perhaps desperate to demonstrate that white racism is still alive in America, have seized upon the Zimmerman/Martin shooting to press home the point even if they have to fabricate evidence and twist the events of that evening to fit their narrative of evil whites murdering innocent black kids.

To this end the media and others on the left have acted like nothing so much as a lynch mob. Ben Shapiro at breitbart.com provides the litany of transgressions against decency and justice that have been heaped upon Zimmerman from the very beginning of his ordeal:

On Monday, CNN showed George Zimmerman’s Social Security number and other personal information live over the air, including address, date of birth, and phone number. Officer Doris Singleton was testifying when the prosecutors showed a narrative report including Zimmerman’s information.

That immediately launched a round of tweets by Zimmerman haters celebrating knowledge of that information.

This is hardly the first time Zimmerman’s personal information has been distributed by those who oppose him. During the initial coverage of the Zimmerman trial, Spike Lee retweeted the home address of what he thought was Zimmerman’s home address. It turned out to be the wrong address. Roseanne Barr then tweeted Zimmerman’s parents’ home address. “If Zimmerman isn't arrested I'll rt his address again. maybe go 2 his house myself,” Barr tweeted.

This isn't the first element of media bias in the Zimmerman case, either. The Associated Press originally reported that Zimmerman was white. That falsehood was repeated for days by the media, heightening the racial aspect of the case.

The media also broadcast photographs of Zimmerman from a 2005 arrest rather than current photos, and conversely broadcast photographs of Martin as a pre-teen, not the 17-year-old he was at the time of the killing (the media's photographic choices actually impacted witness testimony during the trial).

NBC News manipulated tape of Zimmerman's 911 call to make it seem that Zimmerman had targeted Martin because he was black, rather than responding to 911 dispatcher questions. CNN also isolated audio of Zimmerman purportedly calling Martin a racial slur during the call -- an allegation that ended up being completely false.

Both ABC News and NBC News also alleged that Zimmerman's injuries did not exist, releasing badly-pixellated photographs from the night of the incident. As trial testimony has shown, Zimmerman was indeed injured during the incident with Martin.

Shapiro could also have included the bounty that was placed on Zimmerman by the execrable New Black Panthers in Florida, the threats they made against his life, and the fear that his entire family has been living in since the shooting.

I don't know whether Zimmerman was acting in self-defense when he shot Martin or whether he initiated the fight between Martin and himself, but many on the left already have their minds made up. If you're white, or even, as in Zimmerman's case, approximately white, and you harm a young black man then you're ipso facto guilty of racist motivations and therefore deserve to be treated with all the contempt society can summon regardless of what the actual facts of the case might be.

Of course, the reverse is not true because everyone knows that when blacks harm whites, an event which occurs with startling frequency in this country, that's never motivated by racism because blacks can't be racists because racism is something that only whites are afflicted with, and if you disagree with this that's proof that you yourself are a racist, and even if the black aggressor does hate whites it's understandable because blacks' ancestors were slaves two hundred years ago, etc., etc.

And so it goes in the wonderful Wonderland world liberal social thinking has created.

Davis Is No Hero

Kirsten Powers, a liberal commentator who served in the Clinton administration no less, explains in a blistering column at the Daily Beast why there's nothing laudatory in the twelve hour filibuster undertaken by Texas state senator Wendy Davis last week and why the people who should be praised are the Republicans in the legislature. She begins her column with this:

It’s amazing what is considered heroism these days.

A Texas legislator and her pink sneakers have been lionized for an eleventh-hour filibuster against a bill that would have made it illegal for mothers to abort babies past 20 weeks of pregnancy, except in the case of severe fetal abnormalities or to protect the life or health of the mother.

People actually cheered this. When Davis' filibuster was stopped, spectators voiced their anger.

Powers invites us to consider what Ms Davis and her supporters are demanding the legal right to do:

According to the Parents Connect website, if you are in the 25th week of your pregnancy, “Get ready for pat-a-cake! Baby’s hands are now fully developed and he spends most of his awake time groping around in the darkness of your uterus. Brain and nerve endings are developed enough now so that your baby can feel the sensation of touch.” Let’s be clear: Davis has been called a hero for trying to block a bill that would make aborting this baby illegal.

In addition to the limit on late-term abortions, the Texas legislature sought to pass regulations on abortion clinics similar to what was passed in Pennsylvania in 2011 after the Gosnell horror. The New York Times warned that the Texas bill “could lead to the closing of most of Texas’s 42 abortion clinics.”

That sounds familiar. In 2011, the Pennsylvania ACLU claimed a post-Gosnell bill “would effectively close most and maybe all of the independent abortion clinics in Pennsylvania.” Last month, a Pennsylvania news site reported that “several” abortion clinics have closed, which isn’t quite the Armageddon the abortion-rights movement predicted.

For the pro-choice extremists there must be absolutely no restrictions placed on the ability of a woman to obtain an abortion. Given this mindset it's no wonder that condemnations of Kermit Gosnell's infanticides were hard to find on the left. For many of these folks there simply is no reason why a woman should balk at killing her child at any time up to the moment of its birth, or even after it has been born for that matter.

Powers adds:

One can assume I am also not the only woman in America who is really tiring of the Wendys of the world claiming to represent “women’s rights” in their quest to mainstream a medical procedure—elective late-term abortion—that most of the civilized world finds barbaric and abhorrent. In many European countries, you can’t get an abortion past 12 weeks, except in narrow circumstances. Gallup reported in January that 80 percent of Americans think abortion should be illegal in the third trimester, and 64 percent think it should be illegal in the second trimester.

If the majority of Americans oppose elective late-term abortion, why do we have Davis complaining to CBS’s Bob Schieffer that the male politicians who are championing the late-term abortion ban are “bullying women”? Maybe it’s she who is bullying the rest of us into supporting a view that is mocked by scientific advancement; namely 3-D sonograms. Maybe we should be thankful for the men and wonder what is wrong with the women who think protecting the right to abort your baby for any reason up to the 26th week is a “human right.”

A question that I think needs to be raised is why do so many women in our society see nothing wrong with killing a late-term baby? Have we so completely bought into the materialists' argument that human beings are just animals, merely a couple of scoopfuls of atoms, that we believe unwanted babies to be no different than unwanted kittens?

The irony of people who claim to champion human rights protesting a law that would extend the most fundamental right, the right to life, to the most powerless among us is not lost on Powers:

Human-rights movements have traditionally existed to help the voiceless and those without agency gain progressively more rights. Yet in the case of abortion, the voiceless have progressively lost rights at the hands of people who claim to be human-rights crusaders. Abortion-rights leaders have turned the world upside down. They want us to believe that a grown woman is voiceless, that she has less agency than the infant in her womb who relies on her for life.

A woman has so little agency, we are told, that she is incapable of getting an abortion before the fifth month of her pregnancy. To suggest she should do so is a “war on women.” It’s an insult to women dressed up as “women’s rights.”

I can think of no better way to conclude this post than with Powers' own conclusion to her column:

On ABC’s This Week, Peggy Noonan responded to the chants of “I stand with Wendy” by noting, “What she is ... standing for is something we would recognize as infanticide, late-term abortion, the taking of a little child’s life.” Standing for that is not heroic, and it is not something to be cheered.